Talking Points - call for participation / feedback / "should we do this, or can it permanently"
Hello marketing pals,
The talking points have been on the schedule since, well, a long time
ago, and we haven't really done them for several releases now. These
were originally, AFAIK, designed as a point of reference for
Ambassadors for release highlights to discuss - basically paring down
the Feature List into some key enhancements, and making them
human-readable and to-the-point.
Over time, I think they may have been useful as (a) a starting point
for choosing features to write stories (feature profiles) about for an
upcoming release; I think they could also serve as a useful point of
reference for the press, or perhaps as a starting point for crafting a
list of feature information for the press, without pointing the press
folks directly to the feature list immediately.
Anyway: Despite my thoughts that I'm unsure of the usefulness of them
*in their current form* (I have no idea if, when they were created in
past releases, if Ambassadors really ever used them) - I think that
some of the process behind them, including figuring out which features
are story-worthy, and the content created as a result (not skipping
all over a feature page trying to get the bottom-line explanation of
what it does and why it's useful), is helpful.
And to echo Christoph's earlier mail to the marketing list, re: Jos's
efforts for marketing opensuse generally, and to the press - I think
that having a decent, well-written list of features / stories would be
useful for press folks, rather than pointing to the FeatureList as the
primary point of getting info, and perhaps this is part of that
process.
Moving along:
I sent a mail not long ago about the categories / buckets of User,
Developer, Sysadmin that we have typically used in Marketing for
announcements, etc. and whether or not we could think about optimizing
that to tell bigger stories about groups of features/improvements, vs.
"bullet point of new things for someone in a role," esp. since those
lines continue to blur as we move into the FUTURE!. Thoughts welcomed
- the suggestions I have are merely that, more are welcome, we could
also say "that's totally stupid, why would we change that" as well. :)
But I think it's a worthwhile idea perhaps to try out - I think it
drives home bigger-picture thoughts about areas of improvement, and
different stories tend to appeal to folks with different problem
spaces / areas of interest.
Finally:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_19_talking_points <-- I created
this. This is really a starting point (plz read the Talking Points
SOP referenced on the page) - a way to collaboratively identify the
features we think should get highlighted (typically *new* things, not
incremental improvements) - people can take features and add their
reasoning as to why they think something should be a talking point. I
figured we could cross-reference different possible categories for
each feature, so you're welcome to do that as well. Once we have a
list whittled down (we can do that in email, or an IRC meeting) - we
turn those chosen items into content that looks more like this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_talking_points
Thoughts? Ideally, according to the schedule, the talking points would
be done by Tuesday (4/26), and then serve as a starting-point for
picking deeper-dive stories to tell as we approach release, but I'm
99.9% sure that not being done Tuesday isn't going to kill us. We
could also choose to keep talking points at a process level that is
just a "list of agreed-upon things to market" without turning it into
a formal document, but it seems like it wouldn't be significantly more
work to do so.
Anyway: Like I said - visit
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_19_talking_points and feel free
to note features that you think have great stories or should be
featured, and we can run from there? Yes? :D
-Robyn