Re: News links, post 'em here - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Le 11/09/2013 19:33, Josh Berkus a écrit :
>
>> Here's a few more French links :
>> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Postgresql93press#French
>
> You guys in PostgreSQL.Fr do a spectacular job of reaching the French
> press.  How do you do it?  Is it something we could do elsewhere?
>

Thanks ! But I'm not sure exactly how we do it :)

First I have to say that the French media is very active. Even if some
French IT people can speak English, I believe that most prefer reading
news in French. My guess is that in other countries, like say Germany,
engineers are more fluent in English and they tend to go directly to
slashdot, Hacker news, etc. to get their daily dose of information. In
the other hand, French people are strongly attached to their language
and this may be  part of the  explanation. Anyway the same explanation
works for the French documentation too. Lots of people here feel the
need to have a translated documentation whereas in other countries it's
not that necessary and thus launching a translation team is harder.

The other point is that we're spreading the word from several points.
There's of course Stéphane and other guys doing a great job translating
the press release. And in parallel, local PG companies are amplifying
the message by sending it at the same time. Speaking for DALIBO, we're
using our PR company to relay the PG press release and adding some
"French-centric" content (some quotes, a statement from a government
agency,etc.). I think 2NDQUADRANT France does the same even though I'm
not sure if they use a PR company or not.

All in all, on the release day French IT journalists will receive the
announcement from at least 3 different sources. Which is good. It gives
more credit to the information and the journalist are more comfortable
to adapt and relay the news.

I'm not sure how this situation can be reproduced elsewhere and I won't
give lessons to anyone :) But my guess is that when we achieve joint
efforts like that, when we have multiple companies backing a community
initiative at same time, it is a very strong message. A message even
stronger that the announcement itself.

If only we could manage to gather PR and marketing people from companies
involved in this community. Make them synchronize and work together on
common projects such as a new version release. Just like hackers work
together on code.

Who knows ? Maybe we just need an "advocacy summit" during the next
PGCon or another event ? Invite marketing people from Heroku, EDB, Red
Hat, Salesforce et al. Make it work like the developper meeting or the
cluster hackers summit...

I'm probably just daydreaming but if we could inject a small dose of the
hacker/collaborative culture to these people we could make tremendous
things to promote PostgreSQL.

--
damien