Moving the marketing team forward

[Jonathan Roberts]

Moving Fedora Marketing Forwards
================================

I've been way out of the Fedora loop lately, but I wanted to try and
get some thoughts down that might provoke some conversations about
what the marketing team should be doing, how we work, and how we can
become more effective in the future.

Apologies if no one finds this long winded rant useful. I hope that
people might be interested in holding a meeting dedicated to some of
these issues and planning for the Fedora 11 release cycle in the near
future, but I think the mailing list is probably the most accessible
place to bring plenty of people in on the conversation. I hope in the
near future to try and pick up some of these things myself, especially
considering I have two out of the next four weeks where my time will
be much more my own.

What the team does now
----------------------

As things stand, it seems to me that the main activities related to
marketing Fedora are:

 * FPL's release interviews
 * Ambassadors events
 * Documenting media coverage on the mailing list
 * Occassional developer interviews
 * Occassional blog posts & articles pimping features/community
 * Responding to and correcting articles that are inaccurate Re: Fedora

Of these, the marketing team, as a *team* are responsible for 3
(although this is largely done by Rahul) and now 6. Red Hat PR are
responsible for 1 and for the most part 5.

Correct me if I'm wrong here.

How the team works now
----------------------

We largely co-ordinate via the mailing list, with sometimes weekly
meetings that track the task list closely.

Conclusions
-----------

Seems like we could be doing a lot more as a team.

How can we improve?
-------------------

 * We made a marketing plan this year, it establishes what we want to
be promoting and what we think the project is about
  * We should create a *time based* marketing plan that ensures we
have things to be doing, promoting, throughout the release cycle
  * We need to do this asap to make sure that we have lots prepared
for the F11 release cycle

 * We need to work closer with Red Hat PR.
  * Not sure how this can work better, but a lot of stuff seems to
happen that no one outside RH ever realises. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
  * Have no idea if RH PR take advantage of work that the community
does, is our work just going to waste?

 * We need to work closer with the board, and all other parts of the
project, to ensure that we're actually representing what people
believe they're doing.
  * Related to this, we should be working with websites and docs to
shepherd the content on the static pages

 * We should record media coverage of Fedora on the wiki instead of
just on the mailing list. Make a good historical archive and provide
us with the opportunity to better track how Fedora is perceived
outside of our own community across releases.
  * Could even make a good static page and promotional material. On
the front page, "Read what people are saying about Fedora. Click
here."

 * We should create a central location for people to come and learn
about what's happening in Fedora and our wider community
  * I still believe that a Fedora Magazine style project is the best
way to do this

 * We should consider establishing a more formal organisation for the
project, as well as thinking about how to make the best use of meeting
time.
  * Having been out of the loop, I'm not really qualified to comment
on the current state here, but that aside I beleive:
   * Meetings should be less about tracking progress (this is easily
done *quickly* on the mailing list)
   * Meetings should be much more about exploring new tasks that we
want to persue, goals, ways to achieve these.

Notes
-----

I also believe that it may be worth reassesing our marketing
priorities. Our attempts to present Fedora as the innovative
distribution, claiming credit for features that our community creates
and pushes upstream first seemed to be successful this time last year;
now the same features that I thought we'd successfully gained
recognition for as created in Fedora are being attributed to other
distributions as they integrate it, without even acknowledging that
Fedora has feature parity. I don't know if this is our failing or
whether this is just the result of the internet being full of people
who have easy access to a large audience and don't even bother to
thoroughly research what they're going to say. It begs the question,
however, if promoting Fedora as a distribution based on the features
it contains is the right thing to be doing.