[Marketing] reaching out to hackers

[Sean DALY]

OK Tomeu

You're saying we're focusing on the general consumer... but that's not
what we're doing at all, for a very simple reason: we have no media
buying budget. Mass marketing to consumers worldwide (starting with
350 million people who use the Internet at least once a week) starts
at a few million dollars and goes up to 1 billion dollars and beyond.
I'd like to do that (many nonprofits can benefit from free media
buying through the Ad Council program in the US and similar programs
elsewhere), but we need to take many other steps first.

As I've said before (
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-July/007205.html ) we are
currently reaching out to the tech press and bloggers and some
mainstream press. Our coverage is excellent in the tech press
including bloggers and spotty to inexistent in the education and
mainstream press including bloggers. I haven't been concentrating on
social media and aggregators yet (Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, Slashdot,
Technorati, TechMeme, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Twitter,
Facebook, ShoutWire, Propeller, Daylife, Newssift, Ning, and
Hackernews which I hadn't known about) because for now it has been
more efficient to seek coverage in the tech press which these sites
build from.

And, as I said I am preoccupied with how to reach teachers. To take
just one country, the USA, it is estimated there are 1.5 million
elementary school teachers. We could extrapolate to the languages
Sugar is available in and reasonably assume 7 million elementary
school teachers. Reaching them is important, as is reaching funders
and geeks of all kinds including FOSS developers, but we have yet to
work on that. I am starting with influencers and the GPA project will
be our showcase.

I understand that you're concerned about recruiting prequalified FOSS
developers, but as I've said that will likely have more to do with
improving our Getting Involved page, blog posts, and word of mouth
through IRC channels. It's a very specific target, and knowing the
target is half the problem solved, but the next step is harder: how to
reach them.

Ronny doesn't read Slashdot, or CNet, or ZDNet, Ars Technica, or
blogs. He reads Heise.de but missed the past two articles on us. He
missed LinuxTag and Gran Canaria and apparently doesn't know Gnome
will be deployed on the OLPC XO-1.5 refresh. What he says is actually
the perfect reflection of OLPC's bad press as a "failure". A few
seconds of googling would have revealed how we are moving forward; my
guess is that he doesn't follow developments in the FOSS ecosphere
closely. I'm working on improving the OLPC misperceptions situation so
edge cases like him become more aware. It's an uphill climb, because
OLPC is having difficulty spreading a coherent message right now.

Sean


On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> was just talking in IRC with a fellow GNOME hacker and was surprised
> when he mentioned that he thought Sugar was dead. Here is the
> transcript, might give some clues about how to improve our exposure in
> that group:
>
> (12:03:06 PM) ronny: sugar is still alive?
> (12:06:35 PM) tomeu: heh
> (12:06:44 PM) tomeu: what do you mean by that? is gnome alive?
> (12:07:40 PM) tomeu: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8117064.stm
> (12:15:41 PM) tomeu: if hackers think we are dead, our marketing team
> might need a heads up
> (12:16:32 PM) tomeu: ronny: can I ask you which sites you visit to get
> an idea of the projects are interesting, dead, alive, etc?
> (12:29:37 PM) ronny: tomeu: well, suddenlz all messages of work on it
> disappeared from my usual inputs
> (12:29:54 PM) ronny: that usually means a) dead or b) marketing needs spanking
> (12:30:20 PM) tomeu: yeah, I think our marketing team is focusing a
> bit too much on the general consumer
> (12:30:39 PM) tomeu: given that we have no budget nor paid developers,
> this may not be a good strategy
> (12:31:21 PM) tomeu: ronny: there have been articles in ars technica,
> lwn and slashdot. any other news sources you can suggest us?
> (12:32:33 PM) ronny: these days mostly reddit and heise
> (12:32:50 PM) tomeu: heise.de? those use to cover us pretty well
> (12:32:51 PM) ronny: also hackernews
> (12:33:43 PM) ronny: then i must be doing something wrong, its quite
> some time since i did read good things about shugar on heise
> (12:34:51 PM) tomeu: those are good suggestions
> (12:35:00 PM) tomeu: not sure about heise, we were on both uk and de
> (12:35:32 PM) ronny: im on de
> (12:35:37 PM) tomeu: our channel gets flooded by german names every
> time heise.de talks about us because we ship an IRC activity that logs
> automatically into #sugar :p
> (12:35:54 PM) tomeu: ok, I'm going to pass your suggestions to the
> marketing team
> (12:35:56 PM) tomeu: thanks!
>
> HTH,
>
> Tomeu
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>