 Welcome here at Qticon Academy to my talk about PR for open source projects. Feel free to interrupt me, feel free to correct me, feel free to tell me that I'm telling stupid things. This is just a collection of stuff I learned in some almost 20 years in Linux and open source stuff. I've given this talk several times and it's growing. So I'm happy for your input. So feel free to interrupt me. My name is Markus Fallner. I'm team lead at SUSE, team lead for documentation at SUSE. And before that I have been, I had been working for about eight years as open source journalist, as journalist at Linux magazine, Germany. Always biased, always pro open source. And so I think I learned, is this, oh, okay, it's a stubble. So I think I can, yeah, I learned some lessons and I, that I'd like to share and that many open source projects need. And so here we go. I am, as I said, I was a journalist before but now I'm a sort of a lizard, a green one. And I am, some words about me, I sort of have this strange hobby that I'm collecting some things like I'm a priest, collecting titles, maybe I'm a priest for the universal life church. So if you need me for marriages or divorces or whatever, just feel free to talk to me. I'm a diplomat for the Concrepublic, which is a not recognized or not accepted island republic in the Florida Keys. I own some property on the moon and I'm a Jedi knight. And yes, I've been writing lots and lots of pages and stuff for this magazine here, which is the oldest print magazine about Linux on this planet. And then last year in March, I switched the side and I went to SUSE in Nürnberg, Linux distributor. And when I came there, I came to the museum and what I saw in the museum was exactly that kind of Linux that was my first Linux that I had installed. This one was not, I had even one version before that because that is the CD-ROM version of SUSE. I had a friend who came and brought me some 50 or 40 floppy disks and then we had a funny night and the next day I did not know what to do. But now I'm working at SUSE and what I'm, I'm in charge of the team that writes the documentation. My team maintains about 11,000 pages of documentation. And well, that's including all documentation that has been written for older versions of our software. But it's quite a lot. So team is about 10 to 13 people. Well, it's, yeah, soon it will be 13 people. And all that, everything that we write is GNU-free documentation license. So let's now go into this workshop. I've done this workshop for the first time at Academy in Tampere, which I just learned is five, six, seven or eight years ago. It was in 2009 or something like that we think. So 2010, wow. And we did this for a whole day with active contribution from the people. So if you have questions, if you have a project or a question about your project, really interrupt me, ask me. I sort of condensed it for this half hour, 45 minutes, one hour. We will see how long we take for this presentation. We'll have, this is, I call this a mini workshop. And what I'll tell you about is about basic benefits of project promotion, which is rather obvious, but it's quite good to hear about it again because it may be arguments. When you argue with people who say now PR is ugly, we don't like PR and whatever, then you may need some arguments to convince them. And I will tell you about project descriptions. Oh, avoiding typos, obviously not. And what things like elevator pitches are, and I'll give you some suggestions for the website, for videos, for how to dealing with the ugly press, and about direct outreach, tabling at conferences, and how to write announcements, articles, blogs, and dealing with social media and those fucking emotions. Did I really say that? No, I didn't say it loud. Promotion for promoting your project is, I mean, this is telling the obvious, I think. It should bring more users, which again should bring more ideas, new features, new ideas, or also tell you about bugs in your software, in your project. You will hopefully get more developers, which I learned is an issue for KDE, for example. But with more users, you also gain more translators, designers, artists, packages, advocates, everything. I told you, this is basic. So it's about growing your community. And it's also about getting in touch with other communities and finding new intersections maybe with other projects. For that, for stuff like that, one of the most important things that you need for a project, let's think for a new project, is a project description. What does it do? What is it? And that, for use in multiple contexts, something like one or two sentences. It should focus on what the user sees. It should focus on user experience. Don't go down too much in details. It's just about one or two sentences. And it should help someone unfamiliar with the project to get a sense what it is and what it does. Very basic again. And it should be written with the fact in mind that this is something that could appear everywhere in your project, in communications, on the website. For example, someone still knows Gblur. So that's a project description that pretty obviously doesn't work. Or do you think, what do you think? If I take half of the first sentence, that's pretty quite cheap. Gblur is a Python script that blurs images. Now that fact at least says what it does and what you can see as a user. But if you don't know shit about image publishing or picture rendering or whatever, then a user won't know what it does, I think. For the end user, Python is not relevant, I guess. That's a good point, I think. That might be interesting for the developer. But I think it's just too complicated. If you don't know anything about the image processing, I think the second example is better. It's a Python script, okay. That's good for the developers. It applies a blurring technique to raw photos. Gaussian blur, that's so far in. I think it's not really that important. But therefore it's in the second sentence. And we eliminated the IR algorithm. Just as an example. Try to be easy and simple. What you also need, there's three kinds of these short descriptions for your project. That the project description is what will appear everywhere on websites. Then you have an elevator pitch and kitchen calls. These are terms. Elevator pitch is from marketing and kitchen call is from journalism. The elevator pitch is something that imagine you are in an elevator with the super rich CEO and you want him to spend money into your project. That's the classical marketing scene. You have 30 seconds and you have to explain the whole of your project and convince him why he should open his pocket and pour the millions on you. That's a very short sentence on. We are doing that and that and that. That is really cool and that's why we will be totally successful. Whereas a kitchen call is something the journalists will know. It's something that really is one sentence that describes the whole article. In journalism for example. The elevator pitch has the intention to convince somebody of doing something. Whereas the kitchen call is just the ultramost densest summary. KDE desktop environment with lots of applications. Can I say it shorter? Is everything in? Just think of the shortest possible way. There are three different things. The project description is longer. Two sentences is universal. The elevator pitch is to convince somebody to do something and the kitchen call will be just as reduced to the max as possible. Reduced to the max. And tell the story. Yeah. What's peculiar about your project? In one sentence. I put KDE on frame BSE. Uh-huh. That's a kitchen call. Now it convinced me why should I do that? In two sentences. That's the elevator pitch. The project description would now take this kitchen call and make two paragraphs or something like that out of that. For the initiated. Maybe you would want to explain what BSD is in three words. I think these three things, the shorter some element gets when working with words, the more difficult it is. The worst form of wordings in journalism is headings and captions for images. Because you have a limited amount of space. And that's where... This is interesting, I saw it. So you need this stuff for your website which has general information about your project but it should be written for a newbie. My opinion. News on your website will always be good. Make sure that it's individually linkable. So that each news item, I think WordPress does, for example, does all modern CMS do that automatically. That you can link it and that people can link and send it or post it and share it. But one very important thing that many open source projects fail to do is provide a press page for the media and define at least a single person responsible for press contacts. We have community managers and other stuff. But just one person or even better is a group, a press team. If your project is big enough, you can do 24.07 just by time zone things. If you have five, six people in a group, whatever. That's just because most journalists can't wait. They have so much work and very little time for it. So when they realize they need some information about your project, then they might need it in the next two hours or something like that. I've done this job so that's my experience. A press team will be the number one address for your journalists. Contacting your project. It will identify, it will actively, so it's the number one contact in incoming stuff, but it also will be, it should be actively communicating. Identifying important media, making lists, constantly blogging, posting and sharing and preparing contact for the press, content for the press. I will tell you what a press kit is and it will keep, the press team is in charge of keeping the press kit up to date on the website and it will run something like the press at your project org mailing list. When you're talking to the press, when they are talking to the press, there's some little caveats. The Americans will have heard of the vice president under Lyndon B. Johnson in the 60s, Hubert Humphrey. He said, it's always a risk to speak to the press. They might publish what you say. And it's important when you talk to the press, give them hard news, hard facts. That's again marketing and PR stuff. It's about hard news, it's about facts. Journalists want concentrated facts, no big babbling around. So when I met people like politicians or whatever, there's people where you don't start talking to them anymore because it will take half an hour at least to get one answer. Hard facts is appreciated by journalists. What they appreciate is thought leadership if you have people who have a vision and who are sort of way ahead and can articulate that. And then the next very important thing is relationship building. So talk to the people, meet them, invite them, build up a personal relationship. Then you will be able to get a mutual trust situation. Then you can minimize this risk about having them told something that the other guy in your project doesn't want the press to know yet. So that's another just side aspect. Journalists, you will have to do with mischievous or with suspicious journalists. They think that you won't tell them the truth. Especially when things go wrong. There is the saying or Ingham's razor or Henland's razor, they call this. Never attribute to malice which is adequately explained by stupidity. So the journalists will come up to you and tell you there's something significantly going wrong here. And you have to tell them, no, no, no, we are just a stupid bunch and this is, ah, yeah. Things like that, quotes like that and help in such situations to convince them. And that's also when you have this personal relationship with those guys you can be open and frank to them and take them aside and say, okay, listen, this is not for the public, but this is not what happened. And they will believe you if once you have this personal relationship. For this personal relationship, the press team should, I said that before, collect sort of a press distribution list. A list with press people on it that are interested in your project or media contacts that are interested in this project. That can be, it's a simple list, no big tools required. You can have an etherpad, a wiki or on a mailing list or whatever. But start making a list of people that are tech journalists or related or other multipliers that other people that you know, they talk to journalists. Then ask them if they are fine with you sending them news of new versions and stuff and keep the signal to noise ratio low. That's very important. Journalists, you tend to get tens or hundreds of newsletters a day. So if you send them too many, they will not focus on them, they are more likely to not read them. If you send them less but more relevant information, the chances are higher that they read it. But you have to find that out. Journalists are different there. And how to find that out is easy if you talk to other open source projects. As a journalist, I have talked to whatever project they told me, what they do, that's really cool, have a look at that. And that's a synergy that the open source world has among the projects. And then you can ask, you know who to address. I can ask Adrian and ask him, hey, I want to publish something in Holland, in Netherlands or whatever, in England, do you have a contact there? Who am I to address there? And he may know somebody. Basic. And invite us. I'm not, I'm only, I'm at Susie now, but invite us. Invite the journalists to events, to discussions, whatever. I was at Academy as a journalist. I came to some KDE sprints. I was interested in KDE PIM development. I went to KDE PIM sprints where only 20 or 30 people were there of KDE. Only developers, I was the only journalist. And they were like, that's the first time a journalist is here. But they told me about it and I think then it was Bernhard Reiter, it's long ago who said, that's something happening. We are doing some amazing stuff. You should come and have a look at that. And I wrote an article on it. It's really cool. Let's contact them. In interviews, there is, again, it's important to focus on differences of what is different, what has changed, what is, what are we doing new, what is new, improved, other, different. Mind also the difference between the journalist's approach and your approach. So they may not be that deep into the matter. They want to focus on relevance. So there may be stuff that you think is very, very important, but which a journalist either just doesn't get or doesn't think it's that important. They have a different aspect of it. And you want to, these four items, difference, relevance, credibility and vision, you want these four things as an impression in the press. You want to, after the interview, you want to have told them that your project is different, is new or different, that it's important, that what you're doing is a good thing, is sustainable and that you have a vision that goes beyond the current state. That's why I have these four points here, difference, relevance, credibility and vision. So what does your company do? What is it different? What's the most important? Then you need communication skills or just find somebody with communication skills to convince and to be credible. And these guys, they have active mirror neurons. Have you heard of that concept in the head? Okay. When you're talking to somebody, when you're looking at somebody, when you're looking at pictures in your brain, in our brain, there's some part in our brain who, like in a cinema or in a movie, mirrors what's happening in the other guy that you're talking to. So if you're watching photos of some people laughing, a little part of your brain will be laughing. If you're watching photos of somebody who is crying, a little part of your brain is crying, that's something that's automatically, you cannot prevent that. But there is people who are more skilled with this and can actively use this and that is a large part of empathy. Understanding what's happening in somebody else. I look at you and I may have an understanding what's right now happening in you, something like, what the fuck is he talking about me now? Whatever. But that's important for interview situations that you also see basically again. Just see that the journalist is in some completely different spheres now and has some completely different interest or is not interested in what you're saying anymore. You have to focus on the facts, on the central things and not talk about some holiday that you did years ago. And you have to listen and build bridges between your topics and their topics. For Venn diagrams, I'll have one later. It's just a nice tool that you can use within a discussion to find out, is this still my topic? Are we talking about what I have to say or are we talking what this guy has to say? I'll have a diagram for that. And then there is the thing with the first impression. I have the first impression that you give to somebody is very important but nevertheless it's not the only impression that you leave with somebody. Especially in times of multimedia with photos or video recordings or whatever. I try to play with first impressions and giving people a wrong first impression of me because it's fun to see what happens afterwards. It's just some hacking thing maybe, whatever that I like to do. But it's important when you're talking to interview suppressed people then it's important to try to give a good first impression and remember what you said. I already said that. Connect with journalists also on social media. The journalist will get at the interview situation, he will get a press kit. The press kit should also be available on the website. You can print it or make a folder with some stuff. If you have the resources to do that that's fine then you have something to give to the journalist and they'll appreciate that. It should be on the website downloadable and the press team should be in charge of it and take care of it. What should it contain? It should contain of course the project description. What is it? And a guided tour through the best and newest features. For somebody who has no clue about anything about your project. Therefore if it's a graphical program then you should add screenshots. Take care of the license. This is very important. It has to be some kind of free license, not commercial so that the journalists can use those screenshots in publications. Otherwise they will have to set it up their own and do their own screenshots and that's easier. Yeah. So NC is dead. Non-commercial is dead in my opinion. So at Linux Magazine we could not use Wikipedia photos. Wikimedia photos. Wikimedia, which is Wikimedia, Wikifotos. Sorry, photos from Wikipedia. Because they used to be non-commercial license and then I think it took them five years to remove all NC content and now there is only CC content because there's also court rulings about NC. NC is not specified. At least I think in Europe it's not specified which is commercial use. When you run a blog and you earn 20 Euro per year with ads on that blog. Is that commercial use or not? It's too difficult. What's happening here? I'm having a pop-up. Thanks that you didn't see it. Yeah, no non-commercial. That's just CC. That's okay. I mean you're not earning money with the screenshots. So they're not real assets. And again the press contact, phone mail, instant messaging, Facebook, Google plus whatever. When the press needs something they will need it fast. And that's exposure. This person, this team is exposed. That's their job. At your website, I just see. Helpful items at your website for journalists is the news archive so that when I go there I can just grab through, okay what was the last thing that happened and since when is this feature. Then in my news I can write and since 2007 they introduced that blah blah blah and so. I'm already in the middle of the project's history that should be there. A list of distributions, packaging your software. So how to get. A list of major dependencies. Like we had with the G blur thing, that's a Python script was already in the description so I can think okay I may have to install Python if I don't have it if I want to use it. And also events you plan to attend and how and where journalists can meet and contact you. There may be links to related projects. You may get return links from them. And of course if you have any documentation, install guide, quick install, and information about what help is needed. Again you have to expose yourself if you want to do PR and if you want to do the press about your project. Ideally you have a team of people who are ready to say okay yes I stand for this project, I'm running this project. You can show like KDE does pretty well with the academy and the academy photos of all the participants. So show the major contributors, leaders and advocates that drive the project. If you want put some biographies, photos or links to their blogs and social media links there. I know this is a controversial topic but it's for PR it's necessary. Let them talk about why and how they started the project. Everybody loves to hear and read such stories. I think few people like to write it but everybody loves to read it so why does he do that stuff? Press rooms. On the website if your project is bigger you may want a press room. A room not only a press site, a press room for the... That's a special realm of sites of links for the press with press kit and all that stuff inside. So if it's bigger, if you have more to tell and a longer history that's what big companies do. Very important don't require registration. Just make it open for everybody because registration is again a hassle for the journalist oh I've got a password yeah somewhere whatever. It's just a hurdle to get in there. If you have a press room with lots of information provide a quick search through the material you have there. Link to your FAQs and documentation and stuff that you have and have a look at how big companies do that. Do I have Wi-Fi here? So for example... See if I have Wi-Fi, I didn't check otherwise. Now there's data coming. Yeah that's what I'm using I thought. It's interesting where do I get redirected. Vodafone 3 Wi-Fi nice. Who's that? That doesn't... Okay now I'm on the QT. Let's see again. So you see Microsoft has a huge... That's all newsroom and press stuff here from Microsoft. The highlights and that's all stuff that Microsoft writes for the press they have press tools, they have press contacts, press release and lots and lots of stuff. And Google... I had all of this open in the browser but I had to reboot. Yes. Yeah this is Google. Google has a little bit less intrusive or a little... simpler design. Taking my mouse it will be easier for its website but you can see the same information there. Access to the news and contacts. Follow us on Google+. You have the Twitter resources, there's everything that you need. Microsoft obviously focuses more on getting... on the visual, on the images and Google is more focused on the information. Now when you look at how SUSE and Red Hat do that let's have SUSE and this will be faster now because now I have the... Does that mean if you're on Google and as a journalist you see this like no visuals so I will have to still create visuals to make the story out? I didn't understand that. What do you mean? If you as a journalist would end up on Google would you have the feeling like I would still have to figure out the visuals myself if I want to make the story out of this? I would prefer the Google version definitely because I'm faster to where I want to go. I have the press at Google.com email address right there. I feel... I think the Microsoft side is a little bit bloated for my taste with visuals and stuff but that's what they want. They want to tell their story whereas I would say Google is an example for more content focused. The main information is this is the official Google blog with the news that they had that I think here is the media context. That's basically what I as a journalist would want when I go there, I think. So this is SUSE and I think we are doing quite fine there as well at least when I'm asking Sebastian if I ask you, when you're a journalist you go to a website of a company would you... I was just asked because this is the Microsoft newsroom lots of images and I would rather prefer the style that Google has with only information and the quick way to press people and stuff. Microsoft side is totally... can't work with that. So what's the latest news? The latest news? It's interesting because as a small team if you have to also create all these images it's... A lot of work. So if you see just the bullets and the contents if that's enough then it's great. Yeah. That's signal to noise ratio again. See Google, they don't have news in their blog every day here. I mean they are huge but they have August 15th, August 24th, August 25th Wednesday 31th and there may be other stuff on blogs and social media but that's linked and that's pretty focused I would say. And I also think that Sousa is doing that pretty much the same even less. I think that's about 2 news per month in the newsroom. You have the search engine here the main thing and every news is individually linkable. I want to see... I can see that. Did I spell it right? Open Sousa. It's low. In the meantime... Redhead Press. So this is the Open Sousa site which is in my opinion also it's optimized for tablets. It's cool but it's also difficult to find stuff here I think. Here's where you find stuff and news. I don't think this is the best one. Where's Google coming? It's looking for Redhead here. They have also got their own newsroom and while this is loading I'm taking the... as an example from here. KDE. So this is Redhead's press room this is sort of a mixture I would say. It's pretty much visual but here is the news also pretty clear they have a search engine here you can filter you have options on how to present it but it's... also text focus, information focus you find stuff there. KDE Press page offers the story information on KDE so that's the basics but there's for example no link to news or am I wrong? Did they add one? Last time I looked there was no... Where is it? I don't see it. Am I wrong? Just KDE. So not from this press page but if you go to the home page of KDE then you'll have a link to news. Got it? So let's compare that to gnome.org slash press which doesn't load is it blocked? Spelled it correctly? I think so. I think it's just the Wi-Fi being slow. Should I... Does this work? Does this work? Anybody knows if the LAN works? Oh there it is. See gnome, press page spot the difference, the news in the front. Then they have technologies about us but that's also... that's the press page but this doesn't have any of the other story, history And it's all six months old. That is all here about us, technologies and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing. It's constant work. So... Does it work? Yes. So we had the press rooms as examples I don't have redhead in here. No. The summary is make it easy. Think of journalists as someone completely new to your software. We don't know shit. They want to get the most information possible in a very short time. They want to contact you. Give them the chance to succeed. They need material for their article. Give them a press kit with screenshots and stuff. Make it easy for your users too. Give new users an easy way to start. Give new users an easy way to get involved. Give all users links to the information they need. And make it clear what your license is. Explain where and how decisions are made. And that's all stuff that you need to need to tell the story about your project. Because the journalists will want to know nothing about your project but they will right force people who equally don't know anything about your project. But they might be interested in contributing and learning more. So your press kit slash website, press work should be enabling new people. One thing that gets mentioned easily is videos. If you can. Everybody has a smartphone and the camera that does video. When I first held this speech there was something new where people would set up studios and stuff like that. I had to remove some of the funny videos because either today they are not funny anymore at different times or they are not available anymore. But viral video charts show trends and good ideas. It's like viralvideos.com viralviralvideos.com where you can go and see or meme websites and whatever. I learned how to make a clip and ask colleagues and friends for contribution and devastating criticism. At the beginning it's hard but it's fun. It can be really fun to do some stuff like that. That's what I said that time then. Video audio quality matters. They matter. Use audio if you can. The document system management system DMS agorum they made some of the example videos I had in here. They were ridiculous because if you know the people like Horst Breuner from the city of Schwäbisch Hall here in Germany in their office and they did funny videos for that time that was really cool and they had set up equipment like here for that but today you can do smart phones as long as it isn't really really bad quality you see more and more videos in social networks and whatever. Try to do stuff like that and ask friends and colleagues and be ready for devastating criticism they will tell you no you can't do that on stage and then you'll say supper did it and then they say no whatever try and if you succeed that's really it's really cool and that's going to spread by itself there's websites like knowyourmeme.com where you can go and look for memes which are currently trending and stuff and you can combine that maybe with your stuff just try it it may be fun and that's one thing if you succeed that's really cool for the project yeah fun sex edgy stuff is what works what was the last video that you sent around that's what works there are how to's how to kill your viral video including do's and don'ts around this presentation will be shared I think as far as I heard so I didn't and this is a really good how to it's old but it's still good and one of the main sentences out of that is don't be the judge think of your audience so just because you don't like some particular things your audience may like it so ask people, talk with people they will tell you going back from videos and viral stuff going back to direct outreach you may want to present your project at conferences or in schools or at meetups or at nerd talks whatever how do you do that how do you reach that go to people ask them most of them are happy to for papers for a presentation like here mostly it's a matter of asking and the hacker space or the school just talk to people ask them they are mostly happy to have some people telling them hey I got a cool thing and I want to talk about it and after the third time you'll have a working presentation research your target and your pitch elevator pitch remember specifically so get the story when you're in a school think about what might the teacher be interested in then get feedback from them and proof reading help it's always the most important you know it publish early publish often tabling at conferences whatever something else you need to have logistics you have to have a booth setup you have the goal settings why do you go there what do you want to reach there what just tell the people about your existence just be there or give ice free ice cream to everybody who's going to be at the tables you need people to have to stand at the tables and even on the third day those people who are standing they're on a board and tired they still have to have the smile it's marketing it's not nice but it should keep it positive so and what will you actually say things like hi greeting with eye contact at least I will okay at least in Europe I was told in US eye contact is being seen differently but in Europe eye contact ask questions ask about the people who come up to your booth ask them what do they do okay and respond listen to them and you know the attention span of people is limited and it's getting smaller and smaller with social media you may have heard about the goldfish in the glass he only survives in the glass because he's got he said to have an attention span of something like 30 seconds so he sees the world outside he sees a living room and thinks okay this is boring I'll have a swim and when he comes back he's like wow living room cool so don't overload people with information people can usually listen something like 20 seconds when you're talking longer than 20 seconds the other one is slowly losing his interest or losing his focus and this time period is getting slower and slower but that's part of why Trump has so much success in the US because he's reduced to stuff and then spot the right moment to bring up your gold if it's appropriate and always try to close positively close a discussion positively because if the other guy goes away he'll have a good feeling it's bad to go away with a negative thing just try to find something positive bridging if you disagree on topics if you have this guy who is talking about gnome and you're in KDE then try to build bridges between yeah but both better than this other desktop or whatever try to build bridges or build bridges into another argument from your side so get away from the controversy get into the stuff that brings you together build bridges and on several layers writing stuff you will be I have some this is an overview of the next pages you how to write press releases the press release the first press release was written after an accident train accident in Atlantic City and it can trigger your audience alert journalists to something new don't do it too often signal to noise I said that don't do it too often only when really interesting things happen the Venn diagram I've said that before if you talk to somebody for example on a phone make two circles left circle is his thing that he wants to tell the right circle is maybe what you want to tell and then make dots on this paper during the conversation what you're talking about if is it in your realm or is it more or less he explaining about his mother or whatever and at the end of the conversation you should be most of the dots should be here then it was successful because you both had you agreed you talked about something that both of you interested otherwise you're boring people or you're bored relevance in a press release five V five W's who what when where why that's relevant the inverted pyramid who what where when how at first important details next and then the background that's a standard in PR in writing and news release oh no it basically means most people read the first thing and less people come to the end so the first thing has the biggest outreach Marcus Fahnder gave a speech at KDE Academy and QTCon 2016 who what where where in Berlin nobody's interested in that I've done this speech before you start with a lead that's the first sentence a lead is an opening sentence that's the most important thing that's what everybody reads and they decide by this first sentence if they should read on or not it gets the most attention readers decide if they leave the rest of the first paragraph fills out the lead all five W's should be in the lead in the first sentence fact or emotion you choose both will work depending on what you want to present that also works in novels in literature here's a link like to American book review best starting sentences in of all times the best one on number one is from Moby Dick call me Ishmael Ishmael Ishmael the first and there's also I also have a link here for awardedly bad ones you will have a look at them it's fun to read if you want to see some I always pick the Guardian because I think on this planet they are sort of like the exceptionally best news writing people and they can really help you if you know this stuff analyze the news they write you'll see that they follow this so after the lead the first paragraph is the lead which should catch somebody the second paragraph is where you give him the meat that's the so called nut graph in a nutshell that's the paragraph that has the central information in a nutshell it's after the lead should provide facts it's the essence of your news release and it will be found just after the lead the second paragraph it's providing facts you have to still keep the language simple count the words between subject and verb 8 is enough don't build long sentences check it for your language if you're not an English language in German language you can have more because German language is more complicated but in English it should not be more than 8 words between subject and verb use strong words appropriate images correct grammar and focus on the focus on the important part have somebody else read it towards the end you provide sentences like Katie is the desktop environment for Linux build on QD a sentence I will put there for example it's just the basics the background did you have a question oh yeah and then links to contact data pressroom and kit yeah basically the same for email announcements articles blogs make it clear what's new what's interesting make it linkable from elsewhere include the project description links links to events slow news days may give wider exposure that means there's some days on Monday a lot of things have happened from the weekend Tuesday Wednesday maybe less happens whatever or as we did on Friday evening in Linux magazine we will put some news there that is that is colorful that is a little bit more than just Linux tech hot tech that's interesting for the weekend yeah and make your team members write articles for news outlets mentor them that's cool social media I mean this is not new to you anymore social media is time thieves only Amazon and Facebook can tell you if they're really making money with it because Facebook, Amazon exchange data and only Facebook knows when some advertisement from Amazon on Facebook has led to somebody buying something and only Amazon knows that somebody who bought something came from Facebook so nobody else can tell there's no clear ROE social media you know that Facebook's private more private Twitter is for media people and news spreading Google plus is tech people Instagram pictures get somebody who knows what he do he does there it's so important they are people are skilled and you need them don't screw it up it will go viral and don't do it on your smartphone because errors happen very easily there it's nothing that you should automate you can't just post your tweet on Facebook and on Google plus doesn't work people will see that will know that and you get less response for that you have to have someone who does it separately and there's a lot of software for that around use it to cut right tools and don't forget to switch off because lots of people get stuck in there and spend lots and lots of time last point with some funny pictures for the end good behavior how to react when press when everything is blowing up yeah Volcanoes are a good role model if you if you always keep back then the explosion will be even bigger later so if there's problems try to solve them at once and then you have smaller chunks if you have a PR disaster it's better to clean up the stuff at once than to wait try to be proactive I picked the volcanoes because you may have heard that there's good and bad volcanoes around like the ones that go up regularly are considered good and beautiful like here this is old faithful in Yellowstone if you explode regularly people will get used to it in discussions and whatever and nobody will be angry and then it's just something somewhere quite marvelous if you don't explode regularly something will build up and huge things will happen this is what the Yellowstone caldera is a hot spot underneath the American continent it exploded several times and the last time it exploded which is after it built up energy for hundreds of thousands of years the last time it went up it was 640,000 years ago so it's time again and it covered half of North America with 6 feet of debris so the longer you wait the bigger the explosion will be there may be beautiful things after this big explosions like landscapes like this all like this in Europe but there's a lot of things that get destroyed this is Mount St. Helens again so this is one day before you see all the forest in the ground and it's all gone it just took hours but others that explode regularly like the Stromboli this is me on the Stromboli some 20, almost 30 years ago if it's exploding regularly you are sort of accountable and that's a much better way than even the ugly things in the background can be that are soaring and exploding all the time you can just smile them away even if you don't know what's really happening and you don't really care about it if the whole world behind you is going up in flames so think I made it exactly in time at least it looks like excellent cool good questions from the audience get some questions, comments there's much more information as I said before this thing was initially a one day workshop with people writing stuff about their project and it certainly made me think hey I should go through the FreeBSD KDE site and see what we've got comments then we should applaud the speaker thank you very much