by homeworld.cygnus.com with SMTP; 15 Sep 1998 23:43:37 -0000
	by beer.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA09177
	for <netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org>; Tue, 15 Sep 1998 17:43:35 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <199809152343.RAA09177@beer.org>
To: netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org (netbsd-advocacy)
Subject: Re: Some ideas for advocacy 
From: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-ID: <9174.905903014.1@lager>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 17:43:34 -0600

cgd@NetBSD.ORG (Chris G. Demetriou)  wrote:
 > Brian_de_Alwis@oti.com (Brian de Alwis OTT) writes:
 > I think there's something substantial to be said for just getting more
 > name recognition.  Name recognition often leads to interest,
 > inquiries, etc., and that in turn gives us the ability to spread our
 > message.

There are lots of things that can be done to increase the amount of
eyeballs that focus on "NetBSD"...

Case in point, when Macworld mentioned NetBSD in the context of
Rhapsody last month, the hits on www.netbsd.com just exploded. Of
course, I called and requested that they change the link to point
at www.netbsd.org and after that I have no idea what it did to 
netbsd.org's hits...

In any event, just a single occurance of a press-release or mention
of "NetBSD" in a reasonably well distributed medium, creates a large
increase in traffic to the web-page..

So, what do we learn from this?

a) The web-page MUST look good. It needs to load fast (which it does)
and look unoffensive (which I think it does)...

b) We need to stay on top of things like press-releases, and 
pro-actively make sure we get mentioned whenever people refer
to "Free Unix".  ie: I often notice people list things like
"Supports FreeBSD and Linux" so I always write and say "Also
supports NetBSD" (whenever true)...  I sent a letter to Ralph
Nader in fact when he did the thing on Microsoft and the DOJ
and mentioned FreeBSD/Linux...

I would dearly love to have a list of online journals and magazines
et'al and how to send press-releases to them... Whenever we turn up
a new port, we should be sending out a press-release... We got some
good press out of being the first Free Unix to support USB...  

It would be great to have the www logs available in some form so we
can run some sort of relevant statistics on them... If we notice 
a sudden flurry of activity, we can examine the referer log and
see where people are coming from and hopefully spot us being 
mentioned in a journal or magazine or online news agency... 

 > Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
 > Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.
 > Plug: Get your official NetBSD-1.3.2 CDROM set today! http://www.netbsd.com/

actually, the above is interesting too... I asked a bunch of people
to put a plug in their .sigs when they post to NetBSD lists and a
number of people actually did.  I could actually see CD sales increase
as a result... It was fairly consistant too.

I'll be asking people to do this again when we do the next run. :-)

Anyway, that's all from the PR-whore.