[Epo-marketing] marketing

[Gabor Szabo]

Hi Tom,

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 1:29 AM, Tom Metro
<tmetro+enlightenedperl-marketing at tommetro.com> wrote:
> I've been on the EPO announce list for a while, but only joined the
> marketing list shortly after the recent discussion broke out on the announce
> list, first over the place mats and then over Padre. (Seems like more of a
> discussion list tan an announce list.)
>
> Recently the Boston.pm organizer took note of what was done for CeBit and
> wondered if Boston.pm should do something similar for the local LinuxCon.

That would be awesome.
I'd recommend to look at the events page here
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?events
and join the mailing list where we are trying to coordinate the organization.

For every event someone plans to participate we create another page where
we collect the information regarding that specific event.

See for example the CeBIT page:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?events_2010_cebit


> I read one of the reviews of the Perl booth at CeBit and it sounds like it
> worked out well for them, but I'm not entirely sure what the message should
> be about Perl these days. There's certainly enthusiasm for promoting Perl,
> but it isn't clear that we can articulate compelling reasons for using Perl.
>
> The CeBit approach seemed to be to answer whatever random questions that
> came up, and to show off demos of a few projects.

I think the biggest impact for now is just being there and talking to
people. In the
perl community we are very proud of the various perl events but on both FOSDEM
and CeBIT we talked to more people than the number of attendees on any
of the Perl
Workshop. Maybe even more than the number of people on YAPCs.
Compare: Perl workshops have 30-130 ppl, YAPCs have 300-400 ppl.
FOSDEM in Brussels had 5,000. The upcoming LinuxTag in Berlin has 10,000.


While many of you might think that we need some really compelling technical
reasons and proof for the advantages of Perl but IMHO the biggest impact on
people were the tuits, the community business cards ("we suck at marketing"),
the beer mats and the list of places "where they can drink beer with
Perl developers"
(aka. list of Perl events).
People were impressed by code examples but making them laugh and showing them
the way to the Perl community might be even more important.
Remember, you have only a few minutes to "impress" the person.

The plan so far was to try to promote applications written in Perl.
That did not work
out too well as so far we could hardly convince any of the people in
the Perl based
projects (e.g. Bugzilla, Bricolage, WebGUI, etc) to participate. On
CeBIT we had
some presence of Foswiki and OTRS but even that was very light weight.


In the future I think we need
1) increase the presence of Perl based applications and showing them to people
     interested in the specific subject
2) have short 10-15 slide presentations of the various things we would
    like to present (both applications as in 1 but also things like
Moose, Catalyst,
    DBIx::Class,  CPAN etc.)
3) Make sure we have Applications on our presentation computer that look good
    without much thinking. E.g. a nice looking web based application such as a
    CMS or a wiki, a desktop application. e.g. Padre, some games
(newer than Frozen Bubble)
   and it would be awesome if we could present things on mobile devices.


Regarding a research. I think, instead of a formal research it is way
more important
to go out and talk to the people. Give talks about Perl and Perl based projects,
setup a booth, listen to the visitors, ask them what do they know about Perl,
answer their questions and invite them to the Perl community.

Gabor