Marketing plan

The plan

The Marketing Plan serves as the foundation and guide for all the activities that Marketing does. Each section of the plan contains high-level objectives. The per-cycle deliverables and individual projects that the Marketing team executes should be supporting one (or more) sections of the plan.

For more information on how the Marketing Plan has evolved, see the Marketing Plan background.

Educate

• Inform the voluntary switchers
• Easy to find answers to questions
• Highlight spins that show unique use cases

Build bridges

• Support
• Feedback from users to devs
• Questions from devs to users (surveys)
• Build positive dev support/feedback opportunities

Spread the brand

• 4 Foundations are good -- use them!
• Success stories/examples of each
• Ambassadors communicate to focused audiences
  • Design schools
  • CS departments
  • Downstream conferences
• Social networking

Build on-ramps

• Fedora-tour
• EasyFix
• Engineering services queue
• How to file a bug, check/add to wiki page or other outlets

How we made this plan

This plan was created during the Marketing FAD 2010 - you can see a lot of the discussion in the first day's logs, particularly the IRC logs. We went through several exercises to try and get out what we were thinking, and the notes from that are below.

This was very much a a kickoff brainstorm - we didn't expect the handful of contributors at the FAD to have answers to everything, but we figured we could get our own thoughts out and then share them with other people to encourage them to consider and share theirs.

What are the goals of a marketing plan?

• • Who is this plan for?
    • Members (current and new) of the Fedora Marketing team
    • Members of the Fedora Project who want to understand how the Fedora Marketing team is using resources (people, time...)
  • Who is it addressing?

Distro: where are we right now?

We first tried to figure out our first impressions on where Fedora-the-distribution stood at that moment.

Give 3 words that describe the distribution

People went around and added three words each to this list - how do we (as Fedora contributors) see Fedora-the-distribution now? (March 2010).

• Free
• Innovative
• High-context (this means it's difficult to establish context when you're getting started on what all the crazy stuff going on is, but it's great once you get used to things.)
• Powerful
• Intimidating
• Time-consuming
• Interesting
• Good quality
• interesting
• fresh
• Productivity Suite
• Bleeding Edge
• Stability/Security
• community-driven (which causes the high-context sometimes - but doesn't have to)
• Fluid
• Mostly works
• Lots of updates--every day another 10-20 meg (can't tell a difference if I install them or not)
• commitment
• complex
• Challenging
• Uneven
• "can't keep up" (explanation: too much churn, noise, etc. to figure out what's going on at any given point in time without significant investment... need to selectively ignore a lot)
• steep learning curve

1 sentence description of the person that's happiest with the distro right now

People went around and added three words each to this list - who do we (as Fedora contributors) see as the current users happiest with Fedora-the-distribution now? (March 2010). The intent is to compare our first reactions to this question against our intended User base and see how well it matched up.

• Someone who is deeply involved with Linux
• Tinkerers who don't need a safety net
• The contributors
• Mel when she was in high school and had lots of time and energy to play around
• Ryan when he is in high school and has lots of time and energy to play around :)
• Software engineer who wants the latest, most reliable product that's available in terms of having FOSS stuff they need to get end stuff
• Someone who is more of a free software purist
• Someone who has been using it for three or more releases
• Someone who has someone else to help fix broken things
• Someone who has been using the distro for 3+ releases, because they will have figured out the best practices that work for them.
• Some one who likes challenges or end user that gets the box installed for him/her
• Someone who messes with a lot of stuff and learns and just grows better (Learning from mistakes, perfecting at doing many things)

Distro: Where we want to be

We then went around and shared our thoughts on where we would like Fedora-the-distro to be, and what groups we might want to look at to help with that.

User base of tomorrow

This has already been defined. From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base

1. Voluntary switcher
2. Computer-friendly
3. Likely collaborator
4. General productivity user

Hypothetical folks that fit this description, but who we don't serve well right now

• Law student, designer, etc. non-dev and never wants to be technical - but wants to contribute to FOSS
• Our amused SO's/parents who want to be supoportive and give feedback, but only to us directly (for instance, Mel's Linux-using friends who come up with patches but don't have time to learn their way around how to submit it upstream and pass it to her instead)
• Locally focused head of a LUG who'd rather concentrate on regional stuff (not global IRC channels) - "the global Fedora community has to reach out to *me* because I have no time to reach out to it myself" (I would submit that some other FOSS projects do this very well, and this is why they spread so fast - they have out-of-the-box "here, do this, SWAG!" experiences for LUGs.)

Potential areas of opportunity

Real folks from the User base who use Fedora

We should profile these folks as good examples of "What can Fedora do for me?"

I am:

1. Brand new to FOSS(Ryan's 13 year old brother)
2. Brand new to computing
3. A graphic designer (I am mizmo)
4. a Java programmer (I am Andrew Overholt)
5. A python programmer (I am Luke Macken)
6. A Sysadmin (I am Mike McGrath)
7. A WebDev (I am Hiemanshu Sharma)
8. A student studying circuits (FEL)
9. A GNOME hacker
10. A KDE hacker (I am Jaroslav Reznik)
11. A law student
12. A Marketing student (productivity suit, office, plus thousands of other usefull tools)

Some notes:

• Focus on productivity, as this will be a pro for every single person looking at it.
• Consider the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which is a framework for learning stages from novice to expert which points out that (1) newcomers have very little context and need specific instructions, and (2) one of the markers of an experienced person is often forgetting what it's like to be a newcomer.

Strategy for talking to the user base of tomorrow:

1. Emphasize what we enable YOU to do
   • User cases/stories
   • Highlight spins that prove the model (i.e. use based, not view based)
   • "Think out loud" -- what's the user/contributor experience now?
   • Highlight Fedora being used to do things ("Made with Fedora")
2. find ways not to lose users once they come to us
   • consolidation of support, forums, questions, education
   • make sure correct answers are available and easy to find
3. brand identity/recognition
   • events
   • press
   • consistency