Hi all,

As the blog reads "Viral Marketing: The critical element of viral marketing is this: it's built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.". We have to give people a reason to use opensuse. following are the reason i could think off.
1) Placing reading material on to a more visible area, like Desktop of Live CD, or in a folder placed on Desktop of regular user.
2) show people how easy it is watch movies, listen to music, setting up DSL connections for internet, hands on.
3) when browsing over internet or transfering data using USB media they can be assured that windows virus will not be spread.(show them how the virus files are visible on the USB media in nautilus, and delete them using rm)
4) simplicity in slicing of huge files into small chunks and joining them using (dd and cat).
5) bust the myth: "installing opensuse linux is difficult".

i just demonstrated the above steps on my laptop to my friends, and showed them that only opensuse exists on laptop : no need for windows vista/xp to do such simple tasks. i got call from two of my friends asking for setting up opensuse for them(one owing a new laptop, other owing low end desktop of 512 MB ram). i just gave them an install DVD of 11.0, asked them to install by themselves; any problem just give a call. today they are happy browsing, watching movie, listen music and laptop guy enjoying the AIGLX. never turned back to windows.

the features of linux desktop pushed opensuse itself.

--
- Hemanth.G

On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 07:47 -0700, Joe Brockmeier wrote:

Hi all, 

As we're thinking about ways to promote openSUSE, I'd recommend taking a
look at this post by Seth Godin: 

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html

Any thoughts along those lines would be appreciated. 

One thing I'm thinking about for a giveaway at shows next year would be,
instead of just stickers and so forth, something useful -- like a
Zypper, or Bash, or Vim reference card with the openSUSE logo. 

Thoughts?

Best, 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
openSUSE Community Manager
http://zonker.opensuse.org/
jbrockmeier@novell.com