Marketing

Although I have drafted a first article about PDF and distributed to the marketing mailing list, the feedback has been rather poor from journalists. So, I will take an alternative approach, publishing articles as blog posts starting from January 2019.

Italo Vignoli wrote:

Although I have drafted a first article about PDF and distributed to the marketing mailing list, the feedback has been rather poor from journalists. So, I will take an alternative approach, publishing articles as blog posts starting from January 2019.

Any idea why it didn't work yet?
As such blogposts are of course OK. It is quite a different approach and possibly result though.
When (more or less ready to use) articles are spread and appear in different media, it reaches a different audience than with blogposts in our own channel.

Journalists are looking for news, and we are not considered a new story as our project is rather well established. So, they think that our articles are better suited for websites or blogs focused on office suites. Of course, everyone is free to translate the text and pitch it to media in his country.

Two ideas on this:

• We had the LibreOffice magazine in the past year, with the plan to have articles released under a CC license over time. Do you know more details when this will happen? Otherwise happy to ping Brian directly. We might reuse content from there.

• Did we try to reach out to the public marketing list if someone wants to (co-)write such a blogpost?

I had the idea of this task, and drafted a first article about PDF which was not picked up by journalists (this was a few years ago, with the current situation - where journalists do not have the time for almost nothing - I could try again with an updated text, adding the few new features related to PDF). Based on this feedback, we changed the focus from articles to blog posts, but I did not have the time to work at this task as I have always had something more urgent to do. In fact, recurring tasks related to blogs (which have more than doubled in a rather short time), downloads (monitoring and updating numbers), mailing lists (cleaning and updating current entries, and adding new ones) and budgets/events are eating an increasing percentage of my time, which is not really visible (like every back office task). While I would like to keep the task unchanged, as I like writing and developing contents, the idea to involve community members is a good one. I think we could create two marketing easy hacks, but we have to make it very clear that we want original contents from community members (as otherwise we would be assaulted by people looking for free publishing platforms). Of course, not considering the Linux Magazine option.