 My name is Mike Saunders. Some of you may know me. Or some of you may have seen how I was introduced this morning by Florian and the rest of the team. I work in marketing and public relations for the Document Foundation since February. My background is also in journalism, specifically Linux journalism. That's why I want to give this presentation today, talking to the press, relating on my experiences in both of my roles as a journalist and in marketing. Even if it's flashing on and off, you can hopefully see it. Change to a second machine and see if that helps. Actually, I can probably carry on with this. You can all see that anyway. Let's carry on with this. A bit of my background, I've been working as an IT journalist for almost 20 years now. When I started, it actually felt like a real job. You'd actually go around, go to people, interview them. People would send you things, you'd be on the phone all the time. Whereas being a computing journalist today is an internet job. You do almost everything online. You get sent stuff to you, but press releases. There's not the same kind of real involvement with people as they used to be back in the day. As a journalist, I've even had a bottle of whiskey sent to me from New Zealand that somebody had made themselves. I didn't want to try that, especially early in the morning. There's a couple of things I've worked for, Linux Format magazine. We crowdfunded Linux Voice in 2013. An entirely crowdfunded open source magazine would give our content back and give money back to the community. That's sort of my background. Started back in the 90s, Red Hat 5.1, if anybody remembers that from a magazine cover disc. Had to recompile my own kernel just to get sound working. Those were fun days, but I discovered this community, the free and open source software community, GNU, Linux. All the sharing, collaboration, the importance of freedom. I started using Star Office with, I think, 5.2. It had the desktop inside the desktop, if anybody remembers that. It was an interesting interface. Then we had OpenOffice.org. Here's a couple of nostalgic moments for anybody who remembers the Linux box sets back then. It was like Christmas getting one of these. In the time of dial-up internet access, downloading stuff took ages. When you got a huge box through your door full of manuals and full of discs packed with packages, it was brilliant. Anyway, as a journalist, I was always getting messages from marketing people, public relations people, trying to get me to cover their products. Most of these were completely irrelevant messages. They were for software, for Windows, or Mac OS, or hardware that doesn't work with Linux. I'd often respond sarcastically to these messages like, oh, that sounds great. Let me know when you've got a kernel driver for Linux. They didn't understand at all. Also, so many of the press releases that I was sent as a journalist, and still are, are either really, really boring, just the same coffee and paste nonsense. Or they're so full of buzzwords, so full of hyperactivity. You can't take them seriously. Somebody's announcing a mundane product or piece of software, and they're like, it's world-changing. It's going to revolutionise your life. Oh, this is working now. Press releases are usually really boring, full of buzzwords, not relevant at all. So, yeah. In February this year, I moved from being a journalist. I still am to some extent, but I moved from being the journalist side to be the person supplying journalists with information. So I started working in the marketing department with Italo. So some of you may have seen the new features videos I made of LibreOffice and other stuff. But relevant to this discussion here is pitching journalists, contacting journalists. So, for the LibreOffice 5.2 release, Italo and I contacted 15 journalists individually. We plucked them out, said we're going to focus on these. These are people who've covered LibreOffice before. They're aware of us. How can we encourage them to write something good about LibreOffice 5.2? We didn't just send them a press release on the day of the announcement. We thought, let's focus on these people. So, why are we doing this? What's the goal? Again, you could just send a press release to a journalist and say, well, here's LibreOffice 5.2. Good luck. But when you target them, it's really, really important. Obviously, we need to raise awareness of LibreOffice. Many journalists out there, even tech journalists, have no idea we exist, especially some of them in the Windows world. They just assume that we don't exist always some sort of obscure fork or we're only available on Linux. There is this giant awareness gap. I'm sure we can all agree with that. It's better in the Linux world, like I say. But if we get positive stories about LibreOffice, if we get them in the mainstream press, or at least the mainstream tech press, then that is huge for us. They won't always be 100% positive. They may talk about a bug they've discovered in a new release or another problem they've had. But we're out there. It legitimises us. It says we're a real project and a real product worth talking about. Do I have to do both now? Oh. OK. So let's say you've seen a journalist on the internet, a tech journalist or somebody related to our field, and you think it would be great if they talked about LibreOffice. This is especially useful outside of the English-speaking market because Italo and I have a lot of contacts with people, English-speaking journalists, but all over the world there are so many communities that we just can't cover because we don't know the languages. But it's always important to plan ahead before you go and contact a journalist. It's very easy to think, oh, I'll just send them a message saying, hey, LibreOffice, have you heard of it? It's cool or we've got a new release. That's all right, but if you plan ahead, you can get much, much better results. So here's four super-crucial mega-turbo championship rules that I've come up with, anything. And the first thing to do is to read up on their previous work. So you think, oh, this journalist could write a good story about LibreOffice for a magazine, for a blog. Look at everything else they've done first. Look at their audience and their tone. Are they focused on business people? Are they focused on consumers? Because obviously you want to talk to them if they're business-focused, and you want to tell them about LibreOffice 5.2, you talk about the document classification features and stuff like that. If they're more end-user focused, you talk about the new features, the transitions, animations, changes to the interface, and so forth. Yes, and then look, have they actually written about LibreOffice before? This is also really important because you can then determine how positive or negative they've been, if they've changed their opinion, if they've written something wrong, which can happen. I've made that mistake as a journalist myself. You're only human. Do they ever talk about Linux or free software? Do they tend to be positive or negative journalists? Some journalists tend to like really biting articles. They like to hammer someone down and really get people worked up. Some are really, really positive. They're more in line with the free software spirit, and they encourage people. Lots of journalists, especially now, say it's not a real job as it used to be with a hat on and a notebook, lots of them now work for multiple websites. They're freelancers. You'll see their work on website ABC from completely different companies. You've decided to speak to a journalist and let them know about LibreOffice. There are some good practises here. Introduce yourself first. Just say who you are. Hey, you. Here's LibreOffice. Get a little bit of background. Say you're involved with what you do. Importantly, don't write more than 200 words or thereabouts, because journalists are lazy. Very lazy. They don't have a lot of time because they're busy on Facebook and stuff. If you can summarise it in 200 words, then they can easily get an overview of what you want to say. Really, it should be that quick. If you're contacting a journalist, you don't want to reel off all the lists that are featured in a new LibreOffice release. You want to say, this is cool. Check it out. Give them a real story to talk about as well. If you just say, LibreOffice 5.3 has been released, check it out. So what? If you can talk about a benefit to people, if you can say why it's worth looking into. Do their work for them. If the journalist can take your message to them and say, I can turn that into a story with a few changes and copy and paste, then they have an instant story. They don't have to spend a lot of time dealing with it. So try and do their work for them. It's always a good idea. Then think about the language you want to use as well. A lot of us are geeks. We know a lot of the jargon, especially in the community and the technology. Even if the journalist knows that, then the journalist making a story then has to translate it all maybe for their target audience. Again, that's a waste of their time. They just delete it and go back to playing Pokemon Go or whatever. So talk about the benefits. Always have a benefit. Always have a reason to contact them. Just saying X has happened, they're never, never interested. Then the slightly controversial topic, that's why I've put it in red here, is avoiding hype and buzzwords. I say here, do people want to be amazed by an office suite? We tend to use a lot of these words. This was amazing or that was amazing. But is that really what we're striving for? Some moments in life are amazing or maybe a film or a moment in a video game. But in an office suite, people want to get their work done. Maybe they want to be impressed. Maybe they want to feel really good but amazed. Is that the right sort of word for this? I'm sceptical of using them. So many press releases are full of, everything is amazing. But when everything is amazing, nothing can be normal. So here's a list of words that I recommend avoiding. There was nice arrows here and happy sad faces but they've gone. Anyway, amazing. I think it's overused word. It's a buzzword. It doesn't really... Impressive is good. If we can impress people, that's great. Incredible. It's incredible. Also used by marketing people all the time. Remarkable is good. Revolutionary. Everything's revolutionary. But this goes back to what I was saying before. Do we want to tell people that everything's revolutionary? The user who's happy with their office suite, maybe with a previous Libre office. If we tell them it's revolutionary, they think I've got to change everything. Here's another revolution, here's another interface paradigm shift and all that nonsense. So unless something is a true revolution, I've never been done before, then it's not a good word to use. It can actually scare people off a lot of the time, especially when we're talking about serious productivity software. So market leading is a nicer term. And powerful, that's one of my pet peeves. My editors at magazines always complain that I use powerful. I can see why because it doesn't really describe anything. What is powerful? If a computer is powerful, is it fast? Has it got a lot of memory? Has it got a million USB-8 ports? So feature-rich is a bit of a better term for that. And this is just my opinion anyway. I could be wrong, but I think the more that you avoid the buzzwords, the better. It makes us look good and it helps to get the message across. So you've contacted a journalist, you've given them a message, a short message saying, LibreOffice 5.x releases out, or some of the event has happened and you hear nothing. And that is often the case. You can send messages to hundreds of journalists and maybe only hear back from a few. It's worth following up maybe once, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe twice, but preferably once, just after a few days, saying, hi there, I messaged you a few days ago about LibreOffice, just checking if you've had time to look into it, and then they, all being well, they'll go back through their mailbox and look at it, or maybe not. But it could be that they just simply ignore it or it goes into their spam folder and there's not much you can do about that. And then, yeah, keep looking on their website, see if they actually follow up, see if they cover your story, a new LibreOffice release. They may put it as part of another story, it may just be a footnote. They may do a whole complete story, but it's worth then email them saying, yeah, thanks for that. And saying if you've got any questions, talk to us, talk to the community. And if they make a mistake, it's easy to get on social media and rant and say, why didn't you do your research properly? But that's always, always counterproductive anyway. So what now? It's only 15 minutes in, but the point of this is, like I mentioned before, outside of the English-speaking market, this is really where we can spread word about LibreOffice. Italo and I have experienced of talking to journalists who do English publications. We're always happy to get help, of course. It's always welcome. But, you know, in Taiwan, in France, in Germany, in many other markets, all the different languages here, it would be so good to have people helping out in the marketing team to talk to journalists and help get this message across. So if you come across a journalist browsing the web, you see an article and you think, ah, they could write a good article about LibreOffice, or they may not be aware of LibreOffice, or they haven't talked about it for absolutely ages when you do some research, then talk to us. If you have experienced talking to journalists, then by all means contact them. But if you're unsure, talk to us, join our marketing mailing list, and then, you know, we can work together on ideas, build something up. And, yeah, above all, good luck. So that was more of a lightning talk than anything. I'm afraid so only 70 minutes in, but if anybody's got any questions or thoughts...