Event Marketing for Today's Developer Evangelists and Community Managers

Key Takeaways

[Music] thanks to Cisco for sponsoring our day of podcasting at Kubek on we had some great conversations thanks again to Cisco you can learn more about cisco and their micro services platform at mantle do that's ma n TL dot IO hey it's alex williams the new stack here in a wednesday afternoon at Kubek on here in seattle in here with michael franti and priyanka sharma how are you doing good thank you curry right great Branca Michael tell us a little about who know who you are what you do I know you guys both are in community management now that's the topic I'd really like to discuss today you know unity management community management in the Korean Korean etnies ecosystem and like connecting with developers and just your experiences with that so Parker tell it tell us a little bit about yourself and who you're with sure so I'm Priyanka and currently I work on the open tracing project I'm employed by light stepping which is a start-up in the distributed tracing space my background is more in developer products rather than community management if I were to write pick a segment I built my own company before which is an open-source time tracker and that's where I really got to know the developer community aspect okay guys we built it out from zero bootstrapped and over 100,000 developers in our community and because of that I got in touch with a lot of other cool dev products which are slightly further along series a be sometimes even larger companies and I advise and help a lot of them and so I would say my background is def products which inherently includes community manager yes and says yeah Michael so uh michael franti and i'm the vp of marketing cluster HQ uh we make tools for developers who are running databases in containers arm uh previous the cluster HQ I spent about five years of rackspace are where amongst other things I worked on rackspace cloud other early days of OpenStack Bob and then most recently are a tool called mail gun which is an email API for developers so I've been working on with developer products and developer tools are for almost eight years now on and it's it's great it's it's a really fun community arm I think like you said you know community management is only you can't really think about doing community management for developers well unless you're thinking about product things and you know how the api's work and how the CL eyes work it's it's a different type of community in it it's very technical role but it's also really rewarding a really fun so how do you guys approach that role I have the in terms of uh developer did you know working on developer products but also thinking about how you approach that differently especially when there's like it there they're open source projects sure so I would say one of the biggest differences that I've seen when you're working on a developer product versus others is that in traditional marketing it's a numbers game and it's much more about you know how many leads lists can you find well what's the mass numbers situation while in developer marketing it's a much more personalized approach that works so you want to create and connect a connection with each developer and make it very personable to them and that's what wins specifically in the developer space and that's what excites me to be in it too mm-hmm Michael yeah I agree with that I think one point to add would just be um so if you haven't done developer marketing before on it can seem really scary and more and more kind of traditional like even if you're a tech marketer let's say you you know spent a decade at at HP or or some of the business divisions of companies like Microsoft that happens traditionally focused on developer first on Dave in IT shops on developer marketing can seem scary but I think one of the one of the things to remember is that like developers are people and to be good at marketing need to understand your audience and um really developers care about specific things but once you understand what those things are on and they can be things that aren't traditionally areas that marketers think about so for instance documentation if you're doing developer marketing you need to understand that the way to developers heart is through documentation and documentation has tended to be such an afterthought for marketing teams it's look like let's focus on the on the web page let's focus on the mobile app and you know if we get that right then people are gonna love us on and that's an important part of the overall story developers go to web pages just like everybody else but if the follow-through isn't there if the documentation is not there if the CLI command line help isn't there I'm and I think that's one of the traps that um so marketers can fall into working with developer communities is that the forget about that type of stuff I mean that's especially problematic if you're not kind of a developer yourself um but once you understand that you know there there's kind of a playbook for developers the way there's a playbook for any product on you can do really really often to market not forget about really important pieces of a puzzle and connect with those communities yeah I think a general way people approach marketing is is it like a b2b product or a b2c product and those are two categories right enterprise versus director consumer and both have some pretty different strategies when it comes to marketing in my experience a developer product is usually neither exclusively and it falls in the middle and the reason for that is that while you are most often especially if you have a bottoms-up approach which most products do while you're most often reaching out to one individual at a time first there's way fewer of those there's over 6 billion people in the world but there's less than 25 million developers stats vary but there's not that much really just a small group of people exactly exactly and so that's one thing and then the second thing is that developers usually are well they'd have to be highly educated and also are going to bring in once their team buy the product a significant revenue source for the company so that's why it's kind of in the middle between being direct to consumer versus b2b marketing and all these strategies with that we're discussing now kind of address that where you have to make a connection with the person and still find a way to scale out with things like Doc's and all that so what's your profile of the coup benetti's developer yeah that's um that's a good question and i don't think i have a great answer for you it's a pretty diverse group um [Music] so first i think you know this this is a team or this is a community where um kind of developer and operations roles are two are tending to merge so with kerber Nettie's we're seeing more than structure as code which means that people are developing software but are also operating software the reason they're they're bringing on Cooper Nettie's is to kind of ease the operational burden um so not to be pedantic but I think that's one part of it which is that this is a community that cares about operations um and that's different from other developer communities for instance you know uh you know just to take an easy example mobile app developers who don't have to think about the operational aspects um you know if your operational environment is a calculator app that's running on an iPhone it's a different it's a different set of questions um so that's really fun to work with I think people are coming at uber Nettie's from a couple of different backgrounds one is kind of from the oxide on the other is from the pure def side but they're kind of meeting in the middle and that that's really fun yeah my experience with the kokuboro Nettie's community has happened primarily through the open tracing project will be found very interestingly that even though open tracing is about racing in the application layer people in the Kobernus community are really interested in it and i think the reasons reason goes back to what you were saying where this is engineering and operations so these are people who are able to look at both sides of the spectrum and so they're they're realizing oh things like full visibility through your micro services is a good thing in comparison to the other communities I worked with many of whom have been you know mostly web developers some freelance communities as well as a lot of API dubs through postman at sara is that just the expertise level is higher here that's my experience a lot of the people I've met you know because they got interested in tracing our engineering leaders in their organizations they are the ones who are thinking about how to make the system scale how to keep it running how to think about performance issues so the experience level and skill set is pretty high compared to yeah I would absolutely second that this is a really really smart group of people it keeps you on your toes I get really like you know the the high level um feel good pitch that you give it a booth you can get away with at some conferences um you can't get away with here people really quickly get into the nitty-gritty um which actually makes it lots of fun for um this is a little bit of an aside but I think one of the things about community management is kind of how you think about staffing your your trade show booth I mean this is a trade show like any other trade show um but you can't like you can't bring the the quote-unquote marketing people and I'm VP of Marketing so I say that with love it gets it's a different audience so when we come to these types of shows we love to bring our our Colonel engineers and we love to bring our you know our our back-end API folks because they're the ones that really really get it they tend to have the operational knowledge and empathy on that the audience has and they get a ton out of it on in fact on one of our engineers came out with this for the show this is his first his for show and he is both tired of talking all day long and really really excited more excited he's been about arm our product in a long time mainly because a kid's day to day is building the product and you know product and marketing or out talking users on but you know you get into a rhythm where you're you're building the product can you lose a little bit of at the outside um here you come to a show here and you get to talk to the user and look the point I'm making there is just that this audience needs to be really really technical and when you think about community management how you succeed shows like this you need to make sure you recognize that and bring the right type of people to have those conversations I would one hundred percent second that so as open tracing we came to this conference and partly because we're in the CNC f umbrella and we were interested okay there's two people here representing open tracing how is this going to work out because when you think of staffing events like this usually it's like teams of marketing members but what we saw here we had a small session on a different floor which in usually we have many think of conferences you're like oh it's on a different floor no one's going to go it was packed and that's because there was Ben siegelman was there who had to open tracing but Adrian Cole who hits Zipkin and also lifts engineering leads they were all there to help people and think about these difficult problems and so people found a way they somehow managed to not get lost some told me they got lost three times but this still made it that's different from your average conference this is a community that needs to solve hard problems and once they know that there's you know somebody who can help them they're going to find yeah people at people here cuz they really care i think that's um you know this conference on dr. Khan is like that I think it's you newer projects tend to attract people that are just interested arm for good reasons arm and this is definitely one of those conferences so people tend to you go to the sessions they're not you know looking at those as a way to go off and you know gets on some time to check on emails and things like that they really do seek out that those great topics even conversations in this area over here I find very different from the average conference and the what I usually see often is like there'll be lots of people giving up swagg stickers all that and all that still like it's always relevant but here time per person has been a lot higher I've myself spent 10 15 sometimes even 30 minutes talking to one person because we're having a detailed discussion we're talking about what's their infrastructure like are they are they interested in tracing have they heard about it even if people who've never heard about it they want to know more and people invest time I think over here to really learn and you see it even in walking around yeah I mean you as a marketer um you know you put a lot of time and effort into the swag and you want it you want to give something that people that they're gonna like um at conferences like this I find that you know you have that great 15 20 minute conversation you forget that like you've got a t-shirt or a pen or something like that you say would you like a teacher like oh yeah and I hadn't thought about like that I would get it by coming to talk to you whereas some conferences it's like you know come up ask the perfunctory question can i get my t-shirt now and that's not like it's not like that at this conference ah so that leaves many questions how do you prepare your marketing for a conference like this you know what are some of the things you take into consideration like you know yet the you know how you prepare your employees how you know your engineers how you you know what swag you bring what you know stickers you bring the signage how does how how know how do you prepare for a show like this like I can start um you know so one of the things that um I don't try to do is over prepare so you want you want to be prepared but you don't want to come off as an often unauthentic um so you know every every person at your company should understand what the mission of your company is what your company does how you make money like those are just the basics that every employee should understand how each employee expresses those ideas can vary a lot on and I found especially with engineers if you try to go to script it and say like you know dislike describe the product using these words on it comes off as really on authentic and it doesn't give them the room to make a connection with the person they're talking to chances are that engineer knows more about top well not not even chances are that engineers and those a lot more about the product than you as a marketer do and you should give them the opportunity to connect with a person that they're talking to that wants to understand the product at a different level maybe it's the use case that you've just rolled out with the new feature on is not the hook that's going to get the person interested that they're speaking to now what's going to get that person interested is that you're using cloture you're using you know you're using go in like that so the hook that's what creates that personal connection and once that person kind of trust that you're confident technical team then they're more open to receiving well like okay that's that's really awesome that using go are you going to be at that conference next week yes am ok well let's catch up then and so like in into what do you do there's like that hook now I mean when you try to script it too much arm then that you don't you don't let that happen um after that you know I would say my one piece of a kind of conference swagg advice for people would be you know if you're gonna do conference swag spend more money on something that people aren't just going to throw away that's kind of you know we uh we put a lot of time and effort into thinking through our t-shirt designs like making sure that something that people actually know where I'm cuz you can cut you can get inexpensive t-shirts and you can have something giveaway other than people wash the car with them on or or or or worse so um and the other thing is more and more people come to these like these are family-oriented events so some fun things that we've done in the past is we've actually um the printed t-shirts and children sizes um definitely we do men's and women's and unisex arms you have coverage there but then also it's fun some people come to these events and they look for stuff for their kids and really what you care about is you want to create that personal connection so if that person doesn't wear your t shirt but their son does like they're like you're gonna be you're gonna make their down a hero big advantage bureau with with their with their child and and that creates that personal connection as well so I would say all in all it's looking for opportunities to create personal connections that gives you an opportunity to talk about your technology my perspective on this coming from the open source project representing at a conference like this is a slightly different one is that you have less lesser resources so for us in this case been single men who co-authored open tracing and I were the two represent representatives here and the way we thought about staffing this event and planning for it is that there's we're not that many in numbers but we can amplify the message if other thought leaders here also are excited about tracing so it's about letting people know who are in your community like Adrian coal pushing for tracing and the workshops is important things like that so being super prepared like amplifying your message we are twitter by getting sort of allies is really useful along the way for us every person who is representing open tracing it's critical that they understand the value proposition and the technical details as much as possible as we look to having more marketing support that's something that's critical as a community and marketing leader I think every person who's ever talking to anybody needs to understand the product to at least be able to have minute conversation and as someone who has a poli sci degree I think it's completely doable to get to a point where you're doing tracing yourself it decides to so so that's how I would save it when you're a project it's like you're fewer people but you should amplify more and make sure whoever is there is a thought leader and can have detailed discussions how do you then follow up on those personal connections for an event like this because you know from what you guys are telling me the people who are coming these event or highly technical they're highly they thoroughly understand the technologies they thoroughly understand you know they understand their work very well they understand their work they are part developer part engineer part operations people so once you make so if you make that personal connection then then one of the your what are your next steps with them know following up and and you know what are you trying to achieve out of that not a drip email campaign that's that's for sure I mean that I think that you know the the standard marketing arm with tactic around lead generation at events doesn't really work with these types of communities so you know you know you go to some shows and you're walking down the hallway and like someone is gonna you know lunge out at you and try to scan your badge like like if they're successful then that email is going to go right to strip them and you're going to have a worse impression of that company afterwards so so definitely not that email has a place in developers read email and they they look forward to good emails from companies that they that they value so it's not that email is not a part of the outreach it's just like that that's not the goal um I think things that we try to do is get people involved with people in the company who aren't in marketing so for instance um you know we have a couple of open source projects of cluster HQ when we're talking to two users I mean they come back and they say hey I'm using the product and I had a question about this or you know it happens you know I tried this and it didn't work what we try to do then is well you know open up an issue on github because we want to get that person engaged and you know our developers are always looking for feedback on the application like they love it when someone puts in an issue on github and is willing to invest time describing the issue reproducing the issue and then working on to test a solution so the things like that where it's not you know marketing isn't getting a quote unquote lead for their list um you know the company is getting a potential promoter and we have an opportunity to win that person over so things like that getting people on to join our IRC channel as a user or are you google user group on submit issues on github on describe how they complain the contributor on those things in addition to you know asking them nicely if they would like to be added to our newsletter getting that opposite that proactive opt-in to make sure that as soon as they don't get it they're not unsubscribing or just sending it directly to spam I think those are some of the ways in which you can stay connected with people after the conference is over i would say that when you are dealing with deeply technical topics such as tracing knowledge disseminating that is the win so the fact that i have probably talked to 50 people at this conference and that they've learned a little bit more about distributed tracing itself is open so very similar to what you say it's not a legion mechanism but more about its making sure people are aware of something and then from a whole conference if even one open source contributor takes an interest in the project that's huge you know that could move the project forward so much more and so these conversations in itself are the goal is step one and the second is for the people you do exchange emails with your sure that there's very strong interest to know more so my personal approach everybody does it differently is going to be that once you know the conference whoo-hoo guru has died down is to look through all the people have talked to have notes about everybody I did then have a one-on-one reach out now this only works to a certain degree but as an open source project I believe is a better use of my time to reach out to these people and as long as they get to the point that they know there are dogs available and their commute this is where you can reach the community then it's on the developer they know when they need this and they'll be able to reach out to us and that's my goal over here so obviously the the end goal one of the angles over time is you know is maybe having them sign up for commercial distribution or something you know but but that can take a while right that can take some time to do and you may not even be ready for that as I bet you know as a as an organization you may not even be offering your commercial usage what is so how do you fill in the gaps because you can't reach everybody right I mean what is it that you're doing for instance online you know after this conference to kind of fill in those gaps like how do you approach documentation for example how do you approach like your blogging strategy okay how do you approach like you know all these different things I mean that's where you just you know you can't do a lot of that you need by yourself but it takes kind of a now it takes kind of a more kind of a concerted effort doesn't it so I can answer how we are thinking about you know basically content and how it can move the conversation forward right effect documentation is a great place to start so the way open tracing does it it's open so people have and have a voice in terms of what what they want to see and what they don't being at a conference like this has been really eye-opening for me that when someone is already at a high level as as an engineer then what are the knowledge gaps are they asking you questions like hey what is is tracing different from monitoring and logging or are they asking you questions like how do i do context propagation right and so based on the questions you hear you know what documentation zar more important and then you improve that and that's where your notes have actually a greater value than just the individual notes on the person exactly and if let's say this conference is the type of people you want to attract then those are the things you're right right rather than what you here at a different conference which might not be your target as much so that's one big one on documentation when it comes to content I think this conference specifically for us has been really useful to know that while not everybody is doing distribute racing right now that doesn't mean they don't want to hear case studies as a project we hadn't we have tons of it's a logo wall like so many big companies are using open tracing right but we haven't put out the case studies yet and now we know it's an amor it's an important priority should we come into the new stock or action and sending us contributed articles are serious that's awesome yeah good to know so a couple things i would add on the content side so one of the things that's actually hard these days is filling in the matrix of tools that your tool needs to work with in order to provide a complete solution um so as great as you know storage for containers is or as great as tracing is like people people aren't their mission is not to deploy container storage or deploy tracing its to build an application and that means they're using other components so one of the things that we do we have this thing that we call the blog matrix which is basically a spreadsheet with a row along the top and a column down the side and we just like we put in all the tools that we want to work with all the other tools and we start to we start to use that as a dou X with y matrix on and typically the week we will if we have say five different use cases we can kind of mix and match on you know use case one with tool aids will be used case 22 with tools see in two tool d and we kind of can mix and match to it doesn't get repetitive for the for the people who are writing it gives um you know our our developers and our evangelists chance to learn new tools and to learn how other people in the community are doing things it gives them more knowledge that they can bring to conversations it also generates a lot of blog content that is great for us to go so when people are searching for how to solve these problems on a particular framework of for Cooper Nettie's or maybe they're using nisos then we have kind of the you know we have enough raw material that goop won't see okay you know they're looking within this area and this company is an authority there and they also have this content about visible or that tool I'm it needs to actually drive enormous amount of traffic we have the oddest at a concerted effort to do this towards the beginning of last year and we were able to triple the number of unique blog visitors and I believe four and a half months on and it was it wasn't free in the sense that it took time um but it like these articles that we wrote nine months ago 12 months ago are still bringing new people into the site that's currently man having them discover us for the first time so it's it it paid back that's a great strategy with the matrix well thank you both for taking some time to kind of luminate kind of this whole idea about developer marketing and especially kind of in the context of Cooper Nettie's it's been very helpful for me to better understand kind of what you guys do and like a little bit more about the community as well so thanks for your time yes was fun thanks for having us [Music] thanks to Cisco for sponsoring our day of podcasting at Kubek on we had some great conversations thanks again to cisco you can learn more about cisco and their micro services platform at mantle do that's ma n TL dot IO [Music]