[Marketing] reaching out to hackers

[Sean DALY]

Tomeu, from my point of view, Sugar is better known to the open source
community than any other. Which doesn't preclude going beyond the tech
press and conference presence through blog posts and IRC mentions,
since as often as not when Sugar is known it's attached to negative
opinions of OLPC. Just look at yesterday's Slashdot post where
everyone but Charbax talks about the "failure" of OLPC - a ridiculous
point of view for a million-laptop project, but a meme which keeps
cropping up since OLPC is not fighting that. I spoke with visitors at
LinuxTag who were surprised OLPC still exists. However, (not being
able to conduct a study) I believe OLPC has good recognition with
educators and much less negativity than amongst geeks.

To combat OLPC's poor appreciation among geeks, perhaps I should
contact marketing teams from distros? I'll be guesting a marketing
class for the Fedora marketing team after my move & holidays. Keep in
mind though that what most FOSS projects call marketing is more
community relations, interaction with other FOSS projects rather than
recruiting users.

For me, it's a higher priority to reach out to teachers, where we have
close to zero recognition, rather than geeks, where we have good
recognition tempered with OLPC misperceptions. To reach millions of
K-6 teachers, we need good press from influential journalists and
bloggers.

The developer recruitment issue is different, since we have a very
clear idea of who we want to reach and just need to develop a plan to
reach them. We can certainly put together an online recruitment drive,
which should start with an improved Getting Involved page and a blog
post.

The XO-1.5 refresh is a perfect opportunity for us to do joint
marketing with OLPC. If they plan and execute well, they could turn
around the negative press completely, which would go a long way in
dispelling Slashdot drubbings and "Sugar is dead" attitudes.
Hopefully, we can help them with that.

Does that answer your question?

Sean


On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:55, Sean DALY<sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I guess I'm just confused, what I would like to know is if the
> marketing team thinks that getting Sugar well known to the open source
> community is part of their mission and if so, what priority it has and
> which is the plan regarding that.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> 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
>>>
>>
>