Education Expo in Sydney, Australia

[Scott James Remnant]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 14:02 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> A bunch of things worked really well for us at this expo, so I thought I'd
> write some notes for everyone else:
> 
In the UK, Debian attends a regular set of similar broad-focus expos.
In fact, that reminds me, Brian phoned me the other day about the
upcoming one and sorting out an Ubuntu stall ... :p

>  * Get a couple of the helpers, or everyone, to wear something distinctive.
>    Pia and I wore bright orange jumpsuits, which are different, VISIBLE but
>    still "appropriate" (don't wear a loincloth). :-) Everyone on the show
>    floor knew who we were and what we were on about.
> 
We used to just turn up for the Debian ones in whatever random geeky-t
people came in.  A couple of years ago, the Register really berated us
for it ;) so we figured we'd show them.

The next expo, we all turned up in black jeans and black embroidered
Debian t-shirts (the ones you tend to see most UK folk in) -- not only
did out stand look so much better, but we actually found we got a _lot_
more interest from the suits and other people we need to be converting.

>  * Hand out fun stickers. I'll see if Canonical can include stickers in big
>    CD orders for shows like this. We had penguin stickers from a local Linux
>    shop - you could see them everywhere, and everyone was asking what they
>    meant. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu should co-opt Tux, but I'm sure we can
>    come up with some cool ideas for catchy stickers -> reply with your ideas
>    please!
> 
I guess you mean large on-people stickers?  We've tried both case badges
and foil-stickers, which we didn't have much success with (but we were
charging, I guess).

>  * Make sure you have a shortlist of features and benefits. If you're at a
>    techy tradeshow, you'll want to explain why Ubuntu ROCKS, so having a set
>    of cool Ubuntu features you can talk about (great forums, cool community,
>    TotallyRadLaptopSupport) and success stories (HP shipping Ubuntu, things
>    that have happened in your region) is a huge help. You'll know them from
>    heart pretty quickly, because you'll be repeating them all the time. :-)
>    We had a mostly non-technical audience, and a general Linux focus, so we
>    were talking about things like "no viruses", the number of useful things
>    that come on the CD by default that don't come with Windows, compelling
>    features like Gaim doing all the different IM protocols in the one window
>    (which girls absolutely loved).
> 
If you're doing an Ubuntu-focussed stand, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW THE
FEATURES EXPECTED IN THE NEXT RELEASE, AND THE RELEASE DATE.  Seriously,
you will be asked this question about ten to twenty times a second.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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