other marketing ideas (was Re: [osol-mktg] Mascot Contest and other marketing ideas)

[Tim Foster]

Hey there,

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 14:38, Sara Dornsife wrote:
> Fantastic comments Tim. More responses from me below. 

Great, thanks. Sometimes I come up with small flashes of inspiration
like that, but tend to make up for it by delivering them widely
dispersed amongst larger amounts of general stupidity!

> Would you be interested in being one of the leaders in the marketing
> community and helping to grow the site? Let me know.

Sure, no problem, I'd be glad to help out - there's no need to promote
me to a leader though, it'd be nice to see more non-Sun folk in those
kind of roles ! This is far from my day-job or the other OSS project I'm
doing, but I'll do my best.

My overall suggestion is that more content on
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/marketing/ would be a Good Thing.
(and I'm volunteering to work on some, given some sort of plan, which I
will also contribute to, if you like)


I believe the first thing we need on the marketing page, is a list of
stuff that can be done to help out the Marketing project : that's pretty
important, I think in any open source project. Nothing worse than having
enthusiastic people arrive at your site, and find they don't know where
to start. [ cf.
https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/open-language-tools-FAQ.html#q5  as an example of what I mean ] - it ends up with the burden of the project work  getting placed on the project leaders, which isn't fair : we're here to help, you just need to tell us what to do.


I'll start working on a draft of such a list over the next few days, and
drop it to this alias to see what people think. If you guys already have
ideas on the areas you'd like people to work on, let me know and I'll
bake it into the document. I'm not a Marketeer, and am definitely not
well-versed in the arts - so stop me if I'm starting to go in the wrong
direction ? Any books you'd recommend on marketing, maybe big yellow
ones with "dummies" in the title would be good :-) ?

Once we have a list like that, it'd be easier for people to choose items
from it they're interested in helping with, and we can take it from
there.


Of course, there's a fine line between what the marketing group does,
and what other groups do - obviously data would need to flow :

* from engineering to marketing, so we know what we should be talking
about
* from marketing to docs, so they know what they're not explaining
properly (maybe we don't understand a feature enough to be able to talk
about it ?)
* from marketing to engineering ("Developer Smith that we talked to
thought that OpenSolaris sucks because...")
* in other directions I haven't thought of yet

But talking to other groups is good, right - coming up with ideas on our
own would be the wrong thing to do.

<re. mascots>
> But, in the end, if the majority of the community want a mascot, than
> we will do it.

Yep, that's cool, no problemo.

> >  * Elevator pitches

Grand - to what extent are the Sun marketing guys willing to
donate/share material ? Sorry, I know that could be an awkward question
- but the fact is, Sun's been marketing Solaris to people (some of them
who are even the actual developer audience we're targeting) for a while
now - they're bound to have stuff that could be useful to us, it's a
case of determining how much of their resources they're willing to share
: that's an internal conversation they need to have (or continue) I
guess...

> >  * Code information/tutorials

> Some of this is probably in the BOF presos or tutorials that have
> happened at shows. I'll check. 

Fantastic.

> >  * Newbie/Reviewer-assistance
> I could use some help with how to accomplish this one.

Well, I wonder if there's any sort of press/contact page that people are
likely to go to to in order to get information about OpenSolaris ? (Is
is us ?)

If so, we could (politely) enquire if they're going to be doing reviews,
and if there's anything that we can do to help. A cheat-sheet on the
maj. features of OpenSolaris might be a good first resource, so the lazy
journalist/reviewer could make sure they cover all bases in their
review. That said, maybe I'm straying from the path again : OpenSolaris
being a developer-offering and not a product per se, perhaps we don't
expect people to be doing reviews this early. Does this fall under the
jurisdiction of traditional Sun marketing, assuming they're looking at
Solaris Express, for example ?

> >  * Newsletters ?

> > My point is, if we're marketing to developers, we should be asking what
> > sort of marketing information we need to be producing to help open the
> > door a bit more to these guys.
> I think your suggestions are awesome. I will talk to the java.net team
> and find out where they are getting their content from. Thanks for the
> suggestions.

Grand. I believe they're getting their content from users : there's
calls out there for articles (or extended blog entries?) that go on the
today.java.net frontpage, having been vetted by the editorial team. I
suppose it's a case of  "all we need is content" (sung to a Beatles
soundtrack, you understand)

If there was a today.opensolaris.org page, that'd be even better, but
it's early days yet I suppose.

Getting people to start writing OpenSolaris content[1] would be nice :-)

	cheers,
			tim



ps.I like the looks of the marketing project page for OpenOffice.org :
these tips appear to be very sound (and have read most of their reading
list) - 
http://marketing.openoffice.org/Marketing_HOWTO.html


[1] I'd be a big fan of taking selected blog content, dressing it up,
and categorising it somewhere. I'm *all* for the transient and casual
nature of blogs, but there's some terrific content already written for
Opening Day that we should really be highlighting and making a bit more
prominent.

-- 
Tim Foster - Tools Engineer, Software Globalisation, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Project Lead, Open Language Tools https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
http://blogs.sun.com/timf         http://www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~timf

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