 Okay, so I'm Paul and as you know, I have been working with Promo, the Promo team since 2017. My name is Anika Kover and I have, it's been more than a year now with KDE and as everybody knows that I am working with the Promo team. Yes, so this, this talk came about because back in 2018, I was in Vienna, like many of you were also and somebody came up to me, you know I was managing my own business and stuff. Somebody came up to me and asked me, why are you here? I was like that, point blank and you know, being in Vienna, I thought it was pretty obvious. I was there to drink beer, it's Nichel and stuff, Sasha talked into my face, oh, of course to attend the Academy too, but the person asking that question was not asking that. He was asking, why do we need Promo in KDE? Why do we need a Promo team led by somebody who is a contractor, blah, blah, blah, what was so important about Promo? Basically, this is the question, this is a duration of the idea that any product that is good enough will sell itself, people will go to it. It's this idea that if the product is good, people will come. So the problem with that is that idea is false, that idea has been proven false several times, several times nearly every time in the real world over and over again. So for example, if we go to an area that we know well, which is operating systems, think of Windows Vista, this was a mitigated disaster by any measure. It was buggy, it was leaky, it was hoggy, it hogged lots of resources, but Microsoft managed to sell 20 million copies in the first month. That is not 20 million machines installed. This is people going out to buy a box with a disk in it that contained Windows Vista. And over the next year, Windows Vista went on to reach 40% of the PC market. This was back in 2007, meanwhile, the Linux desktop, which I think that everybody would admit here, even at the time was, well, I think that was probably better than Windows Vista for several reasons, was at best 2%. See, last year it peaked at 3%, but then went back to 2%. So that's nearly 15 years later, we are still more or less in the same place. So my question is, Paul's game is way too high, asking for adjustment, okay, one second. It's too loud, is it guys? Sorry. Oh, maybe that's just me, you know. Okay. Better? Yes. Okay. I don't want to cause any damage to anyone these years. Okay. The thing is that, so 15 years later, we are not in a much better position. So do you think that people, the people that went and bought those, the people that went and bought those 20 million box sets of Windows Vista, did it because the product was good? No? So what do you think pushed them to pop down to Walmart or Target or whatever and add a box to their shopping cart, hm? Pardon? I'm sorry. Also, it could be something that I have here that I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you only a few seconds, one second. Let's see if I can grab the thing. Okay, one moment. So I'm going to grab this, put it full screen and see if it will play. Say. Say. So often you experience something so new, so delightfully unexpected, there's only one word for it. Okay. I think that's enough. This advertisement triggers me so much, I can't resist anymore, but you know, maximum is the thing that the magnifying glass, the glass that comes by doesn't magnify anything. But anyway, so what happened, let me get back to this, okay. So basically people knew they had to go and buy a new copy of Windows because they saw an advertisement, because someone told them they had to go and buy it, they didn't come into their head just out of nowhere or just because developers created something. Now this is what basically Promo offers you. We have worked on KDE for now coming up for four years. We have increased KDE's visibility. We have got our name in new publications. We have increased the number of people who read us on social media, et cetera, et cetera. You all know this. We roll this information out every single time we talk. But what you probably are not aware of that apart from working on KDE as a whole, we also want to work with projects individually and even with developers individually if they need it, no? And we have been working with some projects and we have even endorsements from them. For example, Farid from Brazil says, having created telegram groups, KDE live community meetings, better Promo release notes, social media, et cetera, has definitely helped. So yes, thank you, Farid from Brazil. That was from KDE live, obviously. Alexander from Labplot says that Promo, we started working with Labplot in October 2019 and he says that starting to use promotion regularly to increase the visibility of Labplot, to the increase of number of emails we are getting from new users, it increased the number of new followers on Twitter, new people joining Labplot, two new active contributors. This all we didn't have, let's say, one year ago. So thanks, Alexander. And then we have a contributor from the UK who says, would promote things again, thank you, David. So that normally, obviously, when there is a change in the project, the project gets better visibility and better, more people following them and more contributors, et cetera, not for one reason alone, obviously. Promotion is not the only reason. Normally promotion comes with a package of decisions that the maintainers make, like they ramp up promotion, but also they take a project that maybe was on pause because it had lost its maintainer or because it had problems getting unstuck from anything and then they resume and then they take on also promotion or they take the project in another direction, it was headed and then they also add promotion. It's not one thing that contributes to this increasing visibility, obviously, but it is difficult too much, and that in itself has been annoying because we can't say, okay, definitely what we did here helped, but it is obvious what hasn't ever happened is that the project has taken on more promotion and has gotten worse, let's say that. I mean, that's not an enormous thing, but, okay, so, one sec, next slide, here we go. So we obviously, apart from to improve your projects, et cetera, we do things that you probably don't, right? One of the things we do is, I have a list here, but I haven't got a slide with all the bullet points because this is something we have to know, but I'm just going to tell you, right? For example, we study social media and then design pose to get the biggest reaction. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to see if this works a bit better this time, and I'm going to show you something that we, I was working on this past week regarding social media. Let's hope this starts, ah, it's open, okay. Now, let's go here, right. Now, so we measure, we take all this information from all the tweets that we ever post on the KD community account. This is two years worth of tweets, right? For example, and I'm talking about Twitter because it turns out it's really easy to, it's kind of the easiest to analyze for us, but we also do LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, master's on, etc., etc. So we take that data and we do something like this, for example, let me increase that so you can see better. What this is telling us is the engagement per tweet that we receive for each, on each day and at each hour. So the engagements are that people or reply or they retweet or they, what's the other thing they can do, ah, they, or they like it. So, right. So we've got along the top of the days to Monday, Tuesday, to Sunday, and on the left we have the times, approximate times, UTC. Now, the light of the color, the more engagements. So as you can see, we have a cluster here of white cells that's telling us that this is probably a good time and good days to, to post. So when people come in and say, I want to post something about my blog, etc., we may say things like, well, wait until Tuesday or wait until Wednesday or whatever. And we don't say that because, you know, at the moment we don't want to work or anything. We say that because we know this. We know that people tend to engage more on these days and at these times. I mean, if you look along the right, if you look at the maximum number, which is 11,000 and the maximum number at the bottom is 15,000, you have the ideal time to post, apparently, is on Wednesday at eight o'clock UTC, right. Now, of course, this is not the only thing you have to take in mind. You have to take in mind, for example, the impressions, which is how many times your post is going to be seen. And for that, we have this table, right. This is the number of impressions that accumulate impressions we got on these days and times. And again, if you move along to the right, 186 is the highest number and the highest number down here is 403. So again, the best time to be read to be seen is on Wednesday at eight o'clock UTC. So let's get back to the presentation. So this tells us when to post, for example. So this is one of the things we do. We analyze all this information for you. And then when you come in, we can tell you the ideal moment to post. But not only that, we can also tell you the ideal way to focus your post. Let me go on to the next slide. Here we go. Now, because we also analyze, analyzes maybe a very pedantic word, we also look at what posts do well, depending on how they are phrased. So here we have to post the link to the same thing. They were posted on the same day, one hour apart. They were posted to Reddit and as well to Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And as you can see, the bottom one, which was posted first, got 29 upvotes and has no comments. Right. And it was posted at the moment this screenshot was taken. It was posted 12 hours prior. The other one, we posted by accident, because we didn't realize that somebody from Cating Life had already posted about the new 2104 release, was posted by accident, but we decided to leave it. When we realized we decided to leave it, see what happened. And what happened is it got this, this is the one that the primary team posted and it got 76 upvotes and it finally reached nearly 90, if I remember right. And at the moment of taking the screenshot had five comments. It finally went on to have 11. It's not great. It was not one of our most successful posts, but you can see there's a substantial difference, even though the one posted by the Cating Life team was first. What is the difference? The difference is that the one, the promo team posted has much more information. So we normally do this thing of listing three things. So if we say Cating Life, the new version of Cating Life has been launched and it has this, this and this. Three things. Well, the prior one doesn't list anything. So it's with the people who are reading it, they have less information. They have less reason to upvote it. They have less reason to talk about it. So this is the other thing we do. We look at all these things and we decide not only when's the perfect moment to post, well, perfect. There's nothing perfect, but when's a good moment to post. We also, once you tell us what you want to do, we can also tell you how you should focus it, what information you should include. Another classic. We discovered that in a whole year of tweets, the bottom 100 tweets had no pictures whatsoever, while the top 100 tweets had, all of them had pictures included with them, which led us to conclude, maybe wrongly, but we think we're right, led us to conclude that we should always send out a tweet with a picture. That's why, when somebody comes in and says, could you tweet this, we say, okay, what image do you want? And then what text do you want? And we usually give it, we have some talk. So it's not just, you know, tweeting out stuff and letting it go. Just, we have to give it a spin. We have to look for an appropriate image, et cetera, et cetera. Also, another thing we discovered is that brightly colored with lots of busy stuff going on images do better than simply gray windows. So when we post a screenshot of one of KD's applications, there's always something going on. It's not an empty screenshot. Right. So, right. So the other thing we do is we, when we write announcements or somebody comes with a blog post and wants us to go over it or talk about it or whatever, we engineer the text, we rewrite the text so it has a maximum appeal to the audience you want to reach. You will see this in, for example, the Plasma announcements. I mean, in the latest Plasma announcement, we emphasize, we always give the announcement some kind of topic. This year, this last one, there wasn't much visual stuff we could latch on to, much visual, many visual features we could latch on to. So we decided to go with the stability, usability, flexibility, which is a bit abstract, which is something that you can't usually see, but it is something that users could appreciate. And so we made the topic stability, usability, and flexibility. If we look at what people talked about in their blogs and in news sites, et cetera, right, we have, okay, this is telling one got it half right, performance et usabilità. This one says stability, it's on economia, so that is stability and usability, mas fiable and stabile, so it's stability. So we somehow, yes, sorry, do you want to say something? Okay, there's a weird sound. Okay, there was somehow a bit of, you know, that famous reality distortion field where you say something and somehow everybody just believes it, not that we lie or anything like that, but we choose a topic, we put it, and people repeat it as if it were their own ideas, if they had reviewed it and found it to be exactly what we said, which, well, it is true that Plasma 5.32 has improved stability, usability, flexibility, it is also true that most new versions of Plasma improve those things, but anyway. Probably the, oh, 15 minutes only. Probably the most important thing we do for you is we help you define clear goals for every promotional activity, often when you come in, you come in with an idea, and we say you want to promote your blog post, and we ask, why or what do you want to achieve? Let's say we find this a bit off-putting, because it should be obvious, I want to promote my blog post, because I want more people to visit my blog. Okay, but what is the ultimate aim of that? Just promoting your blog post is not the, cannot be the end game. You must want something else, something that will benefit your project. For example, you may want to promote a blog post that invites people to help you develop your application. You're inviting people to participate in the development, or you want to promote your blog post, because you want people to download your application more and use it, etc. That is an end game goal. And we often try to help with that. So by applying what we call a baseline, where we take the thing you are trying to promote and find out how it makes somebody's life, the people you want to reach, lives better. So for example, if it's somebody using your application, it will improve their life somehow. For example, if we're talking about Canadian life, when the new version has more features and it will help you subtitle your videos in a much better way, and you'll be able to produce your videos in several different languages, much faster and without so much hassle. So we find out the thing which is your product and what thing it improves and for who. And that helps us to make your product reach a wider audience, because it is easier to understand for the readers or the listeners or whatever why they should use it. The other thing we do, and with this I'm going to finish, is that, oh, two things. We're looking to, we're also looking to external events where we can take your product and show them off. We have taken GCompre to Educa Web in Brussels and showed it to teachers. We have taken Plasma Mobile to OpenExpo in Madrid and showed it to prospective developers and companies that develop mobile applications and things like that in the hope that somebody will sign up and actually do something with that. And finally, we actually go out and help organize grassroots communities of KD supporters in places where maybe the efforts will be disparate. And this is what the network program is about, which Anika is going to explain. We have already a session tomorrow related to KD Network and it is at 7.40 UTC. And I'm just going to tell you briefly right now. So if you want to know more about it, you can join us tomorrow. So the most important thing last year we did was to actually start KD Network. So we really want all the people who really want to start something in their city and want help from us to promote their KD software. I'm focusing on KD software because GCompre has been promoted in Kerala and we also got a really good leader there and Paul connected to a leader of educational board. So which was a very good initiative for us. So if you think that you need help over there in your community, you think there's a potential and you need support, even if you think that you are only one and you can't do it. So just come to us and we can tell you how we can help you. That's what we did with GCompre as well. We have started creating social posts for them. We have started a cookbook for them. So you can just come to us and maybe we can share ideas. So maybe we have the buff, right Paul? So in the buff, we will be discussing our future steps about Promo. So if you want to join that as well and if you have any ideas or you want to discuss your software or your application in more detail, you can join us. So if you have any questions related to KD Network or Promo, what are you right now? Please come up with it. So yeah, the point is that you should get your Promo Action on and you can do that by, you can do that by, the best way to come to the MacroTrue and talk to us and explain your project and explain what you want to achieve and we will talk you through stuff. Very often what ends up happening is that we give people the information and the tools they need to carry out most of their promotion themselves. But of course, we also offer them the stuff like the access to the KD community, more official, general social media platforms, so stuff that they want to promote, they can promote on there, etc, etc. You can email us, either of us, don't use the mailing list because that is normally for external organizations that want to contact with kind of like the people who respond to press questions and stuff like that. I mean, you could, it's not a problem, it's just that we don't normally receive a request through there. The best way is the Matrix KD Promo group where Annie and I usually are hanging out there most of the time. So I think that's it. Yes. So if there are any questions, I don't know how we're doing time-wise. We have seven minutes. Oh, seven minutes, good. Yeah. Okay, so in regards to the questions, we have one on so far. So this is from Hala. We've seen that the biggest engagement driver for Krita was YouTube by about 60% of incoming hits. So we decided to fund someone to make a YouTube channel. Is that an idea for the KD as a whole? We do have a YouTube channel. We do have a YouTube channel and there are several people who manage it. The problem is, of course, creating content, creating videos is a long slot. It's very, very long and complicated. So we don't update, we don't upload as much as we want. We want to. Nicola is doing a very good job at the moment and we aggregate stuff from his channel into a playlist on the YouTube channel, on the KD YouTube channel. We also had a PeerTube channel, which was nice. But as you know, instances are normally are often hosted by individuals and in the instance we were using disappeared. So we're looking for a new PeerTube channel that we can replicate our YouTube stuff into PeerTube. So we don't have much problem, you know, everything that we have on YouTube, we can dump into PeerTube too, which in itself is complicated because we have many years of videos, lots of gigabytes of videos, and not every instance will take us. So yes, it is definitely a very good thing, Hala. I think it's a very, very savvy move and we are trying to keep up with that. I would like to add, it also depends on your audience. For example, for Krita, mostly people are interested in tutorials. So the audience over there needs videos, right? But for maybe KD, because we are covering so many software, so we don't have one dedicated audience for it. So maybe a lot of your audience gets distributed for KDE. So some of them just want social media, maybe just Facebook, Twitter, MasterDawn, or some of them just want YouTube. So if you compare Krita and KD, you will never have the same. Thank you very much for your answers. No other questions came in in the meantime. So thank you very much for the presentation, both of you. And we'll be seeing each other during the event, I guess. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye.