Marketing FAD, Days 2 and 3.

On day 2, Chris Grams of New Kind and John Adams and Jonathan Opp of Red Hat joined us to talk about growing and strengthening Fedora brand. They talked to us about the 10-plus year work that has gone into building Red Hat’s brand, and helped us find the right questions to ask about Fedora’s brand. The full log is probably more illuminating than quick notes on a complex topic. I also got a chance to take a look at the excellent book Designing Brand Identity, and did some reading in it overnight — enough to know I want to go get a copy of my own.

It seems like Fedora has been doing a good job of maintaining consistency in the way we present Fedora, and that our reliance on the same essential four foundations of freedom, friends, features and first can continue to serve us well into the future. We spent much of the rest of the day trying to flesh out our answers to the questions Chris, John, and Jonathan passed on as a good exercise.

Russell Harrison also took some wonderful head shots of some of the participants at the very tail end of the day. They turned out great and I can really see how much there is to learn as a novice photographer! Then we headed off to the Carolina Ale House for a fun dinner, followed by several hours of packaging introduction by the inimitable David Nalley (ke4qqq).

On day 3, we focused on PR and press-related content. Our guest speaker had a last-minute emergency and we rearranged some of our schedule. Henrik Heigl (wonderer), who’s an experienced press person himself, gave a fantastic presentation on press relations from the perspective of having a foot in both worlds. He’s helping to drive our work on a more modular, expressive, and useful press kit. Everyone worked on content for the kit, drafting up pages that we can shift in and out of such a kit over time and depending on where and to whom we’re giving it out.

Last night I had to hole up in my room to get some non-Marketing work done. Today we are pumped up for a day of video work with the awesome Red Hat Creative team. I’ll be leaving late this afternoon, bringing Neville Cross back to the airport to catch his plane back to Nicaragua, and then heading home.