Offer to help editors?

Max Spevack mspevack at redhat.com
Tue Apr 22 19:00:06 UTC 2008


On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

>> Corporate communications has established a relationship with several 
>> of the editors listed below as we're always reaching out to them with 
>> the latest Fedora and Red Hat news.  I'm happy to help in contacting 
>> any of these folks.  I'll be in touch with several editors toward the 
>> beginning of May to line up Fedora 9 pre-brief interviews with Paul 
>> the week prior to the F9 launch.
>
> We need to find a way to make more of the marketing activities 
> transparent and involve the community.
>
> 1) Know what is getting done
> 2) How we can help

Hi all,

I just want to give you some context around this thread.

Kara Shiltz is a member of Red Hat's corporate communications team, and 
she's the person who is responsible, from the Red Hat side, for 
Fedora-related PR.  Whenever we want to take Marketing strategy, 
messages, and energy from this list and channel it through Red Hat's PR 
team to help formalize, amplify, etc. the effort, Kara is one of the 
folks who is going to help us do it.

What does this mean?

Well, among other things, we get lots of interview requests from various 
publications, websites, etc.  Most of those requests come around the 
time of the Fedora release, or whenever we have some sort of big Fedora 
announcement to make.

Additionally, Kara works with the Fedora team (and the community) to 
augment the community marketing that we are doing -- We've got the 
Fedora Interviews segment, for example, that JonRob is leading.  Kara 
can help to drive attention to that from other sources, like the general 
pool of press contacts that Red Hat has access to, etc.

Kara is here to be a resource to all of us, and to augment the community 
marketing that we do with the professional, full time communications 
work that Red Hat does.

So, specifically on the topic of contacts at various magazines -- it's 
great that we're developing that list, because it can be compared to the 
lists of contacts that other folks in Red Hat already have, and is 
helpful to both of us.

Everyone needs to remember that doing "open marketing" like this, in 
which we actually communicate and work transparently with members of Red 
Hat's PR team, is a very unique way of doing business, even in the world 
of open source companies.

Folks like me and Greg have always worked closely with RH's PR team, but 
now we're trying to bring more and more of that work to this list. 
Let's all continue to be patient with each other, work together, etc.

We're doing a good job, but we have to remember that it's kind of new 
for everyone.

Thanks to everyone for all your hard work.

--Max




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