In which Matthew Goes to Training ---------------------------------
Like many of you, I come from a mostly-technical career background, and ain't got one of them there fancy big city business degrees. But, I know there's a real actual discipline in all this stuff, and I try to pick up things that I think will be useful for Fedora. Last week, I went to training which in part described a model for the overall endeavor of marketing tech products, and I think there might be some ideas we can benefit from.
The model itself is the proprietary product of the training company, and some of it, of course, isn't really relevant ("Setting prices!"), so what follows isn't a copy of the training materials, but kind of a generalization of some of the concepts I took away.
Basically, there's a whole bunch of activities under the general heading "Marketing", and they can be mapped on one axis from conceptual to more technical, and on another axis from strategic to... you know, actually doing stuff. Something like this:
A Model of Marketing --------------------
Finding Defining /----------\ Marketing Plan User Problems Our Market |Conceptual| -----v----/ Getting New Users Identify Product | Strengths Portfolio | User Keeping Existing Users | Personas "Why/why not Business | Fedora?" Plan | Measuring Program /---------\ | Effectiveness /--------\ |Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------< Tactical| ---------/ Requirements | Finding References --------/ Product | & Testimonials Assess Roadmap Use Cases | Collateral Competition | Finding Leads Project | "Sales" Events Assess Our Here Status | Launch Plan Training Own Tech Is Literally A /----^----\ Demos Box That Just |Technical| Show Leadership Says Innovation ---------/ Through Blogs & Speaking
Punchline ---------
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
Current Fedora Marketing ------------------------
I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together with Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant. More technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on collateral (brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is planning to do demo material and provide better event support for Ambassadors.
And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole category basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an area, and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and social media and so on.
Who Does the Rest? ------------------
The training presented several concepts for how this landscape might be divided among different parts of an organization. One would be to have someone focus on the strategic side and someone else on the tactical; another is to divide top and bottom. And then they had another chart which has the left side split top and bottom and the right side as a third bigger oval. This last, most complicated one I think matches most closely what we already have in Fedora —
a. I think, for the most part, the Fedora Council and FESCo have worked on that top-left quadrant — at least, in defining the Cloud, Server, Workstation portfolio and the target markets for this, and I hope in identifying strengths.
b. And, reasonably well, the the bottom-left corresponds to the Cloud, Server, Workstation edition Working Groups.
c. And then, the right side basically falls under Fedora Marketing and Ambassadors.
However... ----------
As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the "below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak area in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole, and it seems like improving this could make a difference.
But, Bigger Picture Problem! ----------------------------
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out — identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so great at doing continually.
I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for you!", we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There are fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of the parts have been moved to better places."
Now, some of that is just the nature of open source — it's not like we have a management team that can tell everyone what they ought to be working on. But, as a project, we certainly have the ability to look at what we can _find_ in the world of open source, figure out what we need to do to connect it together, and thereby solve actual user problems. If we had a bigger emphasis on doing this systematically, the marketing _materials_ would basically write themselves.
Call for Help -------------
At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting on that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking that it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here. Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?
On 10/21/2015 10:12 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out — identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so great at doing continually.
I really really really really really want to see us do this better :)
~m
Il giorno mer, 21/10/2015 alle 10.12 -0400, Matthew Miller ha scritto:
[cut]
A Model of Marketing
Finding Defining /----------\ Marketing Plan User Problems Our Market |Conceptual| \-----v----/ Getting New Users Identify Product | Strengths Portfolio | User Keeping ExistingUsers | Personas "Why/why not Business | Fedora?" Plan | Measuring Program /---------\ | Effectiveness /--- -----\ |Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------< Tactical| ---------/ Requirements | Finding References --- -----/ Product | & Testimonials Assess Roadmap Use Cases | Collateral Competition | Finding Leads Project | "Sales" Events Assess Our Here Status | Launch Plan Training Own Tech Is Literally A /----^----\ Demos Box That Just |Technical| Show Leadership Says Innovation ---------/ Through Blogs & Speaking
Punchline
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
That's fair; but in order to have a market strategy we should track our "sales" (not really sales of course). That's impossible to get, we are not able to handle what happen *after* the release download. Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any request to the community.
Current Fedora Marketing
I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together with Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant. More technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on collateral (brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is planning to do demo material and provide better event support for Ambassadors.
And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole category basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an area, and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and social media and so on.
I agree. Marketing usually is a top level business sector. It doesn't have any contact with "customers" (as said before, not real customers); the marketing team studies long term strategies, explores statistics, choose metrics, checks concurrency. Its job is closely related to the leaders strategies. Ambassadors are the front-office for the users and they should give/receive inputs from/to mktg.
Is my opinion that magazine is a tool to give voice to our community. I'm not sure technical articles are interesting for the whole Fedora world. I think we should reach all the people with a magazine that spreads the Fedora world from the inside. People are more interested to listen stories than a technical article. I'm not discussing about the quality of the two things, but we have to consider also people that are approaching this world and want to know inside movements.
Maybe a solution could be handle two magazines, with different target:
1) technical magazine; 2) generic magazine.
Really unworkable.
However...
As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the "below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak area in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole, and it seems like improving this could make a difference.
As said before, my opinion is to move marketing at a top level.
But, Bigger Picture Problem!
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out — identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so great at doing continually.
So the question is, how we can get statistics? Statistics are the solution worldwide for getting strategies. I know the Project is full of people really qualified to have an opinion where/when we are going, but only an answer from the market can tell us if it's really happening.
I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for you!", we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There are fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of the parts have been moved to better places."
Yes that's the announcement, the one page release notes mean IMO; and the ambassadors should take note of these notes.
[cut]
Call for Help
At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting on that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking that it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here. Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?
Of course I agree with Joe. Be careful that a good seller might be a terrible marketing man. Marketing strategies are so closely similar to budgeting. In order to have a good budget a company must assume a target, choose the tools to reach them and evaluate in currency terms; likewise marketing must assume a target, choosing the tools to reach them and evaluate in time terms.
Of course the issue is more complicated of what I said, but you put on the table a good point.
This is only my opinion.
Thans
Gabri (mailga)
On 21 October 2015 at 12:29, Gabriele Trombini g.trombini@gmail.com wrote:
Il giorno mer, 21/10/2015 alle 10.12 -0400, Matthew Miller ha scritto:
Punchline
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
That's fair; but in order to have a market strategy we should track our "sales" (not really sales of course). That's impossible to get, we are not able to handle what happen *after* the release download. Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any request to the community.
Actually release download is a horrible counte and always has been. It is worse than no data at all because it is always incredibly overly optimistic. Too many people set up (for i in true; do wget http://getfedora.org > /dev/null) type things because they think it helps us in some strange way. We have better numbers on post release usage from dnf and other daily tools. Not perfect but probably within an order of magnitude. [If we went by release iso download numbers it would like some releases we should have hundreds of millions of users. That is clearly not the case in other traffic.] The dnf/yum numbers are limited though because it only shows up in non-metered internet places. Most of South America, Asia and large portions of Europe seem to have metered connections and you instead end up with snapshots of usage because it is too expensive to stay on the daily updates tree.
But, Bigger Picture Problem!
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out — identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so great at doing continually.
So the question is, how we can get statistics? Statistics are the solution worldwide for getting strategies. I know the Project is full of people really qualified to have an opinion where/when we are going, but only an answer from the market can tell us if it's really happening.
I am working on getting statistics more out of the infrastructure logs so that they can be more visible than Matt's slides. It is my desire to have a solution by Feb of next year. The main issues is that I am wanting to make sure that I don't violate basic privacy concerns. Then it is also a small part of my job os progress comes in fits and starts.
Il giorno mer, 21/10/2015 alle 13.03 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen ha scritto:
Actually release download is a horrible counte and always has been. It is worse than no data at all because it is always incredibly overly optimistic. Too many people set up (for i in true; do wget http://getfedora.org > /dev/null) type things because they think it helps us in some strange way. We have better numbers on post release usage from dnf and other daily tools. Not perfect but probably within an order of magnitude. [If we went by release iso download numbers it would like some releases we should have hundreds of millions of users. That is clearly not the case in other traffic.] The dnf/yum numbers are limited though because it only shows up in non-metered internet places. Most of South America, Asia and large portions of Europe seem to have metered connections and you instead end up with snapshots of usage because it is too expensive to stay on the daily updates tree.
Not a way to follow IMO; because of things you are saying and also for the several variable could happen as well.
[cut]
I am working on getting statistics more out of the infrastructure logs so that they can be more visible than Matt's slides. It is my desire to have a solution by Feb of next year. The main issues is that I am wanting to make sure that I don't violate basic privacy concerns. Then it is also a small part of my job os progress comes in fits and starts.
In my opinion this is a marketing strategy: starting. We can always have a more accurate tuning along the way.
Thanks
Gabri (mailga)
Hi Gabriele,
(cc'ing the magazine's chief editor)
On 10/21/2015 02:29 PM, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
Is my opinion that magazine is a tool to give voice to our community. I'm not sure technical articles are interesting for the whole Fedora world. I think we should reach all the people with a magazine that spreads the Fedora world from the inside. People are more interested to listen stories than a technical article. I'm not discussing about the quality of the two things, but we have to consider also people that are approaching this world and want to know inside movements.
Maybe a solution could be handle two magazines, with different target:
- technical magazine;
- generic magazine.
We had a discussion about the target audience of the magazine at Flock and thus far the editing efforts behind the magazine have been pushing towards the user base instead of the contributor base, with articles that would be more suitable for a general audience than just the Fedora contributor community.
The dichotomy is a bit different than you're posing then - contributor vs user rather than 'technical' vs 'generic.' Still, contributor-focused content tends to be mired in technical jargon specific to Fedora and the magazine has been operating thus far in trying to avoid that.
I don't think 'technical' content is bad so long as its suitable for that more general audience and not Fedora-contributor-specific jargon (like 'FAS' or 'koji' or whatever)
~m
Il giorno mer, 21/10/2015 alle 15.48 -0400, Máirín Duffy ha scritto:
Hi Gabriele,
(cc'ing the magazine's chief editor)
On 10/21/2015 02:29 PM, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
Is my opinion that magazine is a tool to give voice to our community. I'm not sure technical articles are interesting for the whole Fedora world. I think we should reach all the people with a magazine that spreads the Fedora world from the inside. People are more interested to listen stories than a technical article. I'm not discussing about the quality of the two things, but we have to consider also people that are approaching this world and want to know inside movements.
Maybe a solution could be handle two magazines, with different target:
- technical magazine;
- generic magazine.
We had a discussion about the target audience of the magazine at Flock and thus far the editing efforts behind the magazine have been pushing towards the user base instead of the contributor base, with articles that would be more suitable for a general audience than just the Fedora contributor community.
The dichotomy is a bit different than you're posing then - contributor vs user rather than 'technical' vs 'generic.' Still, contributor -focused content tends to be mired in technical jargon specific to Fedora and the magazine has been operating thus far in trying to avoid that.
I don't think 'technical' content is bad so long as its suitable for that more general audience and not Fedora-contributor-specific jargon (like 'FAS' or 'koji' or whatever)
~m
Hello Máirín,
I remember the discussion at Flock (which I absolutely agreed), and I didn't meant that technical content is bad; I argue that technical -targeted people are definitely lower (in quantity) than non-technical -targeted people. There are specific areas of interest for each developer (or technician in general) followed by people have the same interest in those areas. A sysadmin, is likely interested to the server improvements, and the numbers of sysadmin are less than the number of the generic users (maybe much more interested, speaking about one of your skills, to an how to gimp/inkskape). It's technical also, but this kind of topic reaches more people. When you discussed about fedora.next, or better, when you discuss about hubs, I see people really interested in, asking questions and talk of some improvement from their point of view. Instead when a developer talks about the change of version of video drives, yes, people is hearing, but how many of them really understand all the thing?
So, I'm for at least categorize magazine, so user are able to find what they are looking for and for having more topics (just like this one) that get once more transparency the Project.
But I absolutely don't want the removal of the technical focused articles.
Thanks.
Gabri
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 08:29:27PM +0200, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
That's fair; but in order to have a market strategy we should track our "sales" (not really sales of course). That's impossible to get, we are not able to handle what happen *after* the release download.
This is certainly part of it. Knowing more about the people who choose Fedora and how we are helping them and how we could do it better is important. But, it's a relatively small slice of the pie of people who *could* be using Fedora (even if we narrow that from "all humans" to a more focused segment).
Making existing users happier is crucial to long-term success, but we also need to find ways to reach out to our wider potential user base and find what we can be doing to get them in.
Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any request to the community.
Yes, I think feedback from ambassadors is a good angle. Especially if we can get people having conversations beyond LUGs and LinuxFests where Fedora is probably already well known. (Linux users who have chosen another distribution are yet another pie slice from our own users and from people who aren't using Linux at all.)
Maybe a solution could be handle two magazines, with different target:
- technical magazine;
- generic magazine.
Really unworkable.
We're in the process of launching an inward-facing blog to carry articles interesting to contributor/community members — elections, council discussions, probably things like test days, etc., that the general user base might feel to be too technical - not in the sense of too much computer knowledge needed, but too much insider Fedora business.
[...]
Of course I agree with Joe. Be careful that a good seller might be a terrible marketing man.
Yes — sales is different. Or, in our case, the outreach aspect of ambassadors is different from marketing.
Of course the issue is more complicated of what I said, but you put on the table a good point. This is only my opinion.
Thanks!
Il giorno ven, 23/10/2015 alle 14.55 -0400, Matthew Miller ha scritto:
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 08:29:27PM +0200, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
[...]
This is certainly part of it. Knowing more about the people who choose Fedora and how we are helping them and how we could do it better is important. But, it's a relatively small slice of the pie of people who *could* be using Fedora (even if we narrow that from "all humans" to a more focused segment).
Making existing users happier is crucial to long-term success, but we also need to find ways to reach out to our wider potential user base and find what we can be doing to get them in.
Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any request to the community.
Yes, I think feedback from ambassadors is a good angle. Especially if we can get people having conversations beyond LUGs and LinuxFests where Fedora is probably already well known. (Linux users who have chosen another distribution are yet another pie slice from our own users and from people who aren't using Linux at all.)
We have different kind of hitch here:
- we don't know how many people are getting Fedora for the first time; - we don't know how many many already got; - we don't know issues new Fedora users are facing, beyond QA tests; - we don't know if people like Fedora; - we don't know the way-to-go people are asking us: - we don't know if the way we are following is clear for all the people; - we don't know if our communications are well received.
Of course I forgot something but I'd like to get focus on these, at the moment. Each one of the points above, in a structured enterprise, requires different approaches, I mean e.g.:
- new user -> customer file; - old user -> sales file; - issues -> after sales service; - liking -> fill in the form; - not liking -> as above;
and so on. Then is on the manager shoulders to aggregate data.
In our case we cannot think such as an enterprise, and we don't want to, so we should look at them from a different angle: the "customer" one.
We don't want tracking the user each time he/she gets in touch with us (FAS accounts, obviously, are out of this discussion) which means we can't use any tool which gathers sensitive data.
Commops already provides some tools and Stephen J Smoogen is working on getting statistics.
I think we could build a "let us know ...." webpage which has to be translated in each language we have in L10n group to fill with replies to questions (to be renew every 3/4 releases?). Of course we don't need random replies, so they must be chosen from a provided list (combo box?) because we have to aggregate them.
This approach has two issues: 1) not each fedora user will fill the form; 2) how we can avoid duplicates?
The first question is easy: we don't wanna force anyone, so we can advise that "the form is to help communications between user and the Project, if you don't fill the form you are not able to change thing, so don't protest in the future". The second question is really I problem, since we don't track users, so we have to trust in them. Of course funny people will complete the form more than once, but I'm pretty sure the percentage will be low.
Thanks
Gabri
On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 10:27:41AM +0200, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
Il giorno ven, 23/10/2015 alle 14.55 -0400, Matthew Miller ha scritto:
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 08:29:27PM +0200, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
[...]
This is certainly part of it. Knowing more about the people who choose Fedora and how we are helping them and how we could do it better is important. But, it's a relatively small slice of the pie of people who *could* be using Fedora (even if we narrow that from "all humans" to a more focused segment).
Making existing users happier is crucial to long-term success, but we also need to find ways to reach out to our wider potential user base and find what we can be doing to get them in.
Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any request to the community.
Yes, I think feedback from ambassadors is a good angle. Especially if we can get people having conversations beyond LUGs and LinuxFests where Fedora is probably already well known. (Linux users who have chosen another distribution are yet another pie slice from our own users and from people who aren't using Linux at all.)
We have different kind of hitch here:
- we don't know how many people are getting Fedora for the first time;
- we don't know how many many already got;
- we don't know issues new Fedora users are facing, beyond QA tests;
- we don't know if people like Fedora;
- we don't know the way-to-go people are asking us:
- we don't know if the way we are following is clear for all the
people;
- we don't know if our communications are well received.
Of course I forgot something but I'd like to get focus on these, at the moment. Each one of the points above, in a structured enterprise, requires different approaches, I mean e.g.:
- new user -> customer file;
- old user -> sales file;
- issues -> after sales service;
- liking -> fill in the form;
- not liking -> as above;
and so on. Then is on the manager shoulders to aggregate data.
In our case we cannot think such as an enterprise, and we don't want to, so we should look at them from a different angle: the "customer" one.
We don't want tracking the user each time he/she gets in touch with us (FAS accounts, obviously, are out of this discussion) which means we can't use any tool which gathers sensitive data.
Commops already provides some tools and Stephen J Smoogen is working on getting statistics.
I think we could build a "let us know ...." webpage which has to be translated in each language we have in L10n group to fill with replies to questions (to be renew every 3/4 releases?). Of course we don't need random replies, so they must be chosen from a provided list (combo box?) because we have to aggregate them.
This approach has two issues:
- not each fedora user will fill the form;
- how we can avoid duplicates?
The first question is easy: we don't wanna force anyone, so we can advise that "the form is to help communications between user and the Project, if you don't fill the form you are not able to change thing, so don't protest in the future". The second question is really I problem, since we don't track users, so we have to trust in them. Of course funny people will complete the form more than once, but I'm pretty sure the percentage will be low.
I am unfortunately not has trusty as you are there and there will be people scripting their answers. Could FAS be a solution for this? It would make the entrance barrier higher but also much higher for bots/scripts.
Pierre
Il giorno lun, 26/10/2015 alle 15.10 +0100, Pierre-Yves Chibon ha scritto:
On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 10:27:41AM +0200, Gabriele Trombini wrote:
The second question is really I problem, since we don't track users, so we have to trust in them. Of course funny people will complete the form more than once, but I'm pretty sure the percentage will be low.
I am unfortunately not has trusty as you are there and there will be people scripting their answers. Could FAS be a solution for this? It would make the entrance barrier higher but also much higher for bots/scripts.
Pierre
Good point, Pierre, but I wouldn't FAS becoming an aggregator for mktg stuff; at that point is it reasonable opening a website (or, better, a section in the future mktg hub) intended to gather the public acceptance?
Thanks
Gabri
council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
In which Matthew Goes to Training
Like many of you, I come from a mostly-technical career background, and ain't got one of them there fancy big city business degrees. But, I know there's a real actual discipline in all this stuff, and I try to pick up things that I think will be useful for Fedora. Last week, I went to training which in part described a model for the overall endeavor of marketing tech products, and I think there might be some ideas we can benefit from.
The model itself is the proprietary product of the training company, and some of it, of course, isn't really relevant ("Setting prices!"), so what follows isn't a copy of the training materials, but kind of a generalization of some of the concepts I took away.
Basically, there's a whole bunch of activities under the general heading "Marketing", and they can be mapped on one axis from conceptual to more technical, and on another axis from strategic to... you know, actually doing stuff. Something like this:
A Model of Marketing
Finding Defining /----------\ Marketing Plan User Problems Our Market |Conceptual| \-----v----/ Getting New Users Identify Product | Strengths Portfolio | User Keeping Existing Users | Personas "Why/why not Business | Fedora?" Plan | Measuring Program /---------\ | Effectiveness /--------\ |Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------< Tactical| \---------/ Requirements | Finding References \--------/ Product | & Testimonials Assess Roadmap Use Cases | Collateral Competition | Finding Leads Project | "Sales" Events Assess Our Here Status | Launch Plan Training Own Tech Is Literally A /----^----\ Demos Box That Just |Technical| Show Leadership Says Innovation \---------/ Through Blogs & SpeakingPunchline
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
Muhaha! Strategic marketing. The thing I used to do for a job before I started working at Red Hat. (Err, the first time I worked at Red Hat, I guess I can now say.)
Current Fedora Marketing
I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together with Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant. More technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on collateral (brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is planning to do demo material and provide better event support for Ambassadors.
And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole category basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an area, and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and social media and so on.
Who Does the Rest?
The training presented several concepts for how this landscape might be divided among different parts of an organization. One would be to have someone focus on the strategic side and someone else on the tactical; another is to divide top and bottom. And then they had another chart which has the left side split top and bottom and the right side as a third bigger oval. This last, most complicated one I think matches most closely what we already have in Fedora —
a. I think, for the most part, the Fedora Council and FESCo have worked on that top-left quadrant — at least, in defining the Cloud, Server, Workstation portfolio and the target markets for this, and I hope in identifying strengths.
b. And, reasonably well, the the bottom-left corresponds to the Cloud, Server, Workstation edition Working Groups.
c. And then, the right side basically falls under Fedora Marketing and Ambassadors.
However...
As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the "below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak area in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole, and it seems like improving this could make a difference.
But, Bigger Picture Problem!
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out — identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so great at doing continually.
I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for you!", we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There are fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of the parts have been moved to better places."
Now, some of that is just the nature of open source — it's not like we have a management team that can tell everyone what they ought to be working on. But, as a project, we certainly have the ability to look at what we can _find_ in the world of open source, figure out what we need to do to connect it together, and thereby solve actual user problems. If we had a bigger emphasis on doing this systematically, the marketing _materials_ would basically write themselves.
Call for Help
At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting on that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking that it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here. Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?
Ohhhh, maybe I shouldn't have said that first line up there. :D
But: I will point at these ... half-decade old blog posts!
http://robyn.io/2010/01/29/trac-strategic-planning-and-a-book-club/ (The strategic planning paragraph is the useful thing.)
And some other old thoughts related to way-back-when discussions about target audience, possibly related: http://robyn.io/2010/01/24/an-overdue-post-on-fedoras-target-audience/ (Note: Some other dude had responses to that, here -- https://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/fedoras-goals/ )
...and while I am not volunteering -- I will be happy to share mucho advice to anyone who should kindly volunteer to take the above on. :)
Because, as Greg pointed out way back when, it's nice to see new blood driving discussion. :)
-robyn
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 01:26:05PM -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.
Muhaha! Strategic marketing. The thing I used to do for a job before I started working at Red Hat. (Err, the first time I worked at Red Hat, I guess I can now say.)
I know, right? :)
awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here. Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?
Ohhhh, maybe I shouldn't have said that first line up there. :D
I'll just leave this here for you....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPw-3e_pzqU
But: I will point at these ... half-decade old blog posts!
I have not forgotten. But I'll go back and reread.
...and while I am not volunteering -- I will be happy to share mucho advice to anyone who should kindly volunteer to take the above on. :) Because, as Greg pointed out way back when, it's nice to see new blood driving discussion. :)
Awesome. We can definitely use your advice!
council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Gabriele Trombini -
Matthew Miller -
Máirín Duffy -
Pierre-Yves Chibon -
Robyn Bergeron -
Stephen John Smoogen