02 October, 2010

Call to Arms

Ladies and gentlemen,

Recently Amaru Zelaya Orellana and myself cooperated on an article about the great work our ambassadors are doing around the world. They deserve great respect for what they do. A great marketing effort.

Meanwhile, the openSUSE marketing team is doing more work - getting articles out on the technologies we have, developing materials for our ambassadors and of course promoting the conference. However, no matter how much they do - they need help.

The work the marketeers do needs to be spread. openSUSE has technology and people which make our competition look pale. But they often manage to get the word out much more. Is that because they have better marketing people? Maybe. But what they DO have is a huge community of users who do their small share. Yes, it matters if you digg, tweet and dent. If you blog and talk about openSUSE. It matters if you become a fan on Facebook or on other social sites.

openSUSE has hundreds of thousands of users. Tens of thousands are active in the openSUSE community - reading our newssite, talking on the forums and contributing in other ways. Still, most of our news items get just a few diggs, just a few tweets, mentions in blogs or on Facebook. That means our impact is limited. You all should take that as a personal insult. If openSUSE is to make an impact, we have to do more than create a great linux distribution or good infrastructure. We have to make it known. Not only in English - blog, tweet or talk about our community in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch, Chinese - or any other language! Our lack of communication is hurting our visibility and therefor our impact.



A bad example is our conference. While most of our community members know about the openSUSE conference, a lot of people outside of our community don't. Yet, the title of our conference is 'collaboration across borders'. So they SHOULD know about that. And we are less than three weeks away! Why have they not heard about our conference? Because WE have not told them. People! We have a stunning program! We have excellent speakers, and many active community members will attend. But if we want to collaborate, increase our impact and really make a difference - we need more people there from projects like GNOME, Apache and yes, Mandriva, Fedora and others.

So I ask all of you - please step up. Go here and blog, tweet, dent, dig, become a fan. If you don't have any social media account, think about writing something for omgSUSE. OMGUbuntu is playing a major role in spreading the word on Ubuntu. We have rtyler and some others rocking and getting the word out for openSUSE users on OMGsuse.com but they need help! If you have a favorite application, write about it! It doesn't have to be a book, just a bunch of notes and a cool screenshot helps a lot. It IS a significant contribution to to that, and really, it doesn't take much time!

5 minutes at most - that's all it takes to help openSUSE. Think about it!

6 comments:

  1. Good blog! Good point, I and many others need to get more involved and speak up. I plan to do so.

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  2. Sure, I'll be an open openSUSE fan ... but shouldn't the status be a little more up to date than "openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7 is out, give it a spin"?

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  3. @Kjetil, where you you bump into that? Cuz that sounds indeed a bit 'old' :D

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  4. Jos,

    Something to reflect: Do you need Ambassadors or Activists?

    Which ones would bring more value to openSUSE as a community?

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  5. Jos, I simply followed your link "become a fan on Facebook" (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2256834487). It's on the left side, below the logo. Not sure if it is the "status" or whatever, but it's quite visible...

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  6. @kjetil, yes, that openSUSE group has a 'slightly' outdated title...

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Say something smart and be polite please!