Attention, Interest, Decision, Action

[Jeremy Hogan]

Note the mild subject adjustment, uttered most notable by Alec Baldwin
in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Anyway, the thread needed a quick bump, I have some F/OSS marketing
experience that I think I can lend.

This project is getting ahead of itself re: defining discrete and
ongoing roles, establishing baseline metrics, and decisions about who
belongs here. There are some basic questions/assumptions you can line
out first.

1a)What is Fedora?1b)Who is it for? (Today).

Answered partly on the homepage nicely:

"The Fedora Project is an open source project sponsored by Red Hat and
supported by the Fedora community. It is also a proving ground for new
technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It
is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc."

That may or may not need to change as the NPO emerges, but it doesn't
answer who it's for. If it's not for the average end user, then a
whole suite of distros are out for comparison.  Developers, hobbyists,
enthusiasts, professional IT interested in the future direction of
RHEL, etc.

2)Who else is in that space?

Only SuSE is built this way (community feeding and fed by a big
publicly held sugare daddy with a large install base, and market cap
of 3-5Billion. No, Mandriva not out of the game, and if you threw out
F/OSS values you could throw Sun in mix, but it's fair to focus toeard
SuSE/Novell.

3a)What is Fedora? 3b)Who is it for? (Tomorrow).

Some TBD, of course, but you'd hope that if today's mission succeeds,
that you'll still have Developers, hobbyists, enthusiasts,
professional IT interested in the future direction of RHEL, etc.

Now, if Fedora *is* to be comared to Ubuntu, the core mission would
have to reflect that to a degree, and comparisons and metrics should
be made. And you can add more Ubuntu-esque users. If Fedora definition
were to stretch from "proving ground for Red Hat" to "proving ground
for Linux Innovation" or similar, then you can add small IT companies,
tech savvy internal IT staff, and even an eco system of VARs for
SMB/SME -- *cough cough* -- I mean people deploying and supporting it
for others. And the verbage invites spin-off projects. (Still seen as
to Red Hat's benefit).

#3 is what needs rounding out before you decide you goes out saying
what to whom, and in what medium.

When you get through 3, you need only two more:

4) So what?

What is unique and/or important about feature x, or relationship y? If
I agree that I understand Fedora, and that it is for me -- so what?
Every line of you PR, and every slide in your deck has to answer that
question, or it's noise.

5) Who cares?

You now have your sniper shot of a message. You can stand up, in
confidence, and explain what Fedora is, and articulate what it is not.
(And why Ubuntu is them, and you is you.) You add that to the answer
to part b, of question3, and you no who this should resonate with. And
you go after events, and online venues where they are and talk to
them. Or when the come to where you are, they know quickly whether and
how they fit in. No dancing, no marketing buzzwords. Recruit active
participants, but  you should be open as many interested onlookers as
possible.

4 and 5 have potential for looping.

%POST
Then... 
-FAQ the hell out of 1-5 on 
-use PRWeb or a similar free service regularly (not feature releases,
more like "Fedora guy writes free book in native language" type stuff,
create news -- recognition is a core human need, get lots of it and
attract lots of folks)
-press contacts (invite a NewsForge editor to an exclusive at FudCON,
send the LiveCD out for reviewers -- I like the documentary idea, but
there's only so much of our collective navel the world needs to gaze
into, give the project a broader context)
-a media kit (zip file of the logo, the About statement, and ONE sheet
giving the FAQ and spiel, contact info for one/two people at the most
to follow up with)
-an event or street team "SWAT" kit (swag like LiveString bracelets and LiveCDs)
-etc

--jeremy