Subject: Re: About IETF communication skills

From: Mark Seery <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:55:41 -0700 (PDT)

Another strategy that might be worth pursuing is getting the questions from the journalist and responding in writing. If the response is long then there is a chance it will get paraphrased / mangled. If the response is short there is a higher chance it will be quoted as is.
In the event a reporter wants the interactive dialog to flesh out some issues then maybe you could try the approach of having the dialog and then following up with some quotable statements about the topic. That approach has worked for me occassionally.
Lastly, may be there needs to be a ranking/reputation site for reporters ;-)

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From: "Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 00:52:42 +0200

>From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>

>On Jul 31, 2008, at 5:52 PM, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:
>
>> Some considered that part of the delay of the IPv6 deployment was
>> due to the lack of communication effort from IETF. I'm not really
>> sure about that, however I agree that everything helps, of course.
>
>To be honest, I think IPv6 has been overmarketed.

and

>But IPv6 was heavily marketed. That leaves people saying, now that the
>problem is materializing, "yeah, yeah, yeah, been hearing about that
>for years."

Permit me to say that IMHO you are both right and wrong.
Yes, IPv6 was heavily marketed as "immediate death of the IPv4 net 
predicted" for so many years that I heard this kind of reply for many years. 
Uninformed people just don't believe the "hype" that IPv4 addresses are 
running out. After all, this is indeed the same stuff we used to feed them 
10 years ago.

But overmarketed, I disagree. Mis-marketed might be the term to use.

IPv6 needs to be marketed to a vast variety of stakeholders:
- end individual users
- corporate commercial users
- ISPs
- Governments
- Organisations

The mistake that might have been committed in the past is to hold the same 
kind of talk to each one of those stakeholders. This doesn't work. Each 
group is going to need specific, targeted marketing, ranging from "how do I 
connect to IPv6" to "why should we run IPv6", to "what is IPv6" - in this 
day and age, the message needs to be targeted to each group for it to be 
effective.

This has, so far, not been done.

Easy wins could be making IPv6 trendy with users by having a v6 logo 
(clearly like "super-charge your Internet with v6"), à la "Intel Inside" or 
"Designed for Vista" kinds of logo.
Industry has to be convinced. This is another marketing stream. You do not 
speak to a banker with the same language as you speak to an engineer. 
"running out of IPv4 addresses" means nothing to a banker. On the other hand 
"IPv6 will be cheaper than IPv4" makes sense to a lot of people. Instead, 
the current image of IPv6 is that it is expensive, you get deteriorated 
service, it is unsafe, it is complex, etc. etc.

IPv6 is really suffering from an image problem. Marketing of IPv6 is only 
beginning and the task ahead is huge because all of those years of 
mis-marketing by having the single slogan "we are running out of IPv4 
addresses" just doesn't quite hit the target anymore.

I attended ICANN Paris & 2 days at IETF Dublin. Two different worlds. One is 
beginning to understand that we need to act now. The other is still 
gallavanting around other subjects. It will take time and energy to make 
everybody know that it is their concern and that if they don't start putting 
their act together today, the costs in the near future (4 years) will amount 
to more than they've ever imagined.

Required IPv6 reading: La Fontaine's "La Cigale et la Fourmi"
http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue209/cigale.html

Olivier

-- 
Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond, Ph.D.
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