“When I say that this is about “How to Market”, I mean to
say that when you deal with Free Software, there are certain points
of etiquette and certain bits of cultural knowledge that you need
to understand, and that these may be foreign to you if you’ve just
arrived at BigLinuxBiz, Inc. after years of marketing something
else, even if it was at a technology company. … The good
news is that you have teachers just waiting to tell you what you
need to know. The fact that you work for a Linux company must mean
that there are programmers hidden away in cubicles somewhere. Find
them. … They’re in touch. They’ll all be dripping with the
commodity you need — clues.”
“Don’t Send Your Press Release in Microsoft Word Format
Don’t. Just don’t. I don’t care if it’s what you’ve always done. I
don’t care if the people you usually write spend six hours a day
typing in Word. It’s just bad form. It’s like going to the Tibetan
Embassy and singing the Chinese National Anthem before you say
hello. It doesn’t matter what you say after that; everyone has
already decided that you don’t know what’s going on around you, and
will discount whatever you have to say. Yes, we can all view Word
documents — we have tools to display them or reformat them into
reasonable formats — but we’re not going to bother. Trust me on
this.”
“Learn to Use your Mail Program
Learn to use the Bcc: header. People who don’t know any better send
a message to dozens (or hundreds) of people by putting all of the
names and addresses in the To: or Cc: headers. This has three [bad]
effects… Send your message as text. Just text, that’s all. No
need for HTML or rich text or whatever proprietary format
MailProgramsRUs has given you to make certain words red and others
italicized. … Make sure your text wraps at 80 columns.”