Marketing FAD Day 1: Midnight ADD Post-Hockey blogging at its finest.

Fedora view from a window.

Started reading a new book on the airplane en route to Raleigh for the Marketing FAD — Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.  There was a quote at the beginning of the book which I thought was particularly poignant:

“Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.” – Seth Godin, “Purple Cow”

Day 1 of Marketing-FAD-Goodness involved a number of things in terms of deliverables – but one of the most important things, at least in my humble opinion, that we’re working on is developing a solid marketing plan that we can use moving forward. We did a lot of talking – and writing, and typing, and hashing out, as well – today about… who are the Right People? What are the things that Marketing is doing – or perhaps, should be doing – to reach those people, and what are the qualities of Fedora that make it remarkable that we should be talking about, promoting, and so forth?  We came up with a solid of strategies to reach the Right People – and to go along with it, a tactical list of executable things to do.

Another thing we’ve been talking about a lot — which, actually, isn’t restricted to Marketing, btw — is the process of getting rid of the fear of doing things, and instead, just doing SOMETHING.  We started the afternoon today with a Marketing Plan that was a plan in the most traditional sense; i.e., something that one would actually look at and learn how to produce in a college-level marketing course.  Unfortunately, those marketing plans have been, for years and years, geared towards traditional companies, who do traditional things; Fedora is none of these.  So we are, in a sense, sort of re-writing how to do a Marketing plan, for an open source project, in an open fashion.  None of this comes easy.  And for a long time, it hasn’t come at all.  So I think it’s great that today, we took the first steps towards actually solidifying a Marketing plan that is actually actionable for the Fedora project as a whole; we are going Somewhere, which, frankly, is better than Nowhere.  Even if we start walking and we run into a wall, or some sort of blocker, at least we know that that route is bad.  And we can try, try again in a different direction.  It’s sort of like Wombat. 😀  Except, you know, with ponies. And the Right People. And a remarkable product.

Oh, how ’bout them Phoenix Coyotes? 🙂