 All right. So to begin, hey there, folks. My name is Daymar Stein. I'm a Brazilian graphic designer and a member of the marketing team for two years now. Yes, and my name is Joseph Galloso. I am a data analyst in an unrelated field and I'm also a part of the marketing team since, what, since, I guess over a year now, like a year and a half, I don't know, since 3rd or 36. Yeah, same thing here. 3rd or 36 beta was like the first time I like, oh, okay, this, this project seems interesting. I'm enjoying it maybe. And today here we are. Yeah. I might seem a bit nervous. This is my first time ever presenting at any event from the Fedora project, but let's try to keep this flowing. So yeah, pretty much we're here to talk about the ways that our marketing team is currently both failing and succeeding at the marketing part of the project. And most of the quotes you'll see here in the talk, like the slides there, are from Daedra Trondland. I think I'm pronouncing her name correctly from at the time it was AWS. I'm not sure where she's working currently. I think it's still Amazon, but like she gave, she gave a great talk about open source and marketing at OSCon 2019. And that talk still inspires me to this day as like one of my North Star guides, like for what I want to do with the marketing team. So you can skip to the next slide, Joseph, please. So pretty much our introductions, pretty much what we just said. Joseph here is mainly running the Macedon account and I'm mainly running the YouTube account, like being basically the face behind the YouTube community tab. And we've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes and both with graphic design and copywriting and marketing strategy to try and put something together that actually helps the project both gain more trust in the public view, in the Linux community, and to reach more people outside of the Linux community to like get people to know Linux in general and get people to know Fedora specifically and like get interested in the project to maybe use it and maybe contribute to it. So, and pretty much this tweet is like kind of unrelated but it's still one of the things that helped me start with this, with the strategy we're currently going. And the idea behind it is that pretty much I see I had a couple of experiences with other Linux distros before joining the Fedora project and it was kind of a complicated situation because the distro part, the operating system part, in many cases was there, but the community itself wasn't that tight, at least not as tight as Fedora. In many cases it felt like it was the leaders talking to the rest of the users and not like a horizontal organization of the projects of like people in the community, just helping build the community and the operating system itself. And that's a bit of what we're trying to do with the marketing team here in Fedora. So, yeah, I can skip to the next one. So, when I saw the tweet that you shared that I thought that was a good opportunity to talk about what are some of the high-level things that we try to keep in mind within the Fedora marketing team because Fedora is in a very, and I don't want to say unique space, but it's different from what you normally think of when you think of marketing. Marketing is normally, you think of a business, you think of a company, you think of trying to do things, to put out materials, but have you to get folks to buy a product or a service. And while on one end we are trying to increase Mindshare and get folks to try Fedora, to want to stay with Fedora and to get feedback back to Fedora for us to make a better distro, there's also a lot more that we have to keep in mind. So, the first thing that I thought of that is a guiding principle for me is the Friends Foundation. We have, what is it, Features, First, Friends, and I forget the fourth F1, but we have four main foundations that we try to stick to in the community and those are actual core values. Friends being about thinking of everyone in the community as friends. For Fedora marketing, that extends not just within the community, but also outside of the community. So, other distros are friends. People who have a negative time with Fedora are friends. And that colors how we post and how we reply and how we interact back with folks. Something else we keep in mind is that the Fedora brand represents the Fedora community and not just the distro. So, when the Fedora accounts gonna post something representing you, representing the folks that you work with, and especially when it comes to dicey subjects, that's a helpful principle to keep in mind because Fedora is showing partiality to Fedora workstation. How does that make the Fedora KDE folks feel? If we're talking all the time about workstation, how does that make the cloud folks feel or Fedora server folks feel? So, we don't want to pick sides unnecessarily because Fedora is much bigger than just the opinions of whoever happens to be behind accounts. We want to be participants in the communities of the platforms that we're active on as much as we are sources of content for those platforms. So, we should not be an RSS feed. Our channels should be as much members of those communities as we are just putting stuff out there. It shouldn't just be pump things out there, try to get likes, try to get boosts and never participate back, never hear back, never act on anything that you listen to on the channels. And the last point is from a YouTube show I like, Chatlag, where at some point, it's a travel game show and at one point one of them says that they're navigating on cardinal directions and vibes. But I thought that was apt because there's a lot of nuance that goes into what we're doing. We're representing a very well-known brand. We're representing a lot of people in the form of a community. And there have been a few topics that have come up that are not easy to deal with. So, we have to deal with those things with nuance. We have to feel the vibe essentially about all the different places where we're active and make sure that we're being respectful and when to say something and when to not say something because it isn't maybe the place for a marketing channel. So, okay, look good. Well, starting with the good things that we've been doing in the last, basically the last year in the FDORA marketing team, we basically revitalized the YouTube channel which was kind of not necessarily halted but it didn't have a lot of activity before. So, we started posting the F38 release party videos, the thoughts from it. And from that, we began to start planning strategies to how to actually grow and maintain the YouTube channel as another platform. So, we started with the flock videos. We basically had all the live streams. We separate that into chapters and we did a whole plan on how to get those VODs and separate them into individual talks to publish them individually for if people prefer to watch like that. And that went into a whole spree of like, oh, we can get this absolutely massive form content of the live streams and turn them into shorter, more compact videos and turn those into even shorter YouTube shorts and we try to plan for those. And it was a bit of experimentation with YouTube shorts and short for content for YouTube but we'll get to that later. Yes, and I also mentioned to that, oh, Daymar's work with essentially applying more strategy to the content that we already have that served us for a lot of growth and it works for, like it's gonna be what we apply for this release party when those VODs go up and it's gonna, it'll help the Fedora channel integrate more with how YouTube works so that we can grow off of it or not just dump all the videos at once and then make it very hard for folks to poke the algorithm in the direction that we need it to. I also wanna point out that Daymar's done a great job of activating the YouTube community page where he's been doing posts there as regularly as we do posts on other social media channels so that wasn't a channel I wasn't really even thinking about and he took advantage of being involved with YouTube to turn that on. And we also have the Fedora podcast so that could get its own session but Eric Hendricks has done a great job with the Fedora podcast where I think 11 episodes in from having come back and that's also contributed tremendously to the growth and as we continue to be consistent and start seeing how we can do more with the content that we have, we hope that the Fedora account will be, I mean, it's not gonna join the pantheon of Linux YouTubers but folks should know about it, folks should know that it's active so that's my hope for it anyway. Well, when it comes to the results, they basically exploded and when it comes to our channel's popularity, it wasn't necessarily surprising considering doing something is better than not doing anything with the channel but the growth has been really impressive for the channel itself. We've been regularly getting over 15,000 views per month with the YouTube channel and in those last few weeks, we haven't been publishing any new videos, we've been just maintaining the community tab but hopefully it will get better with when we actually release the release party videos, hopefully and once again, I'll talk more about the short form content plans and results lately but we've been experimenting with those and I've been trying and I've been planning on doing more with them but we'll get to that later. When it comes to Instagram, it's been basically my main focus lately and due to many personal reasons to be honest, I've been trying to do my own personal project as a freelance graphic designer and I've been working with Instagram a lot lately and it basically got me back to my roots because when I first started contributing to the project, my main goal was to actually get the project's Instagram to a usable state basically because at that point, when I joined two years ago, the Instagram page was just to post one image to the feed with some tags, usually for a release party or something like that and then not post anything for like five to six months. So the page was not necessarily active, it didn't have a cohesive visual style when I first came in. So like the profile pictures and the highlights for the stories weren't like not necessarily very organized and we've been working on that a lot lately. I've been planning a lot of content for many channels that include and basically have Instagram as one of their main focus. Just to answer a question in the chat late for a moment, not necessarily a Q and A moment, but just like we know about the privacy concerns about meta and their products, but we decided that in the end, we need to reach a wider audience and we don't need to necessarily stick with the more privacy focused platforms that don't have a lot of users. We can use those. For example, we'd have been investing a lot in Macedon as a profile and as a channel for us to interact with, but we don't need to be limited to it. Our users can be and we recommend they stay, they stay in privacy safe platforms like Macedon, but we ourselves as our channel, we need to reach a wider audience. So we need to be in basically every channel that we can, that we have the manpower to do it basically. Yeah, I mentioned the privacy, yes, but I'm going too much into it. Folks have a lot of different threat models. It is something that I think about because I do consider myself to be pretty privacy conscious even though my threat model isn't advanced. Maybe you noticed or you didn't, but in the beginning of our slides, but Daymar and I listed our emails, we're both using proton mail. I use hard and Firefox. I picked Kinoi because of the immutability. So I do try to think about these things and we'll get to the Macedon piece later, but Macedon is essentially the option. If you want to be privacy conscious, you have Macedon and I think that'll be more than enough of a replacement for folks who want to get into our content, but don't want to be on the other platforms, which I don't blame you, but there are other folks who do want to use these platforms so we want to support them there. Yeah, we can move on to the next slide. Oh, I did want to mention, and this is just a hang up on me, but as of now, Emma Kidney's been doing a great job as our point of contact and we'll get into what that means later as well, but Daymar has provided a lot of like coming up with the ideas for content, producing the graphics. It's just a matter of the formality and the ticket, but I think at some point we'll just have Daymar have access to the Instagram of the same way that he has access to the YouTube and then he can manage that directly. I do want to give a shout out to Emma for her support there. Basically moving on, coming back to what we've been doing on Instagram lately. I say that it's kind of working in our strategy because we've been focusing, at least I've been focusing on creating content for Instagram and LinkedIn, one basically connecting to the other when it comes to the content itself, but I've been mostly focusing on creating posts and having some ideas for posting things that don't necessarily go really deep into the technical aspects of Linux or Fedora or anything and just focusing on like, hey, this is a free and open source operating system and this can look just as good or even better as any of the proprietary alternatives and just here it is, you can look at it, you can be interested in it and showing people opportunities of getting to know this thing, not necessarily trying to sell them on any of the big, huge necessarily privacy features or technical Linuxy features. I don't really know how to say this without being offensive, but we're basically trying to just not necessarily market Fedora just for nerds like us. I think it's fair. Yeah, we're trying to expand outside of, we don't wanna just convert folks who are using other Linux distros. At some point, especially when we think of a mass market adoption, even though we're not there yet, we do have to think in those terms in order to get there. So yeah, I agree, you're good. And do you wanna talk about LinkedIn or do I? I don't necessarily mind. But I did wanna shout out Justin Flurry, he's been our point of contact for LinkedIn and Twitter. So a lot of the, will be producing content mainly for Macedon and the YouTube community page and Instagram, but he then gets that content onto those platforms. And it's a way of us having coverage there without, or because we don't really have someone dedicated to dive in as deeply as we do on the other platform. So shout out to him and big thank you. Hopefully in the future we can do a little more there. The Maslnard account is, this is the main way that I contribute to the marketing team. Everything else is more admin stuff and or another thing that I'll talk about next. But I'm very excited. We are officially the most followed Linux just through account on the Fediverse. Maybe someone will find out another account now that I wasn't aware of, but I'm very excited that within a year we've hit that point. It's not something that I think would have happened on its own. So I think that our investment in Macedon has gotten this result and I'm grateful for it. And as an example of the type of engagement that we're getting for the Fedora 39 release, we did a little campaign. So it was just one announcement post but trying to have several posts peeling off important pieces of news that might have gotten lost in the change vlogger in the announcement article. And so when you add up the engagement from all that we had 380 boosts and 484 favorites. That's a lot of engagement. I didn't compare it to what we did on Twitter but that's on par with what you might see on another platform. And as I've mentioned in previous talks we have less than 10% of the followers as we have on like something like Twitter. So I'm very excited for Macedon. I consider it to be, it's this, we have what? 896 posts that we've done in a year. It's kind of our flagship social media channel to the point of privacy. It's, there you go, you know. The one that we spent our most energy on is the one that is the most privacy conscious but it also serves as a spring of content for the other channels for that. You know, we can copy off each other's homework. If I posted something on Macedon because that's what I do every day. Instagram can peel that off or Twitter can peel that off. So I'm glad that Macedon has succeeded in its experiment and risen to the point that it is and we want to just to keep on going. As of now because we are the Fedora, the Linux distro account with the most followers we're kind of expanding our market to, all right, up till now I've been comparing our account to OpenSusa, that's elementary OS, that's a Debian. But now that we're at the top, I'm comparing myself or we're comparing the account to how many followers does Kenome have? How many followers does KDE have? How many followers does Thunderbird have? Because those are accounts that represent the wider open source market, but obviously because they're applications that is, it's distro agnostic and so of course they're gonna have more followers. That being said, it still represents an open source market. And so if we can start to get follower accounts that approach those accounts then I think we're, it's just about trying to grow while defining chunks of the market as we get bigger and bigger. So we'll see where we are next year. But I'm very happy with this and then here are the followers for other accounts when I checked yesterday. I don't think this is something that you could take for granted. Obviously popular distros are not being reflected with their follower accounts here but I don't think Fedora would be where it is if it wasn't for us spending the time on it. So I'm grateful for the support from the community and I'm happy to keep on doing it. I feel like folks like, I feel like folks like the Fedora Macedon account. So thank you and I'm glad and I hope that we can continue to do that. And to touch on workflow, we've kind of mentioned it a little bit here where we have essentially three tiers of social media managers that we've worked out. This is something that we worked out based on our experiment with Macedon and we thought, but we have a lot of points to put into Macedon but how do we turn on other social media channels? And what you've seen is what we worked out. If you remember from the release party, we just had the Macedon account that was really active but now we have points of contact where I can reach out to Justin or to Emma and say, hey, here's like, I'm not gonna bother you all the time but here's one person I think could go to Twitter at LinkedIn, can you post that? And so they help us out this point of contacts where the expectations there are just have access to the account but someone else will feed you content. Then we have kind of a maintainer tier where you get that point, you are running the account more independently but the cadence is maybe at least getting something out once a week. So it's not as many posts as what you might see on other channels and you're really just focusing on posting, you're not really diving deep into how the platform works and how to ring out as much value as you can. The last tier that kind of curators here, that's where I would put myself with the Macedon account where I'm just diving in like, how do hashtags work? How do you, like, what should you be posting? What kind of content works? Let's give a good mix. Let's watch, you know, what we have pinned. And so that's kind of, you're spending the most amount of time on a platform as a curator and you're trying to get to know it in and out to get the most value. Besides that workflow wise, we're just talking through our matrix channel but we are trying to develop something a little more formal for our point of contacts because a random ping in matrix can get lost easily and that's been a challenge for them. So DMR especially has been working on what our GitLab workflow looks like so that we could feed them content in a way that's easier. Do you have any thoughts on this? DMR, do we move on to the next one? Considering the time is better that we move on. Okay. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I want more time. All right. Yeah. Part of our initiative. This is something that is coming straight out of the strategy 2028. We want to have Fedora and more laptops. So we want to partner with vendors who choose to support Fedora and the kind of partnership that we, or the support that we offer back is right now mostly in marketing, in trying to coordinate technical help or in liaising within the project to get certain things done. For Lenovo, we are working on a Fedora compatible devices list. The reason for that is they have a ton of laptops that already support Fedora or a Fedora friendly and a few laptops that do ship Fedora. But the challenge for them is putting the points into marketing to have more folks know about it. It's hard to find their Linux conflicts. So we're helping with that by this phased project that you can ask me about later. So basically we need to move the needle. We got a show demand for preloaded Linux. For framework, they were already supporting Fedora as an official distro. So we want to help get them more technical to support for them to feel more confident. Right now we're still growing that relationship to see what more we can do down the line but hopefully we can do more and we are in contact with Matt Hartley who's the Linux support lead for them. And the last one, which is the special announcement is SlimBook. Now you might think we already announced something from SlimBook, what do you mean? And we did. What we announced was the SlimBook, the Fedora SlimBook 16. So we got a lot of feedback and so SlimBook decided we want to address some of that point of feedback by launching the Fedora SlimBook 14 inch. So this is a smaller model. This is one without the dedicated graphics card. So this is just an Intel Core i7. It's still a lot of the great specs are there. So it's still light. So the magnesium chassis still has a great screen with really thin bezels. And right now there should be an article on Fedora Magazine, which I will check later that has more details as well as if you go to fedora.slimbook.es that should also now be live with more information on the Fedora SlimBook 14 inch. So we're trying to expand, SlimBook try to go after some folks with the 16 inch and now we're trying to help other folks who are interested in this laptop with the 14 inch. They also gave us a, they decided to do a 100 euro discount for the release of Fedora 39, which is very nice for them. If you go to check out, you'll see it, this is already applied. And if you're a contributor, which if you're here, you are like a contributor and you can get an additional 100 euros off in the magazine article that should be live. There is a link to the community blog post that explains how to do that. So SlimBook is by far the one that we have the most flexibility with. We do want to make sure they're happy, but if they're happy with the partnership and what we're doing with Fedora, we hope to continue that and develop that as a partnership. We have more flexibility to address, more needs that folks may have for laptops or desktops. Okay, so we may have to breeze through this piece, Debar, but I'll just let you run through it. Tell me when to flip. Have we okay? We'll just record it here, there you go. Yeah. Basically, not everything is sunshine and rainbows in marketing land. Yeah, we've been trying our strategy and it's been working quite effectively, but not everything is 100% working as intended or the performance is as good as we hope to be. So we've experimented with YouTube Shorts as a way to do short form content, short form videos. And if that worked, we plan to expand that to Reels or TikTok or other social media, but the results weren't quite as great. We didn't get as much views and not really that much engagement out of the videos. And we had to like, the only videos we actually got pretty much good results from were really like click baby titles and things that we did not want to maintain moving forward. So we decided to stop them for a while and try to rework them with another ideas and more variety on them later on. So pretty much we're thinking about like doing some shorts from the content from the FDORA podcast and other forms of like videos from our YouTube channel and try to make short form videos from them for people to like get some highlights from what we've been working on. But currently we had to rework that. Our engagement on the Instagram page is also not really going that well, even though the likes and views from those posts are going quite well. We're not getting like as much comments and like follow up and like messages from people as we used to. And we've been trying to work out on that, especially because we've been, the main focus when I started working on Instagram is to try and get our reach to more people, not necessarily just our followers, but currently we've been reaching the people we've been reaching out the most is our followers. We've not been reaching that much an audience or like a community outside of those followers. And when it comes to our YouTube channel, it's mainly just like a male 25 to 35 year old people that have been watching our videos and we've been trying to get some ideas on how to get a wider reach from that, like more age, wider age gap, getting a wider audience with a female, with a wider female audience, let's put it like that. And with lots of help, especially from the DEI team with which I think could work with us quite well to like brainstorm some things that could work for us there. But even though it's just pretty much this whole section is just to point out that even though our strategy is working quite well, it is not necessarily perfect. And like there are things that we need to address in order to maintain that going forward. Okay, and I'll just go through this, follow us on our socials, look up Fedora wherever you like to be and go there. Here's a link which I will have to add separately for marketing, but if you're already in the marketing space it's the hashtag marketing you can find us there. If you have something that you want to promote and you're in the Fedora community, please reach out, we want to help you promote that. The recent example is Fedora docs, we've been helping them out. And if you are technical and you are not currently in the Fedora marketing channel, please join, it would be nice to have people to ask questions to when we don't know technical things because we tend to lean to be not technical. And then this last quote, marketing is not evil, you may already be doing it, you just may not think of some of what you're doing as marketing. Alrighty, oh man, no time for Q and A. Unless Justin says otherwise. Stop sharing. He says yes, yes to Q and A. I don't know if you wanna, well you're part of the marketing team, you could jump in if you want. They can switch to Q and A. So I see the first question here, can we also create Fedora cooperation with companies that's all laptops that I can afford? They can the 500 to 700 UR range, yes. So that is something that we are thinking about, we thought about that in the context of Slimbook as well because they had listed an essential line, which is the cheapest one, I think it was somewhere between 600 to 700 euros, but for different reasons right now, the only laptops they have available are their executive line of which the Fedora Slimbook is based. And we can ask if Fedora Slimbook ship with Fedora 39, I think they would, but I'm not sure. So we can follow up on that. On future plans for the marketing team, which we watch out for in the F40 release cycle, we hope to have, I guess more campaigns that are out sooner leading up to that, and especially get our ducks in the road regarding any announcements for hardware partnerships. But I think it's just kind of more of the same, just try to keep on doing the idea of thoughts on what we wanna get done for Fedora 40. Yeah, basically a bigger presence in social media for now, like we've been trying this whole release cycle, we've been trying to get our planning organized, like the organizing who is gonna manage which social media channels, how can we organize our posting schedule and getting some strategy on what to post, when to post, which channels to post. And we'll probably get to better results starting now because especially we've been starting this plan and in the end of this release cycle, so it's probably going to start getting better in this next cycle. So keep an eye out for our social media channels and it's probably going to get better, I hope, at least. Yes, very excited, when I think back to the last release cycle was just mastered on, now we're active on a lot more channels and we're putting points toward the hardware partner initiative as well. So it's also resulting in tangible benefits. So I think it's its folks' benefits. I think folks are happy to be along for the ride and I'm grateful and we hope to continue to grow that.