Hi Robert, Firstly, sorry for the delay in replying to this.
On 29/06/06, Robert McWilliam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm a bit worried about coming up with this type of objectives. The first reason is that it sounds like 'corporate speak'. Marketing is already misunderstood by the wider community, and us sounding like managers will only reinforce that.
I agree that we need to think about how we present ourselves to the wider Ubuntu community but we shouldn't allow misunderstanding to get in the way of making ourselves more effective. I believe that objectives, such as these, can help us organise ourselves more effectively. I'm, as with most things, happy to be persuaded otherwise, provided there's a good argument. However, saying that something sounds like "corporate speak" isn't a good argument :) Imagine if, for example, the installer team avoided object oriented programming because the rest of the community didn't get it. Okay, not a fantastic example, but I think it shows that it's important to use the best tools available for the job and to consider explaining that to the rest of the community as a secondary task, not as a reason for dismissing the tool.
The second (and more important) point is that I'm not convinced this type of objective setting technique is actually useful for a team such as this.
I think this is where we have plenty of room for debate.
SMART objectives need to be challenging but achievable if they are going to have any value and that is very hard to do when we don't really know the capabilities of the team, or how much time they can commit.
Agreed. While we find our feet, it could be difficult to set SMART objectives. I think that the skills, commitment-level and time resources that people can offer will become clear reasonably quickly.
We do need to look to how marketing is done in business to see what is effective in terms of the actual marketing but I think trying to transplant the organisational techniques used there is dangerous because we have a very different organisational setup.
We do have a different organisational setup to, say, British Airways, but this isn't amount telling people what to do, it's about measuring the effectiveness of what we do. People in the team are free to do whatever they choose but, I imagine, people will gather around a few projects and the majority will be keen to see their efforts have the most impact possible. So, if those projects within the team have an idea of where they're going, why their chosen tactics make sense and a good way to measure their success, I reckon we'll help motivate people and help ourselves to do the things that help Ubuntu most, rather than get sidetracked by our best guess at what will work. The Gnome guys are fairly methodical with their marketing, as are the OOo chaps. Now, admittedly they are more established than us, so they have a better idea of what resources they have in the team, but they manage to combine openness etc with a serious discussion of how proven marketing techniques can work for their projects.
I would say the best plan is to agree on what we want to achieve and how best to go about it, and then work on doing it rather than spending time worrying about how the objectives are expressed, and measured.
But deciding what we want to achieve and how to go about it is pretty much all there is to setting objectives. Allowing yourself to measure the level of success just means that you have a chance to learn from what works and what doesn't. Another discussion is around how we decide what we do. The more I discuss it with the guys on #ubuntu-marketing, the more I think that SpreadUbuntu is a good idea. However, that's based on my gut instinct, not on any evidence. Research could be difficult for us, but it would be good to get some idea of who we want to choose as target markets, how that fits in with Canonical's plans, and what marketing support those targets need to help them choose then use Ubuntu. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not a marketing expert but I do believe that we can be more effective if we use the proven techniques that marketing offers us. Of course, we should debate which ones are most appropriate to us at that time but we should avoid thinking of ourselves merely as a team that talks to people. We first need to listen and then decide how, who, what and when based on thing things that people have told us about themselves. -- Matthew Revell www.understated.co.uk -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
