I’ve announced in the Mindshare, Design and Ambassadors mailing lists that I will try to revive the Marketing team.
Previously the marketing team was in charge of several tasks related to how the Fedora Project displays information to the public, working closely with Design, that produces assets, and Ambassadors, who attend events promoting Fedora Linux and the Fedora Project. The work of the team mostly focused on communicating the changes and new features in each release as bullet points that Ambassadors could use in their events.
What’s new?
The idea of this revival is to start reaching people, create social media campaigns and strategies, as well as to provide teams that need bullet points, assets, and guidance on how to market the Fedora Project.
For this, we should keep our old task of collecting “Talking Points” and screenshots, but also we should take access to different social media accounts and help contributors post content. Of course this content needs to be curated and, in cases where there is doubt about the content, approved; and here is where Mindshare comes into play. Mindshare is working in a policy content that we should follow to decide what content could and should be in our media accounts.
Help needed!
The Marketing Team failed because lack of hands to help. This time, what will be different is that we will take responsibilities only if there is hands to work on them. For that I asked infra to create a GitLab Sub-Group in the Fedora GitLab group. In there, I’ve created a project that will work as issue tracker, so we can create tasks and work on them coordinated.
Communication
- We still have the IRC channel (#fedora-mktg at libera.chat), that is linked to the Matrix room.
- We moved the mailing list to a tag in Discourse.
- As I mentioned before, we have a GitLab Sub-Group to work in.
Hello! I figured this was a good place to tag people who have expressed interest in helping with marketing in the last few weeks (at least the ones that I’ve come across).
CC: @a7mad98 @itguyeric @jcas0058
In talking with @x3mboy it seems like the forum is the best place to discuss the marketing efforts. There is also the Matrix channel at #marketing:fedoraproject.org.
The main tasks or projects are managed on this GitLab page, so you may want to get that account and review what is currently on deck.
All this is just duplicated from the main post, I just realized.
@x3mboy I’m super new so I don’t mean to overstep. Just figured it could be helpful to bring together folks who may want to start working on something but don’t know what to start on. Otherwise, I guess we can talk about ideas for want we can do?
No overstep at all, I’m super happy to have you here and all people that want to help. I’m at the gym now, and my nights are kind of busy, but tomorrow I will tag more people and let’s people work on stuff. One of the heaviest things is to bring pagure issues to GitLab. The idea is to take the latest, maybe counting from 200 and ahead, but feel free to read, and ask me or anyone if something is still relevant or decide it yourself!!!
Sure, I am happy to contribute however I can. I have put in a request for access to the GitLab marketing project!
Reviewing the past tickets to see what we should migrate to the GitLab has actually been good for familiarizing myself with the history of the marketing team, it’s ups and downs, and the existential debate that has happened about what ‘Marketing’ is supposed to be in Fedora. I came across two resources that could be helpful for us at a high level.
I'm really excited so I wrote out all of my thoughts. I don't want to bog people down with it so click on the arrow to unhide them. I recognize my foolishness.
Aw, thanks!
The first one is a discussion under a ticket titled Marketing team purpose. One group thought at a very high level and wanted to work on many things or organize within the community to leverage the content we already have. The other group was focused on smaller, more concrete goals or projects that better reflected the manpower at the time. I think both sides were right in their own way, but it doesn’t seem like the differences were resolved.
@jflory7 at one point linked to Matthew’s thoughts on the topic from 2015, the delightfully named In which Matthew goes to Training (and comes back with Ideas about Marketing). I recommend for anyone interested in marketing to read this because it’s a textbook outline of how marketing works.
The biggest gem in the treasure chest is this:
In the article Matthew has this neat chart that gives ideas of what kinds of activities relate to what parts of marketing, whether they be conceptual, technical, strategic, or tactical. He also highlights how broad this definition of marketing really is because much of that work is done by groups such as FESCo and the Fedora Council. But that’s the big secret.
I don’t have a ton of experience with marketing proper, but one of the main lessons I learned in college was exactly how involved marketing was in how a business or initiative operated. In my opinion, without a high-level view of what’s going and the ability to affect that, marketing is reduced to advertising. The 5 P’s of Marketing are product, price, promotion, place, and people, and obviously that’s way broader than just a Twitter account or a YouTube channel.
That being said, forget all of it. Why? Because the reality of marketing is that the whole community is part of the process, the learning, and the execution, and it can’t all fall on a single detached team. It means that while we should be thinking about Fedora at a high level, we can leverage the rest of the community to be thinking about their own piece of marketing (even if they don’t realize it’s part of marketing) and let it work together to produce how Fedora meets the market.
In a roundabout way, the breath of marketing as a field gives us as a team the breathing room to take baby steps and grow through small and concrete initiatives.
After the call with the Fedora Ambassadors team I came to realize that Marketing, Ambassadors and Design have quite intertwined codependent work and communications between them need to be clear, straight and responsive.
Marketing supporting Ambassadors on creating manuals, message boxes (a key technique to establish a coherent speech) and recording best practices.
Ambassadors supporting Marketing on the development of content, audiovisual or written. People connect through stories and the best way to spark curiosity and turn it into action is connecting with people. Ambassadors are the most visible faces on the Fedora Project… They are, also, eyes and ears to provide feedback from people outside the community.
Design providing all teams with an updated graphic identity manual (There is one for the old logo, and as far as I know, the only change is on the new Fedora Blue colour and the new logo), so all content creators can make their material in an open-source way… or delivering templates so there’s a more coherent image all around.
So, Marketing, Ambassadors and Design are more like RPM packages than Flatpaks: They share many fundamental dependencies… even with the core system (a probably wrong technical reference from a non-technical guy). The best approach to the work ahead is to address these common dependencies as the base for an open-source approach on content creation, activities and communications.
I’ve had similar training to Matt, mine was part of the Pragmatic institute: Product Management Framework | Pragmatic Institute
Currently, I do a lot of Launch, Positioning, Awareness, and I am sure I left a few things out. I do agree that these teams share a lot in common.