Where to start?

Thu Oct 15 15:25:50 UTC 2009

Gregory,

If I may permit myself a comment as an outsider. I am the marketing
coordinator over at Sugar Labs, a FLOSS project which works closely
with Fedora and other distros; I like to keep an eye on what other
FLOSS projects are doing about marketing. In my day job, I work at a
Fortune 500 company in the top 30 of Ad Age's Global Marketers list by
advertising spend.

I can guarantee you doing marketing for any engineer-heavy FLOSS
structure is a lot of work, and not just getting the work done, but
convincing engineers of its usefulness.

Most engineers I know have a healthy dislike for marketing as mere
"spin" or "prettifying" and have horror stories to tell of proprietary
software companies asking engineers to rewrite the laws of physics to
make a deadline thought up by "clueless marketers". Even the category
is conceptually displaced: most engineers think "marketing" means
reaching other engineers, not presenting products or services to
targets with a strategy. The do-it-yourself ethos of FLOSS communities
means everyone feels competent enough to write press release copy,
with catastrophic results; some PR never goes any further than an
obscure blog post. Cultivating journalists is unheard-of. Marketing
folk are often not informed what is going on, usually because
engineers consider their input superfluous. When in doubt, FLOSS
engineers cite examples from other FLOSS projects, most of whom have
awful marketing as well. Engineers think in terms of "releases", and
getting them to think of "launches" instead is an uphill climb. Under
these conditions, it's no surprise that all GNU/Linux distros together
amount to under 2% market share on the desktop.

However, engineers like results, and know them when they see them.
Most of them will set aside prejudices and listen to reasoned
arguments; recognition of expertise in FLOSS projects is earned, not
announced. And a great many developers understand that FLOSS marketing
is underdeveloped, but are frustrated because they are not sure how to
do better, and are eager to learn from anyone not talking jargon.

Marketers-communicators can help, but it requires patience and
fortitude inside the project. Marketing methods, concepts, tactics,
branding, advertising, are foreign to engineers. So we have an extra
challenge: explaining, and explaining again, and then again, how we
come up with a marketing plan, based on knowledge of our targets (from
studies, or surveys, or focus groups, or whatever we have), ideas on
how to reach targets, what the messages are, what metrics to use to
measure results, and of course the limited resources available.

At Sugar Labs, from time to time I write messages like this one
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-March/000681.html as
mini-tutorials about the world marketers move in, so mysterious to
most engineers. Many colleagues pass by such messages as
pie-in-the-sky fluff, but there will always be some who are very sharp
and willing to learn, and sometimes the colleagues will sit up and
take notice that those whom they respect are listening, and they will
listen too.

Of course it's hard to contribute time and money and for others to
disrespect your work. Let me give you an example. When I arrived at
Sugar Labs at the beginning of this year, I asked about branded USB
sticks. There were none, just a CG image (which provided free
advertising to Belkin, since the image was spidered by Google). The
marketing budget ($0) meant no sticks. Yet I knew beauty shots of
logo'd sticks were absolutely necessary from a branding standpoint.
Seed money is often an issue in FLOSS projects. So I fronted a
thousand USD to Sugar Labs to get a hundred sticks done in several
colors. The sticks themselves were gone in a "flash" to qualified
prospects at education shows, but the few we set aside wound up in our
current beauty shot
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Sugar-on-a-Stick-Strawberry-cs.jpg)
done by a talented photographer friend and which has been widely
published, for example by the BBC
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8117064.stm). The result? We
have been plumb out of sticks for months, but the branding initiative
has brought us closer to finding funders who will help us get quite a
lot more sticks done. Naturally, the last time a developer suggested
that marketers were useless, I had to count to ten to cool off. But
cool off I did... for the good of the project.

May I suggest you work a little more with the Fedora marketing team.
Give them a chance, let them see what positive impact you can have,
not by telling them what they may be doing wrong, but by suggesting
how they can work better. Bring some results, your words will carry
more weight as time goes on.

Sean
Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Marketing,
>
> I have pondered over the question of; 'where to start?'
>
> After receiving the comments on this list which were supplemented by emails
> supporting the fact that there is not much coordination in the area of
> marketing, but more so the unwillingness to see the relevance of it, it
> makes this a difficult mission. That combined with the questions I have
> asked through email to the group leader who never replies to those mails
> makes this impossible.
>
> There has been talk of people not wanting to look inside the organization,
> but just want to focus on the outside. Like a doctor who takes care of the
> sick but never takes care of themselves. He may help a lot of people, but
> when he neglects his own health, he eventually ends up in a position where
> he can no longer help others.
>
> I can really say that as a newbie to the FOSS community and someone who is
> not a "techie" or paid to do this but looks at it as one of this social
> responsibilities, I am really not too impressed. There is widespread
> disagreement, as their is in many other FOSS communities also which leads me
> to believe that this is a "members club" only. Those members being the
> technically inclined. These technical people have jobs that either support
> you to work on Fedora with their time and money or you are actually paid by
> Fedora/Redhat.Those of "us" who do not fall under those categories are
> putting all of our time with no supplemental payment.
>
> Therefore, I suggest you keep this a technical distro only, that way
> everyone entering the community as well as it's users will have a foundation
> to start from. Wider user bases than that need not apply.
>
> After many hours contemplating it and some sleepless nights, I have decided
> where to start: Removing myself from this group!
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory Zysk
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk
>
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