Am Thu, 26. January 2006 00:49 schrieb houghi:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 11:11:06PM +0100, email.listen@googlemail.com wrote:
May be it is interesting to have a mailing campaign, snail mail might be the best, to invite lost users to join the new openSUSE community and become an active member (again). The addresses of all those who ordered SUSE boxes in the past will be a base for this.
That will be called Spam, no matter what the intentions are or how much people have told to accept occosional mail. Let the people find their way (again) to the comunity through quality, not through marketing.
Hhhm, I understand your reservation but I wouldn't agree, but let me explain... I remember that some years ago when I bought every SUSE box I got a snail mail (more an info bulletin) and in my eyes this was no spam at all. And I would think that a lot of users also don't saw it as spam. It was more an information bulletin of a club/fellowship of same interest... But youre right that it is a bit difficult and has to be dealt with great care so that is not seen as spam.
I don't think we are looking for subscribers, we are looking for participants. Pardon my poor english if I didn't make it clear enough...
What I wanted to say is that a lot of former SUSE users where very busy in promoting SUSE in their local region. Which in my eyes can be seen as an active participation. Those people often plowed the fields where SUSE later on made it's buisines (according to the OSDL survey [1] it where theese users who asked for Free Software in their companies or as administrators installed the first 'inofficial' SUSE servers in their companies) And such a 'plowing the fields' will be very helpfull for Novell too. Some of those people _have_ experience in promoting SUSE so thats why I think it might be interesting to have a focus on them first. It should be more efficient reactivating theese people than only qualifying novice participants (nevertheless that should be done too). regaards, Thomas [1] http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005.pdf