Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

01 Apr 2011, 16:21 p.m.

GNOME 3 Marketing: A Snapshot

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

The story of this week, for me and GNOME marketing, is primarily the story of a press release. I collected quotes, revised it in response to feedback on marketing-list, added press contacts to our CiviCRM installation and emailed the press release to them (at least twenty contacts, with more to come). It should show up tomorrow on gnome.org once the "we're delaying six months" April Fool's press release runs its course. We're now getting responses from interested journalists and I'll be answering their questions and helping them set up interviews with some key developers.

Also, I heard a success story from another open source marketer about ereleases, so I plan on editing the press release down to 500 words and paying $200 (the nonprofit rate) for their press release publicity service this afternoon.

By the way, in a previous status report I mentioned looking into Collabtive. It's terrible and I won't make us use it. For tasks involving responding to press contacts, we are using CiviCRM. I will be checking with Allan after the hackfest to see whether the remaining tasks would benefit from being placed in Bugzilla; I had aimed to do that before I fell ill.

This week we also had the second User Day. I did not publicize it as far ahead of time as I wish I had, but we did get some participation and answer some users' questions. Thanks to all the hosts!

After a discussion with Sri and Diego, I added "Approaches That Work" to the GNOME 3.0 talking points. If you need to talk with a skeptic about GNOME 3, we're hoping you can get some ideas, tips, and answers to common skepticisms there.

I also did some nagging, editing, writing, and organizing around GNOME Journal's GNOME 3 issue, which we hope to put out this weekend.

So my main TODOs today, this weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the ereleases blast, and GNOME Journal. Thanks to everyone in Bangalore who's at the hackfest and working on the release!

Comments

Juanjo Marin
01 Apr 2011, 16:30 p.m.

Well done Sumana !

Anonymous
anonymous@example.org
06 Apr 2011, 15:06 p.m.

The ereleases website really seems to scream "scam", especially the pseudo-popups covering each page. I'd love to hear if they actually work out well, and whether they end up doing anything that you couldn't trivially do for free.

Sumana
06 Apr 2011, 18:48 p.m.

eReleases: not a scam! And if I were more knowledgable or had a big database of press contacts I might have been able to do for free what they did, but I think they did okay -- time will tell as we get more coverage.