[IAEP] Debrief of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry launch for all teams

[Bill Kerr]

Thanks for detailed and comprehensive report Sean. I hadn't understand the
importance of visuals and your report explained that very clearly.

btw your report doesn't contain any links - I found the gallery page
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=gallery&page=gallery but still
wasn't sure what you  meant by this:
a great many websites carried screenshots of Buddy View with
collaboration; the large colorful icons in that screenshot kept their
visual code when thumbnailed, better than the Neighborhood View

I guess your are referring to either the Groups or Journal screenshot?

I had a look at the videos here: http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs and
noticed that they don't have sound. Sound would improve them a lot.

Related: I recently did a search for xo videos for a presentation - there
are a lot out there (you tube) and I found it difficult to find good ones.
Most are too general and often the quality is poor. In the end the ones I
picked out were either professionally done (eg. David Pogues NYT) or had an
interesting twist of gimick, eg. 9yo evaluating the xo or joel's video
showing two kids pulling it apart and putting it back together

Possibly some high quality, high profile videos - some illustrating specific
interesting features or with an original creative twist (educational
bloggers might pick up on that) - would help promotion of sugar.

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:

> We have had a successful media launch of the Strawberry release of
> SoaS; coverage is ongoing a week after the launch.
>
> I feel very strongly that a successful launch like this can only work
> if everyone is on board together, from developers to marketers, from
> packagers to designers, so I have preferred starting this integrated
> thread rather than continuing David's separate threads; I also feel
> that the longer-term SoaS-distro issue should be discussed separately.
> Although we did manage to avoid confusion from the last-minute
> timetable change through some hard work, we may not be so lucky next
> time; communication between teams is vital, especially as we grow.
> Routine work should of course stay compartmentalized, but I am
> convinced the key to a launch's success (aside from great software :-)
> is that we all pull together and make an extra effort at launch time,
> pulling back after launch.
>
> Coverage began with an article in MIT Technology Review a few hours
> before the press release went out; we were Slashdotted several hours
> later. This was followed by a BBC News report the day of the release,
> and we have been picked up around the world every day since by tech
> media, bloggers, and even some Spanish language print newspapers.
>
> I want to share some observations, and mention several techniques we
> used this time which multiplied coverage, as well as some missed
> opportunities. Comments are encouraged pleased.
>
>
> * Press release editing.
> We got the PR done 30 minutes before the Friday evening deadline and I
> thank Walter, Fred, David, and Caroline for their very helpful
> co-editing with me directly on the Google Docs document and IRC
> discussion. I had been concerned about an Activities positioning issue
> and we made a good choice through consensus. We were able to trim 150
> words in the final minutes yet the final release had enough
> information to interest editors worldwide.
>
>
> * Prelaunch journalist briefings.
> Some journalists were briefed with the releases beforehand, under
> embargo. This common practice gives them time to decide if they want
> to work up a story or not and provides an opportunity for direct
> discussion with us for background and quotes. It also provides
> precious lead time for us to provide visuals (journalists won't waste
> time fishing, and without visuals will just google and snatch the
> first thing they find, including bad logos and dated screenshots).
>
>
> * The last-minute timetable change.
> We successfully spun the move of v1 from the "Q3 in the fall" to June
> as "part of the plan" and diverted some attention from the numbering
> with the Strawberrry code name which was universally liked. Only one
> news site noticed we had changed our story, and their coverage arrived
> late; journalists who have been following us kindly didn't bring it
> up. That said I can't stress enough that our very wide coverage was a
> direct result of our simplification of the numbering system to
> "beta-1" and "v1"; most news sites judged this release as our first
> major milestone since the creation of Sugar Labs. I agree with David
> and Caroline that our next major media push should stress content over
> technical info to generate teacher interest. As part of avoiding
> last-minute crises in the future, to avoid surprises I sent the press
> release to all the lists before it went out on the wires. The
> marketing team work is of course available to all.
>
>
> * Launch datelined LinuxTag Berlin.
> Do a Google News search in English on "LinuxTag"... you will notice
> that our launch is the only widely aggregated news. In other words, no
> one else did a media launch in English from LinuxTag with coverage as
> wide as ours. This was effective because it showed that we are mobile,
> e.g. with roots in but not anchored to the Cambridge base. We also
> managed to create a "halo effect" for GNU/Linux; several articles
> including the BBC piece mentioned distributions. Although we make the
> choice (correct in my view) to not place priority on our FOSS nature,
> preferring to stress education, we raised the profile of Fedora with
> half a dozen articles which reported that information. The coverage
> gave us a boost at the booth, and the design sprint starring Gary and
> Mike helped us to have focused marketing materials for both LinuxTag
> and NECC.
>
>
> * Targeted mailing list bigger with each launch.
> We have a simple rule: anyone who writes about Sugar and/or OLPC gets
> onto the list. We are at 500 names and to date have received only two
> requests for removal (one from a small news outlet where other
> journalists remain on-list, one stating the address used is not the
> best one for PR submissions). We have very complete coverage of tech
> journalists, but spotty coverage of education news outlets including
> blogs, so I am turning my attention to that. Some journalists and
> bloggers who treated us unfairly in the past are not on the list or
> are sent the PR afterwards; of course, writers of tough but fair
> coverage get the PR like everybody else. Note that as most journalists
> receive dozens of such press releases every day, occasionally a
> journalist will learn of us through another news article, then search
> her mail to find our unread release before trying to find our press
> page.
>
>
> * Multilanguage PR in targeted press mailings.
> The press release went out in 5 languages: English, Spanish, French,
> Italian, and German. Bravo to the translators who provided me the text
> before the deadline! This was extremely effective in obtaining wide
> coverage, many sites digested the press release in the local language.
> Coverage in Brazil was late, I am convinced we would have had more
> coverage earlier if we had had a Portugese translation available (we
> still don't). Unfortunately, Christian was unable to post the
> translations to the press page, see next point.
>
>
> * Bottleneck problem for SL homepage and press page.
> Christian is very booked up with the little one and his work and has
> not been able to post the press release translations or a homepage
> callout for SoaS, as well as other agreed-upon requests such as a
> homepage link to the gallery page instead of to the QuickTime movie,
> the sitewide navbar, and links to visuals on the press page. We would
> have had even wider coverage with translated press releases up, and we
> need to examine how to avoid this bottleneck in the future. I myself
> did not find the time to prepare PDFs which include our logo and the
> PR visual and ideally our back catalogue of PR should be translated
> too, I may put these in the "one-hour contribution" section.
>
>
> * Availability of visuals.
> The fabulous SoaS beauty shot by my friend the talented Philippe
> Cantiniau and topped by Gary and Christian's last-minute work on the
> Strawberry "sugar on a stick" logo text was very widely carried by
> news outlets including the BBC because of its shininess, and
> apparently the confusion we feared between SoaS the ISO and the
> branded USB stick was not widespread - every article I saw mentioned
> it was freely available for download. It's sometimes debated that
> nonprofit libre software should not glorify "products", especially at
> the expense of software, but any observer should see that the OLPC
> XO-1 beauty shots had an enormous impact in raising awareness. Also, a
> great many websites carried screenshots of Buddy View with
> collaboration; the large colorful icons in that screenshot kept their
> visual code when thumbnailed, better than the Neighborhood View. I
> opened a Flickr stream for my Sugar-themed photos just before the
> launch and the BBC photo of the XO and Intel Classmate running Sugar
> came from there; I will add some screenshots too. I would like the
> press page to link to that photostream and Mike Lee's as well,
> journalists really like finding CC content they can use.
>
>
> * PR image hosted on SL site and not distributed with release.
> We fell down on getting our visuals well referenced. Fortunately many
> (but by no means most) journalists and bloggers followed the hyperlink
> in the press release, but Google Image searches are disappointing; a
> major Chinese news site published an old draft logo. The clear
> solution is 1) distribute an image itself as well as the link with the
> eReleases/PR Newswire release, as we did with the March release logo
> and screenshot, 2) as mentioned above make visuals easily findable on
> the press page and in the website gallery.
>
>
> * USB boot issue on older computers.
> Slashdot readers who did not RTFA complained of SoaS's uselessness
> with old PCs unable to boot from USB (due to BIOS limitation, I have a
> PC like that myself). Fortunately, clueful commenters informed readers
> about the boot helper CD. We reacted quickly by updating the
> Strawberry page and other pages of the wiki, with callouts about the
> boot helper CD; we were unable to change Christian's homepage as
> described above. In the future, we will want to have a Boot Helper CD
> visual available. The BBC article was updated three times during the
> day of the launch, and one of the running updates added info about the
> boot helper CD.
>
>
> * Wiki pages not quite ready at launch.
> The Strawberry page was posted as the release went out, but was poorly
> referenced from the wiki homepage, the Sugar on a Stick page, and the
> press release itself. Updates were quickly added, but it will be much
> better in future to get this done at least 2-3 days before media
> launch; remember, some briefed journalists have the PR under embargo
> and will evaluate us based on the status of what is online.
>
>
> * Video of SoaS booting.
> One site did a home video of loading SoaS to a stick and booting it;
> this was very quickly widely referenced, which shows that either we
> don't have a good vid like that ourselves, or a publication has more
> credibility on the subject than we do, or both :-)
>
>
> * Mac compatibility.
> We were late in getting the updated VDI and instructions online. Mac
> users are a vocal lot :-) and are used to things just working so any
> efforts we can make to ease the Mac experience will help us with
> coverage. Many journalists write on Macs and some key articles in the
> past had screenshots from a Mac VM. Perhaps one of us (Dave B, Gary,
> Caroline, myself) could be a Mac emissary to the development team?
>
>
> * School server.
> We mentioned the school server in the PR, which has all the potential
> to be a solid solution with SoaS but requires work. Tech journalists
> didn't follow up on that in depth, but we need to work out how that
> support will be part of the SoaS ecosystem.
>
>
> * Perception of Sugar Labs as a company, or as part of OLPC.
> We slip the word "nonprofit" into our PR often, but we still see
> perceptions that SL is a company or is part of OLPC. Our homepage is
> clear on the latter, but unclear on the former, so we need to reflect
> that.
>
>
> * No OLPC briefing beforehand.
> The authors of the key articles in this launch sought comment from
> OLPC, who provided an odd statement from Professor Negroponte, odd
> enough that it was heavily edited or truncated by the journalists. The
> BBC published more of the quote than anyone, obliging us to respond
> that NN hadn't understood the tech. The statement did not make sense
> and was out of phase with what is currently under development, namely
> a Gnome/Sugar choice of default desktop similar to Apple's OS9/OSX
> solution of a few years ago. We are in contact with OLPC's PR people
> so as to smooth bumps prior to launches; perhaps Adam Holt can help us
> in this regard as well.
>
>
> * Infrastructure performance issues.
> The sites held up well due to infrastructure steps taken by the David,
> Bernie, Marten, and the Systems Team (torrent, mirroring, monitoring);
> hopefully we will not be swamped by the Chinese coverage which is
> growing quickly.
>
>
> * Coverage reporting.
> With each launch, I enumerate links to coverage; aside from
> celebrating :-), this serves a dual purpose: 1) enable local language
> speakers to evaluate quality of coverage, most useful when there is
> negative coverage (happily not the case this time), 2) simplify the
> later work of adding contacts to our targeted mailing list. However,
> the (unexpected!) volume of coverage was such that one member of the
> community complained. The suggestion was made to create a wiki page,
> but that doesn't help as far as identifying good, mediocre, bad, and
> indifferent (i.e. reprint of PR) coverage - it would never be to our
> advantage to publish ratings of journalists' work (all PR firms and
> corporate communication departments maintain journalist profiles, but
> in the strictest secrecy for obvious reasons). I liked the suggestion
> to regroup coverage in batches, and from five days after the release
> (when the risk of negative coverage was greatly reduced) I sent the
> batches to the marketing list only and not IAEP. I was very pleased to
> receive links from Carlo and Raul to coverage I would have missed in
> their countries; it's best-practice since I can then add the
> journalists to the list. Everyone's help in spotting coverage is
> appreciated during a launch and spotting negative coverage early is
> critical.
>
>
> * No coverage on some key tech sites.
> Some tech publications did not cover us this time, or came late to the
> party despite having received the targeted mailing. I have identified
> the sites in question and will add journalists to the list. In the
> case of OLPCNews, my impression after an exchange with Wayan (he's
> just published by "focus group" post) is that his daily coverage and
> proximity to the OLPC/Sugar Labs projects hid the significance of the
> release to the wider tech world.
>
>
> * Press-contactable.
> Our press page mail alias and softphone phone number, although
> sparsely used, enabled the BBC and a few others to reach us
> immediately.
>
>
> * Site statistics.
> I've chosen to not prioritize this for now (aside from worrying if we
> will have a China meltdown); Bernie provided me with a graph that said
> it all. In future I'd like to check the site stats during the launch
> period and report metrics to the marketing team, in particular the
> number of SoaS ISO downloads. Dailymotion page views seem small,
> indicating we need more content in there.
>
>
> * Contributor recruitment.
> The USA volunteers site, and our wide coverage, worked together to
> persuade several people to propose contributing to Sugar Labs. This is
> an excellent development and shows the positive impact wide coverage
> can have in other areas such as funding and partnerships.
>
>
> Please reply with comments and suggestions, especially ideas about how
> to obtain better coverage in education publications, blogs, social
> media, and newspapers.
>
>
> thanks
>
>
> Sean
> Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
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