Roblimo‘s recent piece, Getting good PR for your open source project sparked the recent IRC discussion today, where he came up with some tips for the FLOSS world to heed.
- Promote what you have – better hardware recognition, new menus, anything different from the rest – tell the journalists, they’d like to know. Remember, journalists are always looking for story leads, so write in and tell them – the worse that can happen is the story isn’t written.
- Sending letters to companies to switch to FLOSS isn’t wise; better show them via demonstrations and get LUGs to act. However, showing them financial benefit via letters, or offering cheap training might help – the word “FREE” has been over-used.
- Press releases and announcements might be run verbatim – don’t be alarmed.
- “Comparisons are good when you’re the underdog, but are usually not smart when you dominate a market”. Also make sure comparisons are honest, and keep in mind if the product is bad, big advertising will kill your product fairly fast. “PR is simply telling the world your product exists.”
- Assumption that folks understand open source or what your project is about isn’t useful. In fact, talking about the software rather than the fact that its open source might be better.
- Make your main point in the first couple of sentences, because thats when you catch the editor/journalist.
Daniel has a color coded log file. A lot of reference that roblimo made, was to The Care and Feeding of the Press, so read that if you want to be a PR afficiando. I don’t think I missed out on any particularly useful points from the discussion, but if I did, drop me a comment, thanks.