Jim Campbell wrote:
Hi Pasi,
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Pasi
Lallinaho <open@knome.fi> wrote:
Hello
everybody,
I've been planning the Xubuntu Lucid marketing quite a bit and here's my
current thoughts. The marketing would be one big entity, which would
consist several parts:
1) POSTERS
Real-life, touchable posters. Few designs. B&W also. Get people to
print
them and place them on the walls all over the world.
I think in most cases I would feel pretty "meh" about this idea,
but I think you'd probably come up with something that would look
awesome.
The posters wouldn't really take much time to design, as we can use
artwork which is meant for the wallpaper.
Personally, I had been thinking of Xubuntu tshirts. Â*How come
there are no Xubuntu tshirts? Â*
Â*Might that be more doable than
posters? Â*I think we'd probably be able to get more "oomph" from shirts
than posters, but maybe I'm wrong.Â*
I don't know if posters would be "the thing" either, but how can we
know without trying? The idea of having a B&W version as well was
because many people do not have a color printer, thus the color designs
look awful. On the other hand, if they could easily print out a B&W
poster which would look cool, why wouldn't they do it? It isn't a huge
contribution financially but it can bring us many users.
T-shirts would be fine as well. The shirts would definitely cost more
to the users, so the people buying those would probably be lower than
the ones printing our posters.
No offense to the Ubuntu tshirt designers, but the designs
haven't always seemed particularly attractive to me. Â*I bet we (our
artwork folks?) could come up with a tshirt design that more people
would want to wear.Â*
I think the shirt color needs to be blue and in top of that, something
light and maybe some patterns (maybe the three or the landscape?). My
concern is I want too much and the shirt printers can't print what I
want. So if we decided to do this, please tell me when there is enough
stuff.
Â*
2) WIDGETS
Web widgets or something like that. Something a bit more than just a
countdown banner. We had the idea of some "special" banner frames for
some days, maybe use that idea?
I'm not sure what this would entail. Â*What is a web widget?
Â*When I think of widgets, I think of things like gdesklets or Google
gadgets. Â*Would these be something like sidebar banners and buttons
that people could place on their sites to show their Xubuntu love?
Yes, sidebar banners and stuff. Something more than just the countdown
banner. Something they can use all year around, which could *also*
serve as the countdown banners. Maybe a static address so they don't
have to worry about the hassle of changing <img> src's when
there's a new release coming?
I really liked the idea of some "special frames" we thought about doing
last year, but didn't do after all.
Â*
3) MICROSITE – THE BIG IDEA
A microsite for the LTS release. Link to all the poster sources and
widgets. Tell about new releases and the LTS concept. Add more content
at least weekly (remember that this content can be ready before it's
published, so we don't have to rush when we are near to the release).
Maybe some "developer interviews"? Maybe even ask Mark to answer some
questions? How to get the voice of users to show? Some interactive
parts?
It sounds like this idea would coincide with the developer blog
(at least there is some overlap).
This site could aggregate the developer blog and/or the blogs of the
developers elsewhere to be part of the site.
In terms of the voice of users, perhaps some user interviews
would be good. Â*One person who comes to mind isÂ*Elizabeth Krumbach.
Â*She is a member of the community council and a Xubuntu user. Â*Also,
aren't there a few businesses that run Xubuntu? Â*I seem to recall a
group that worked with dolphins (??) who sent a couple of emails to the
xubuntu-users ML. Â*I think there's also a web development company in
Montana that uses Xubuntu.Â*
Yes, the messages can be found from the xubuntu-devel archives [1].
These sound generally good.
I'm not quite sure I
get the focus on just the LTS portion of it, but I do like expanding
things out a bit. Â*I think I could help with user interviews, if people
thought that was a good idea.
The microsite would not be only for LTS (it could be used with all the
releases to tell about new features), but I think it would make a good
job telling about we have an LTS release now and you really should test
this if you want to try Linux.
Â*
4)
EVENTS?
Some events to lift Xubuntu to even higher level. Ubuntu Developer Week?
Ubuntu Open Week (plan beforehand)!
If either of them would be up for it, one thing that comes to
mind is perhaps having Lionel or Cody (or both of them) lead a Xubuntu
development session during developer week. Â*Maybe talk about the key
components / packages of Xubuntu and how our development process works.
Â*Talk about some of the development needs of Xubuntu and how developers
can contribute.
I suggest that because it would be good to get more development
contributors, and because I don't think we've done any kind of Xubuntu
development session before.
I agree. We have had quite many "community" sessions. They are good as
well, but we really need more developers.
Â*
I'm trying to redesign the website for Lucid also. What are we going to
do for the "developer blog" idea?
I still think the developer blog is a good idea, but have no
major opinion on how it should be configured. Â*
As a side note, Pasi, thanks for putting up the blog note about
the Alpha 1 release of Xubuntu. Â*And thanks to Charlie for testing!!Â*
No problem. The idea actually came from #xubuntu where random users
started talking about how alpha1 torrents need to be seeded better.
Jim
Â*
[1]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-devel/2009-February/006666.html
--
Pasi Lallinaho
Xubuntu Marketing Lead
Web-designer, graphic artist
IRC: knome @ freenode
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Marketing for Xubuntu Lucid
