Reinvigorating the marketing team!

Project Discussion
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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. :sweat_smile:

@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?

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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!!!

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Sure, I am happy to contribute however I can. I have put in a request for access to the GitLab marketing project!

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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.

  1. #292 Marketing team purpose - Pagure ticket
  2. In which Matthew goes to Training (and comes back with Ideas about Marketing) - Post by Matthew Miller
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! :slight_smile:

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:

The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is finding problems in the market and helping the organization create and distribute solutions to them.

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.

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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.

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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.

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I’ve had similar training to Matt, mine was part of the Pragmatic institute: https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/framework

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.

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I’ve moved this to a new marketing topic in the :category_project: Project Discussion category. Hope that doesn’t confuse anyone. :classic_smiley: I’m very glad to see this activity — and wow, it was fun to read my 2015 post! Eric, yes, it was a Pragmatic Marketing class!

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Thanks for moving this here. It’s easier to follow the conversation

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Thanks for the help, Matthew! Also thanks Juan and Eric for those resources you shared. I’ve never seen those before!

My goal with this post is to outline the main areas that I think we can focus on as a team, and from here I think we can peel off parts for planning, creating tickets, and starting to push things forward. Some of these topics can probably be their own discussion threads.

As of now, it seems like there’s three main functions that we as a marketing team can look at.

  1. Talking points
  2. Social platforms
  3. Content creation (YouTube)

Talking Points
Because Fedora 36 is out I imagine that the need for talking points is satisfied by the two articles that came out on Fedora Magazine. I assume that the Magazine team has been working on this responsibility for some amount of time, so perhaps the best approach for us would be to simply participate in those conversations and contribute there when the next release rolls around.
Announcing Fedora Linux 36
What’s new in Fedora Workstation 36

Social Platforms
I think we can break this up into two categories: outlets which we have full control over and outlets in which we are just participants like everyone else. I think both sides provide opportunities for engagement and content distribution, but we would of course go about them differently depending on the type of platform we’re talking about.

While we may want to develop or look for guidelines on what and how to post, I suspect each platform will have its own set of tasks and strategy that we will probably discuss.

I have no idea who has the login credentials for these accounts or what groups are currently using them, but I think it would be good to find out and see how we can help. If you know other platforms I’m missing, please ping me with it and I will add it here!

Social media that we have full control over:

Social media in which we are just participating:

YouTube
This one also comes in two parts:

  1. Alleviating Ben Cotton and anyone else who is currently editing the livestreamed content so they can do other things they may want to do instead.
  2. Making original content.

I believe @a7mad98 volunteered to help with editing videos. If anyone else on the team would also like to help with that, it would be cool. I can’t remember the last time I edited a video if ever, but I can learn. :slight_smile:

When it comes to content, this is where I think we will have the most freedom. This is also where what we do depends on what we can do as a team. For example, I can help with research, writing a script, and maybe being on camera (maybe), but I don’t really have any experience with YouTube besides watching it a lot. Please chime in with ideas!

So what should we do now?
Like I said at the top, this is a lot to go through, but I hope that it will give us more solid things to work on and think about.

Also, unlike some of us, I don’t work in marketing for a living, so I hope my thoughts are not super off-base from what we should be thinking about!

Any who, what do you guys think? Are there other areas we can explore as well (there’s probably a bunch)? Are there any specific actions items you think we should be tackling?

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Well, @joseph, I already wrote some considerations regarding the Youtube channel and I’m already taking the open-source approach and working on something… still in the early drafting phase.

And, of course, I hope @bcotton is aware that I’m also here to help with editing.

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I can help you guys with editing like I said. However, reading @joseph and @jcas0058 posts it appears that the Fedora Marketing team needs help with YouTube. That’s why I would love to throw my hat in ring for hosting/presenting Fedora content as well as editing and uploading the content. I have a two year experience with making content on YouTube from picking content topics, shooting the content, editing it, to finally uploading it.

Important note: I am an Undergrad CS student in my final year and I already run my own channel. So, if all of you would like me to work on Fedora’s YouTube channel then I will need help with scripts as they are the most important piece of the video. At this time I might only be presenting, editing, and uploading the content due to my limited time.

I look forward to your replies.

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Fantastic! Why don’t you and @jcas0058 take the lead on planning a video and I can support you guys with research or writing where you need it. Maybe we can use this one video as a test to see what this workflow will look like and if there are possible constraints from the content policy side of things. @x3mboy for example was trying to update the standards (here is his ticket and the current policy, I believe.)

If we’re good on this, go ahead and make a ticket in our GitLab and we can have further discussion there or in a separate thread. :slight_smile:

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I’m already on the scripting phase of a video. The theme: Mythbusting Fedora.

The idea is using my own experience (with Linux in general and Fedora in particular) to bring a light and bust these legends from the old age. Like:

1.- A complicated system
2.- A toxic community filled with gatekeepers
3.- Some programming skills are required to use it and to contribute with the community.
(I’m open to bust any other myth… as long as I can bring my recent experience)

Maybe it can be turnes into a collab video, where we share our experiences, @a7mad98.

What do you think?

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I would love to help with that as well, but my job and college keeps me from doing large projects, so if you guys need anyone to create the thumbnails for the videos, I’d be up for that too.

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That would be great!

I don’t know if you need to work with @duffy and the design team on, at least, a basic template for those thumbnails. If you want to propose something, @steiner, go ahead.

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Of course, let’s get started on this.

I think we should create a separate thread here on Fedora discussions so that if anyone wants to get involved they could jump onboard.

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I made a quick first draft of a possible template, with a mix of modern YouTube thumbnail standards but not too clickbait-y (and with HEAVY inspirations on RHEL’s YouTube channel), which I think look good without being too flashy.

1st-draft-without-border
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1st-draft-with-border
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The idea behind it is similar to what was already used in F35 Release Party, with the default wallpaper of the current version appearing faded in the background. In front of it I’m not still sure if we should put some element related to the video, be it a picture of the person presenting it (again, like RHEL tends to do), or some other graphical element.

It didn’t take too long to come up with, as I think it’s too heavily inspired by them and I want to create something unique, but I dunno, sounded like a good first draft and I wanted to know you guys’ opinion on it.

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@steiner
I think it’s great. Because we need a consistent thumbnail for all videos with slight changes here and there. However, I am not a designer so I think it’s best to get a designer’s opinion on this.

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Great idea! Here is a new thread specifically to discuss working on the first video. Let’s try to coordinate the rest in that thread to keep this one more big picture.
Fedora Discussion - Making a video for the Fedora YouTube channel