Marketing Team

The Sugar Labs Marketing Team exists to spread the good word about Sugar. Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computing and the Internet. It is the job of the Sugar Labs Marketing Team to promote the benefits of Sugar as widely as possible, and to recruit volunteers to help improve the Sugar experience.

Team Coordinator
(sdaly at sugarlabs.org) is Marketing Coordinator and welcomes ideas and comments but most of all communicators interested in helping out!

Mailing list
Please see our Marketing Team mailing list and its archive.

Projects
Deliverables and/or initiatives actively being worked on (with goals and deadlines).

MIT Sloan MarketLab Study
In late 2010, four students from the MIT Sloan MarketLab worked on a study of the Sugar Labs website. Their conclusions indicate the importance not only of revamping our website (launched two years ago when fewer visuals were available), but of addressing other aspects, in particular installation and support issues, as well as the technical orientation of our web presence.

The study wiki, with raw data, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/marketlabsugar

Of particular interest: the survey results from 85 respondents, here: [[Media:MarketLab_survey_results.pdf]]

A sample fundraising document by the MarketLab team is here: [[Media:Sugar_Fundraising_Text_Proposal.odt]]

The annotated final presentation is here: [[Media:MIT_MarketLab_Annotated_Presentation.odp]]

Sugar Labs website revamp
Our polished static website as a landing page for Sugar Labs is in the process of being redone (March-May 2011). Marketing Team/Website

Events
See Marketing Team/Events for a table of events we are targeting.

Press page
Our Press page is here: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=press

Translator assistance welcomed!

Sugar stories
How Sugar motivates us: a series of profiles on contributors. Marketing Team/Sugar stories

Press contacts list
We're working on a Marketing Team/Press contacts list with education-oriented publications. This list is maintained by the Marketing Coordinator.

PR phone line
+1 (617) 500-9610

Marketing Team/Phone is the new number that journalists can call for quotes, interviews, clarifications, etc. about Sugar. This is a VoIP number which at this time forwards either to the Marketing Coordinator, an Oversight Board member, or voicemail which is forwarded as a timestamped soundfile to pr AT sugarlabs DOT org, an account monitored through forwarding by the Marketing Coordinator and two others. Unfortunately, our previous provider has gone out of business and stopped service at the end of March 2011, so the old PR number no longer works.

Swag
To view, download, and contribute to swag designs (stickers, t-shirts, business cards, USB sticks, umbrellas, etc.) and coordinate purchasing swag from suppliers, see Marketing Team/Swag.

Discussions
Conversations that may one day turn into projects, or may have in the past been projects.

"Audited" Circulation
- Docdtv

While a small user community might discourage adoption of a tool, a large user community can help encourage adoption. And of course, small communities need always precede large ones! You know the old expression: "Eat Sugar! 10**9 flies can't be wrong!" 

How do you measure the size of a community? A great way to do that with automata connected to a global communication network is to have them "phone home" now and then. Now, I hope what I am suggesting does not break with any covenent, (implicit or explicit, moral or legal). But would it be so harmful if, say once a day, a Sugar installation would briefly tell Sugar Labs "Hey, I'm alive on a machine today!"

Some might agree to do this, but worry about a slippery slope. Would the future of this humble audit parallel the course of the United States decennial census, growing from a simple enumeration into a ruthless and arrogant demographic strip-search?

Of course, audits could be of great benefit to end-users, especially if they included Activity installation audits. For example, they could evolve into a mechanism for warning the user about a terrible bug that needs patching, or advertising a follow-on tool almost all users adopt upon learning about the new existence of same. (I just now learn that automatic software updates are a new feature of the latest (8.2.0) OLPC software release.) By "factoring" the audit mechanism into a system-wide facility, Activity developers would be spared the need to code such support on their own.

As a courtesy to Sugar users, cooperation in audits should be voluntary. But every user should be told why such an audit can help him and others.

Naturally, all this is limited by the fact that not every last machine on which Sugar will be run will be attached to the Internet.

Video channels
- Docdtv

1. Does a YouTube channel exist? If not, why not? There already is a channel at Dailymotion with 19 videos as we write: http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs/1 YouTube may not use an open source codec, but it is an incredibly popular search engine and affiliate-propagation tool, see:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/31/technology/internet/31tubeGrfx/articleInline.jpg

2. First video would be a 60-second TV-style ad explaining

... what Sugar is (leverage OLPC brand-awareness!)

... that it is free

... what you need to run it

... how you get a copy to install

3. Every time a pitch (q.v. below) is created, a YouTube video record of same is made. The YouTube version can add stills or short video clips to a talking head.

Pitches
Short, 1-page elevator pitches to sell Sugar to various audiences. Not formalized, but the homepage (www.sugarlabs.org) is the best starting point. Marketing Team/Pitches

Logo
See Marketing Team/Logo.

Name
Ongoing discussion. See Marketing Team/Name

Slogans
Several slogan options are available at Marketing Team/Slogan.