Marketing Fedora Worldwide

[David Barzilay]

A few more comments...

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 23:35 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, David Barzilay wrote:
> 
> > Can you help me with these:
> > . What are the goals of fedora-marketing?
> 
> To come up with ways of encouraging use of, and *participation in*, Fedora 
> projects.  Dead simple.

I don't think is that simple. To encourage use, we might need to
approach a different set of people than the potential contributors
group.

I hate labeling people, but at this stage I see users (or potential
users) as niches of the general public, and contributors as enthusiasts
and geeks.

Unless I got the whole marketing thing wrong, and we intend to continue
approaching only the latter...

> > . Who are we approaching?
> 
> Anyone who's standing in a crowd of three or more people, and doesn't 
> break eye contact with us when we approach them.  Like bums, or Amway 
> salesmen.

Approaching "Anyone who's standing in a crowd of three or more people,
and doesn't break eye contact with us" might be quite broad... 

How can you guide this sort of efforts on a worldwide basis?

I don't intend to discuss network marketing here, but if I follow your
vision, am I supposed to preach Fedora to all my acquaintances?

"Hey Grandma! Come to my place, bring all your friends coz I got
something reaaaaaly special to show you..."

or 

"Sorry I crashed your car. Here's my business card. Gimme a call coz I
want to show you something that works for me..."

In other words, we need to narrow down the people we are approaching,
and better target our different audiences.

BTW, how does the eye contact work in an online environment?

> > . How are we approaching the different audiences?
> > . Then: what are the best marketing and communication actions to
> > approach these?
> 
> I don't even think we're at the market segmentation phase.  I think we're
> still at the *basic* messaging phase.
> 
> See, here's the problem: we're immersed in Fedora, so we make basic
> assumptions about other people's knowledge that is just wrong.

You got it! Why don't we stop making assumptions and take an inquisitive
approach?