Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Some thoughts on marketing strategy

Hello Jean, 

Thank you for picking this up.

Le lundi 03 septembre 2012 à 15:59 +1000, Jean Weber a écrit :
> I'm sorry I've not responded to Charles's thread on marketing
> strategy. I've got notes but haven't organised my thoughts
> sufficiently to share them.
>
> Meanwhile, I found some good ideas in here to consider when defining
> the "what and how" part of our marketing strategy. With examples. Most
> of us know this, and we're working on some aspects, but we probably
> should and could do more. Though that depends a bit on who we consider
> our primary target audiences. Clearly the methods mentioned in the
> article are relevant to individual decision-making, but if one's
> target is government or business, perhaps not so relevant.
>
> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html


Interesting read. It somehow fits into the point I was trying to make,
which is that our marketing team must be able to market our community
(through the community) while serving specific marketing needs. Let me
give you an example: marketing should not be "just" about a message, as
elaborate as it could be. It ought to provide information about
features, but at the same time being able to advertise and communicate
about our ability, as a community, to help people in their daily tasks
or to get specific features included. 
On another level, distribution as an autonomous team is important: it's
a community based, community powered team giving the tools and the means
to any potential distributor of LibreOffice DVDs, USB keys, CD ROMs,
torrents to spread LibreOffice. 

In the paragraph above (again, just as an example, but as an identified
need), we can identify two tasks that need specific contributions:
* Features communication and advertisement: Only with out last versions
did we start to have a real features page . We should make sure to have
one for each release (sorry, at least for each major release such as the
3.x 3.y), people blogging about one or several specific features coming
up in a non technical way, etc.
* Distribution team: we would need  a bunch of people making sure that
DVD, CD-ROMs, USB Keys and torrents are kept up to date, possibly with
special packages. The NA DVD is a great example of that. 


Last but not least, coming back to "marketing the community". Our
community is our biggest asset, not just because traditional marketing
is dead, but because our "product mix" is largely relevant on what the
community wants (by opposition to one vendor, or one specific product).
Hence we could not really be advertising a coherent product strategy as
if we were selling software even if we wanted to. But we can certainly
talk about our community and how it strives everyday to be a friendly
and proactive community helping out users, reporting and fixing bugs,
etc.

Cheers,

Charles.




-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted