[Marketing] targeting journals from countries where sugar is used

[Sean DALY]

Hi Tomeu

In fact, it's not an either/or approach; although the wire services
(AP, AFP, Reuters, Bloomberg) and international broadcast media like
the BBC have a fantastic reach, "seeding" both the general and
specialized press, of course they cannot go into the depth print can,
especially within a country where deployments exist.

I'm hampered by not speaking Spanish... who can help us build a list
of publications in Latin American OLPC countries?

Ideally, we could start with both the general press and tech press of
each country which has published articles on OLPC. Most of these
articles will be online.

Then, we could complement the list with whatever general and tech
publications have wide reach within the country but have not published
OLPC articles.

Next, we could add education-themed specialized publications; many
countries have glossy monthlies read by teachers.

Finally, we could identify influential bloggers or columnists, ideally
oriented to education.

In all cases, the work to do is the same: identify article authors,
find their e-mail address if possible, add the general news-item
submission e-mail of the publication, add them to the mailing list I
maintain with the two-lettter ISO-639 language code. If a press
release is available in the tagged language, journalists get the PR in
their language. PR launches generate coverage, and often bubble up
awareness, meaning that if a journalist or editor doesn't write that
day, they may make a note to follow what we are doing.

It's important to note if any journalist has been very unfair to
OLPC/Sugar; there are unfortunately some biased viewpoints and these
cases need to be handled carefully. Sometimes it's worth correcting
the record, as we did recently with teleread.org; other times it's
best to add information in an article comment; occasionally, it's best
to suffer in silence and see if the journalist evolves over time.

Approaching publications is the publicist's job, and beyond marketing
I do this for English and French publications, but as I say I can't do
Spanish. It would be great if we could find someone to do that, and of
course for other non-English languages too. I mentioned that I want to
grow the marketing team; finding contributors to help us with that is
on top of my list of skillsets to seek. It's time-consuming work, but
has a direct impact on the effectiveness of our launches which boost
Sugar awareness.

Of course, there is another issue: we can't speak for OLPC, and they
haven't expressed any interest in working with the press. However,
I've seen some recent changes at OLPC which are encouraging, they may
be willing to make efforts in that regard. It's a pity, because we
could do extremely effective joint marketing about Uruguay, the
XO-1.5, and so on which could transform their bad press.

thanks
Sean



On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> wonder if it has already been discussed to put special focus in
> journalists from countries where Sugar is being used (mainly OLPC
> countries)? We may assess which journals have published most about the
> XOs, then approach them.
>
> I would say that they should have a more direct interest in Sugar
> than, says, BBC.
>
> If the governments in those countries realized how much they could win
> by participating in the development of Sugar, we could get some
> resources. Some public discussion about what Sugar is and how it is
> developed might help get us there.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> --
> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
> Farning
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>