RFC: Marketing collateral plan

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 04:00:41PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> >I wasn't thinking of it as "pressing", but showcasing all the different
> >interesting and fun parts of the community.
> Whatever verbiage is used, wouldn't such a flyer and accompanying
> pitch is and would be perceived as an upsell? (to convert them from
> a (not even yet?) user to a contributor?)

Well, I guess at some level it *is* marketing, sure. Is that inherently
wrong?


> There's mutual benefit there, sure, but being a contributor is a
> much larger time investment than trying out the software, and I
> think it's a bit much on top of trying to relay the fundamentals
> about the software itself. Let them try the software and like it
> first (or not, then don't bother) before recruiting them.... and
> don't distract / muddy the message. If it's a conference with booths
> there's a lot of information they're going to be processing at once,
> my thought is keep the message focused, simple, to-the-point as you
> can for the best impact. I think the message to try / use Fedora is
> more important than to contribute to it at that stage.

I've been thinking about our presence at some of the big,
well-established Linux/Open Source shows — SCALE, OSCON, LinuxCon,
FOSDEM, etc. Most of the people in the audience have a general
awareness of Fedora already. They may have tried it, or are even Fedora
users. I've heard from several people that our presence at these is
valuable simply to maintain visibility — that if Fedora isn't there, it
looks like we're not a going concern anymore. I guess I agree that
there's a little to that, but I'd like us to get more out of the time
(and expense).

At SCALE in particular, the commercial booths are very much "job fair".
We aren't playing at that game (although *Red Hat* is!), but over on
the community projects side, I think showing the fun, interesting,
cool, useful, meaingful ways to get involved *could* be valuable. 

At some of these events, maybe focusing on all of (or one of) the
Fedora editions might be the best thing, at least especially while the
idea of cloud/server/workstation is still novel. But at a lot of them,
I think the users walking by already have a pretty good idea of what
Fedora is as a distribution, which is why I'd be interested in trying
to sell the *project* to them, too.


(Now, again, maybe flyers aren't the best way to do that; I don't know.)


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader