[Marketing] Welcome to Christian Vanizette (Marketing Team Resources)

[Sean DALY]

Marketers, I'd like you to welcome Christian Vanizette to the marketing list!

Christian is a marketing student from Euromed Management, one of
France's top business schools located in Marseille.

He's currently doing an internship with a tech company but I'll let
him tell you about that and more about himself if he wishes.

Christian came to SugarCamp Paris on Saturday and expressed his wish
to help, we had the opportunity to talk marketing for a while.

I promised him he doesn't have to read months of threads to get up to
date :D but here are some useful Marketing Team links:


* the Sugar Labs homepage
http://www.sugarlabs.org/

* Press page
http://www.sugarlabs.org/press

* Logo materials on the wiki (note: all 12 variants plus black or
white backgrounds are valid logos, horizontal preferred to stacked)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo

* Marketing Team page on the wiki
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team

* Marketing Team Meetings page on the wiki (the agenda is out of date,
but the IRC meeting transcripts are not and will give you a flavor for
what the weekly meetings are like)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Meetings

* Marketing list archives (useful to link to a list post more than a
few days old, but scrubs attachments I believe)
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/

* IRC channel for Sugar meetings, usually one hour on Tuesdays at 5pm Paris time
server: irc.freenode.net
channel: #sugar-meeting
(note: sugar general discussion & support is on #sugar)

* Sugar Labs DailyMotion channel (3 days old!)
http://www.dailymotion.com/user/sugarlabs



Right now we are working on these priorities, listed in no particular order:

* Building up to Sugar on a Stick v1 launch in the fall.
We have wisely not set a date yet, since "SoaS" (as we call it) is
impacted by elements beyond our control in particular the underlying
Fedora version whose schedule could slip (cf. Fedora 11). SoaS impacts
everyone of course. My strategy is to issue a press release (or more
generally try to generate press/blogger coverage) every 4 to 6 weeks
up to launch. I haven't planned beyond that... yet :-)


* Branding, brand identity, brand values, positioning, star marketing.

Establishing the logo. Christian Marc Schmidt is our main design guru,
he's in New York and designed the logo and the intro part of our
website. Although I have imagined possible changes to the logo and
website (whose intro went live very recently - it was the wiki
before), now is not the time given our resources - so I'm
concentrating on:
- "Sugar Labs", not "Sugar", in our communications so as to avoid
conflation with the white stuff from beets and the brown stuff from
canes
- logo on the splash page of SoaS and ideally on a splash page of the
OLPC XO-1 and XO-1.5 due in the fall
- logo on USB sticks for SoaS (will have some of the first run of 100
sticks tomorrow so I can get "beauty shots" done)
- merchandise or "swag" = t-shirts, buttons, hats, mugs, etc
(cafepress or ? we need to do this)
- a roll-up banner I want to have designed & ready in time for
LinuxTag Berlin end of June, ideally with Mike Lee photo from last
press release
- other booth stuff such as logo'd balloons
- logo on a Shuttle PC I am setting up as a School Server for roadshow
demonstrations
- etc.

Brand Values: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-February/000323.html
(and the responses) is all I have for now.

Brand Positioning: I had fruitful discussions with Caroline Meeks
(SoaS project manager) concerning this at SugarCamp Paris. We will be
working on this but the main concept is to present Sugar as
"best-of-breed", ideal for young children (5 to 10 years old), and for
kids from all backgrounds (developing nations, richer nations). The
price (free) will be used as a secondary argument. No slogan yet!

Star Marketing: we have been focusing on Activities (capital "A" :-)
in our press materials; hopefully more interesting for teachers and
helpful for differentiation along with built-in collaboration etc.


* PDF handout.
We don't have this yet (I promised it to Caroline weeks ago), I need
help with that. The idea is to do a 2-page PDF which sums up Sugar. if
it's efffective, it will need to be translated :-)


* Competitive Landscape: this includes software or websites for kids,
for example: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-April/000717.html


* Hardware platforms targeted at schools: the OLPC XO series, the
Intel Classmate class (3 generations already and multiple local
manufacturers licensed for ex:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-April/000787.html),
the new Dell education netbook
(http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-latitude-2100?c=us&l=en&s=k12),
etc. Netbooks in general too. Curiously, Apple is absent from this
sector (Steve Jobs is anti-netbook, citing profitability), but of
course that could change.


* News monitoring.
I use Google News / Blogs / Images, Technorati, Newssift and other
sources and post noteworthy article links to the list. With few
exceptions, any journalist who writes on Sugar or OLPC is added to the
targeted mailing list I maintain.


* Improving our website navigation.
Bewildering to a first-time visitor, so I am working with Christian on
establishing a common two-tier navbar on all site sections:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-April/000742.html


* Online referencing.
This problem is largely solved but work remains; Google decribes Sugar
Labs as "Spin-off of the "Sugar" user interface platform to another
project." which is accurate, but should be updated.


* Blogging.
Walter does excellent reports (the "Sugar Digest") and there is a blog
post aggregator live at planet.sugarlabs.org, but we could probably do
more marketing communication in a blog format. To be developed...


* Translation of press releases, marketing materials, ultimately the website.
Ad hoc and therefore uneven for now, we need a process and of course
volunteers. There are translators for Sugar, but I don't know how we
can call upon them for marketing materials. I am responsible for a
bottleneck, I am holding several press release translations which I
have not made time to update & convert to PDFs for the press page...


* Response to journalists.
We have a contact system in place which is working well, but may have
difficulty scaling. When a journalists contacts us, it's best to
respond as soon as possible and to try to learn what the deadline is.


* Sugar use feedback.
Very poor right now, needs to be teacher-friendly. The Marketing Team
can play a role helping teachers feedback information to the
developers. The Design Team is working on possible interface changes
for the next version of Sugar (v0.86). We're in a bit of a strange
place: our credibility derives from the one million XO-1s distributed
with Sugar, but we lack consolidated reliable information as to what
teachers and students are doing. Of course, part of that problem is
related to poor connectivity in developing countries. For now, we are
exploring ways to contact technically adept teachers who will provide
very useful feedback with minimum support effort.


* Partnerships/Fundraising.
We have negotiations with several partners and potential donors
underway at this time.


* Coordinated and possibly joint marketing with OLPC.
There are gross misperceptions in the blogosphere concerning OLPC's
situation and that impacts Sugar Labs. My principle is that OLPC's
success, even with an older version of Sugar, is good for Sugar and
Sugar's success, even on hardware other than OLPC, is good for OLPC.
In that connection I hope to coordinate marketing efforts around the
XO-1.5 refresh due in the fall.


* Community outreach.
We need to develop more contacts with our partner distributions; I
hope to kick off a new effort in this direction at LinuxTag Berlin.


* Recruitment of volunteers - "Sugar Stories".
Every team at Sugar Labs could use more hands and the Marketing Team
can help everyone by publishing "Sugar Stories". I want to rapidly
develop this on our new Dailymotion channel (and add a Flickr account
too). Related: we want to develop local Sugar Labs in each country,
this will help us scale; those structures will need marketing support.


* Sugar version numbering simplification.
We have an extremely complicated numbering system for Sugar versions
and, moreover, OLPC assigns their own numbering to Sugar+Fedora
versions and to make matters worse, these unrelated numbers resemble
each other (Sugar 0.82 <> OLPC-OS 8.2.1). As Sugar on the OLPC does
not currently have a logo'd splash page with verison number, ordinary
(7-year-old ;-) users have no idea what version they are running; I am
attempting to get logo'd splash pages with version numbers into Sugar.
We are attempting to sidestep this problem by numbering Sugar on a
Stick as "beta-1" (out now), "beta-2" (end of June) and "version 1"
(the fall).


I'm sure I have forgotten stuff but if you have any questions, feel
free to mail me :-)

thanks

Sean
Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator