increasing the reach of fedora-marketing

Rik van Riel riel at redhat.com
Sun Oct 28 23:31:03 UTC 2007


Over the last few years, we have noticed a few interesting phenomena.
A lot of new technology was developed in the Fedora community and the
fedora-marketing community wrote great content about the software.

However, the main stream press often did not pick up on the fact and
sometimes ended up with the impression that the technology was invented
by the first distribution to be loud about it. 

Worse yet, a while later Fedora (and Red Hat) get labelled "copiers".
Not only is this frustrating to the developers who implemented the
software, it is also bad for the image of Fedora and, by extension,
Red Hat.

It does not have to be this way.  The fedora-marketing community has
great content; the Red Hat marketing department has great channels to
get content distributed and is willing to use those for Fedora.

I am talking about things like press releases, the press.redhat.com
blog, Red Hat Magazine (already used by Fedora?) and personal contact
with journalists.

In order for Fedora to be able to use those channels, we need to do
a few things:
- Figure out exactly what we want.  What kind of press attention do
  we need most and for what kind of content?
- For press releases, we need a Fedora tagline (goes at the beginning
  of a press release) and boilerplate (goes at the end) to act as
  descriptors for Fedora.

While we have Leigh's attention, maybe we can start with the excellent
interview of Dimitris Glezos on Transifex?  It would be a good example
of great content which deserves to be promoted heavily.

I do not know much about marketing, so I will close with an observation
of the news: have you ever seen a "breaking news" article that did not
have either some cut'n'pasted text from a press release, or a lack of
details?  Being first with some news on the internet means there is
little time for research. Afterwards, half the internet syndicates that
first article, while a few dedicated journalists go out of their way to
do lots of research.  I believe that if we make it easier for the
cut'n'paste journalists to publish information on Fedora, we will
greatly increase the amount of publicity Fedora gets.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan




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