In which Matthew goes to Training (and comes back with Ideas about Marketing)

Wed Oct 21 20:26:05 UTC 2015

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> In which Matthew Goes to Training
> ---------------------------------
>
> Like many of you, I come from a mostly-technical career background, and
> ain't got one of them there fancy big city business degrees. But, I know
> there's a real actual discipline in all this stuff, and I try to pick up
> things that I think will be useful for Fedora. Last week, I went to
> training which in part described a model for the overall endeavor of
> marketing tech products, and I think there might be some ideas we can
> benefit from.
>
> The model itself is the proprietary product of the training company, and
> some of it, of course, isn't really relevant ("Setting prices!"), so what
> follows isn't a copy of the training materials, but kind of a
> generalization of some of the concepts I took away.
>
> Basically, there's a whole bunch of activities under the general heading
> "Marketing", and they can be mapped on one axis from conceptual to more
> technical, and on another axis from strategic to... you know, actually
> doing stuff. Something like this:
>
>
> A Model of Marketing
> --------------------
>
>
>     Finding          Defining    /----------\   Marketing Plan
>     User Problems    Our Market  |Conceptual|
>                                  \-----v----/      Getting New Users
>     Identify       Product             |
>      Strengths      Portfolio          |  User       Keeping Existing Users
>                                        | Personas
>     "Why/why not           Business    |
>         Fedora?"            Plan       |      Measuring Program
>     /---------\                        |        Effectiveness    /--------\
>     |Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------< Tactical|
>     \---------/           Requirements |  Finding References     \--------/
>                  Product               |  & Testimonials
>     Assess        Roadmap   Use Cases  |                   Collateral
>      Competition                       |   Finding Leads
>                             Project    |                  "Sales"   Events
>     Assess Our     Here       Status   |     Launch Plan  Training
>      Own Tech  Is Literally A     /----^----\                        Demos
>                 Box That Just     |Technical| Show Leadership
>                 Says Innovation   \---------/  Through Blogs & Speaking
>
>
> Punchline
> ---------
>
> The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the
> training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding
> problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and
> distribute solutions to them.

Muhaha! Strategic marketing. The thing I used to do for a job before I
started working at Red Hat. (Err, the first time I worked at Red Hat,
I guess I can now say.)

>
>
> Current Fedora Marketing
> ------------------------
>
> I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together with
> Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant. More
> technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new
> releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on collateral
> (brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is
> planning to do demo material and provide better event support for
> Ambassadors.
>
> And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole category
> basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an area,
> and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and
> social media and so on.
>
>
> Who Does the Rest?
> ------------------
>
> The training presented several concepts for how this landscape might be
> divided among different parts of an organization. One would be to have
> someone focus on the strategic side and someone else on the tactical;
> another is to divide top and bottom. And then they had another chart
> which has the left side split top and bottom and the right side as a
> third bigger oval. This last, most complicated one I think matches most
> closely what we already have in Fedora —
>
> a. I think, for the most part, the Fedora Council and FESCo have worked
> on that top-left quadrant — at least, in defining the Cloud, Server,
> Workstation portfolio and the target markets for this, and I hope in
> identifying strengths.
>
> b. And, reasonably well, the the bottom-left corresponds to the Cloud,
> Server, Workstation edition Working Groups.
>
> c. And then, the right side basically falls under Fedora Marketing and
> Ambassadors.
>
>
> However...
> ----------
>
> As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the
> "below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak area
> in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole, and
> it seems like improving this could make a difference.
>
>
> But, Bigger Picture Problem!
> ----------------------------
>
> Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out —
> identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we
> did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so
> great at doing continually.
>
> I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this
> really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are
> having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for you!",
> we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There are
> fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of the
> parts have been moved to better places."
>
> Now, some of that is just the nature of open source — it's not like we
> have a management team that can tell everyone what they ought to be
> working on. But, as a project, we certainly have the ability to look at
> what we can _find_ in the world of open source, figure out what we need
> to do to connect it together, and thereby solve actual user problems. If
> we had a bigger emphasis on doing this systematically, the marketing
> _materials_ would basically write themselves.
>
>
> Call for Help
> -------------
>
> At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing
> might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting on
> that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking that
> it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most
> awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual
> background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious
> 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here.
> Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?

Ohhhh, maybe I shouldn't have said that first line up there. :D

But: I will point at these ... half-decade old blog posts!

http://robyn.io/2010/01/29/trac-strategic-planning-and-a-book-club/
(The strategic planning paragraph is the useful thing.)

And some other old thoughts related to way-back-when discussions about
target audience, possibly related:
http://robyn.io/2010/01/24/an-overdue-post-on-fedoras-target-audience/
(Note: Some other dude had responses to that, here --
https://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/fedoras-goals/ )

...and while I am not volunteering -- I will be happy to share mucho
advice to anyone who should kindly volunteer to take the above on. :)

Because, as Greg pointed out way back when, it's nice to see new blood
driving discussion. :)

-robyn

>
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
> _______________________________________________
> council-discuss mailing list
> council-discuss at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
>
> The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and
> open source software and content as a collaborative community.