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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Welcome Christian, hope you have lots of fun in SugarLabs.

Sean, this is excellent info, maybe we should drop it somewhere in the
wiki? Also, did you added the intended Christian to CC?

Regards,

Tomeu

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 18:51, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 * Marketing Team Meetings page on the wiki (the agenda is out of date,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
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>