expand the user base by ... pointing people in the right direction?

[Michelle Thompson]

I keep a look out (recently) on Tweets about Fedora.

http://twitter.com/dr_scholl

^^^ this person tweeted these:
(dr_scholl) is looking for HELP!! Apparently I don't have "make" on my 
Fedora 10 ?? WTF?? How do I install it?

and

hrms... yum install make says it's installed, but CPAN is still telling 
me it can't find it :( This is FRUSTRATING

I'm wondering what some thoughts out there are on maybe trying to point 
this tweeter in the right direction. I am more familiar with 
communications, and less familiar with the technical side (so I'm not 
qualified to help). Just wondering if we would encourage user help in 
social media channels.

[or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC 
channel? a wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]

Thoughts?

mt

[Jonathan Roberts]

> [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC channel? a
> wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]

Would suggest pointing them to:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-help

Or if you want to point them straight at IRC:

#fedora on irc.freenode.org

Or if straight at a mailing list:

[e-mail]
> Thoughts?

I'm not really on many social networks like Twitter, kind of surprised
people use them to discuss stuff like Fedora in 100 and something
characters! I'd hope that anyone who uses them and sees something like
this would do exactly what you've just done and try to point them in
the right direction, not sure there's anyway we can formalise this.
Unless someone wants to do something like start monitoring #tags?

Jon

[Jason Benedict Low]

+

Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> > [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC channel? a
> > wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]
>
> Would suggest pointing them to:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/get-help
>
> Or if you want to point them straight at IRC:
>
> #fedora on irc.freenode.org
>
> Or if straight at a mailing list:
>
> [e-mail]
> > Thoughts?
>
> I'm not really on many social networks like Twitter, kind of surprised
> people use them to discuss stuff like Fedora in 100 and something
> characters! I'd hope that anyone who uses them and sees something like
> this would do exactly what you've just done and try to point them in
> the right direction, not sure there's anyway we can formalise this.
> Unless someone wants to do something like start monitoring #tags?
>
> Jon

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 05:33:38PM +0000, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> > [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC channel? a
> > wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]
>
> Would suggest pointing them to:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/get-help
>
> Or if you want to point them straight at IRC:
>
> #fedora on irc.freenode.org
>
> Or if straight at a mailing list:
>
> [e-mail]

There's also the unofficial help forums at http://fedoraforum.org/
which is used by many thousands of people.

[Lisa Brewster]

It might not be the best communication method length-wise, but Twitter is a
powerful social search mechanism that even evil mainstream moneymaking
corporations are starting to embrace as part of their customer service
suite.  These messages have less delay than email, are designed to be
accessed while on the go, get to the point quickly, and are a great
opportunity to demonstrate superior customer service in front of other
potential users (which is commonly referred to as "marketing" *grin*).

The easiest way to tap into these conversations is by subscribing to the RSS
feed for your query on http://search.twitter.com, but there's no way to keep
track of which messages have been responded to.  A customer service tool
that I really like is called Get Satisfaction, which has a feature where you
can monitor when people say your company name, then reply and manage the
following conversation from their interface.  See an example here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast/overheard/

I don't know if social customer service would duplicate any existing support
efforts (I'm sure it would), but it can be a more accessible system to the
average user, with bonus built-in publicity features.  If anyone else is
interested in exploring how this would work for Fedora, I am more than happy
to get the infrastructure set up and help you get started.

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Jonathan Roberts
wrote:
> > [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC
>
> channel? a
> > wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]
>
> Would suggest pointing them to:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/get-help
>
> Or if you want to point them straight at IRC:
>
> #fedora on irc.freenode.org
>
> Or if straight at a mailing list:
>
> [e-mail]
> > Thoughts?
>
> I'm not really on many social networks like Twitter, kind of surprised
> people use them to discuss stuff like Fedora in 100 and something
> characters! I'd hope that anyone who uses them and sees something like
> this would do exactly what you've just done and try to point them in
> the right direction, not sure there's anyway we can formalise this.
> Unless someone wants to do something like start monitoring #tags?
>
> Jon
>
> --
> Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

[Máirín Duffy]

Michelle Thompson wrote:
> I'm wondering what some thoughts out there are on maybe trying to point
> this tweeter in the right direction. I am more familiar with
> communications, and less familiar with the technical side (so I'm not
> qualified to help). Just wondering if we would encourage user help in
> social media channels.
>
> [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC
> channel? a wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]

sudo yum install make -y

is what he is looking for

in the future, this sort of thing can be looked up with yum
whatprovides, like this:

[duffy@hellokitty ~]$ yum whatprovides make
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
make.i386 : A GNU tool which simplifies the build process
for users

~m