 101, your community from Brian Prophet, former technology journalist, Principal Community Analyst at Red Hat. Thanks for coming, Brian. Thank you. I just need to make sure that I'm actually talking about what I'm telling him. So hi, how are you? Everybody good? Eat all the chocolate. So snacks up here, you're all good. So as Leslie said, I am a former technology journalist. I have been doing, as I counted up, over 25 years of writing about technology, either books or actual newspapers with real paper, mind you, and websites for over 25 years. So maybe they thought I would know what I was talking about. So let's find out. So two important reminders that are going to be very important to this presentation. You must not forget that I do this for American audiences. I don't have to do this, but I'm going to kind of help out. Remember, April is tax time in the United States. This is important. I'm not going to tell you why, because spoil the thing. And the second part of that is, because it's tax time, April is the busiest time of the year for any tax accountants. What am I talking about? Well, let me tell you a story very quickly. About 15 years ago, I used to be a volunteer in a hospital emergency room, or an A&E center, as they call it in Britain. So my job was to help people get from the door to the room where the nurse would see them and say, oh, you just need a band-aid. Oh, you've lost your arm. You need to go into surgery. Things like that. So one night, I'm working at the desk, and I'm letting people in. And in comes this woman who is limping badly. She's been at work, and she's fallen, and she's twisted her ankle. So I get her a wheelchair. I take her to the triage room. We're not very busy, so she goes right in. And all is good. About 15 minutes later, a couple comes in. They're young. He's very handsome. She's very pretty. They're dressed up very well. She's bent over. She has what appears to be food poisoning. So she's very sick. So I get her the pan, just in case. I walk her over to the triage room. The first lady in the wheelchair is still in the room. So I put them in the hallway, and I say, please wait here. The nurse will be right here. I start to go back to my desk. The nurse is done with patient one, the lady in the wheelchair. Wheels are out to the waiting room because it's not very serious. Dating the wheelchair, sees the couple sitting there in the hall, says, what the bleep are you doing here? Turns out lady in the wheelchair was the wife of the gentleman with the other woman who was sick. So it gets really awkward, really bad. And what made it worse, and I'm not going to go into every detail, but basically, lady in the wheelchair, the wife, decided that she was going to get into a physical conflict with both of them. So she stands up in the chair, immediately regrets this decision because her ankle folds out from under her. So she falls down. And now she's trying to kick and hit from the floor. And I'm trying to pull them apart. And we're calling for security. And I'm a nonviolent person. So this is all just really bad. So it turned out that a couple had been there for six years. The lady who had fallen at work was an, ah, that was she? Very good, an accountant. And she was supposed to be working late all through April. So the husband, Mr. Sly Dogg, decided he'd be safe on a date until his date got sick. So there you go, into my story. And why is this even remotely important? Because if I were writing this as a reporter, the first paragraph would have said, a very couple of six years received more than physical injuries Wednesday night when ill-timed visits to the ER brought together the wife, the husband, and his mistress. And then there would have been a blow-by-blow. The point of this is, you have to, when you're talking about your project, you have to know your audience. When I told you that story, we are friends. We are here together. We're hanging out at five. Then we're doing all the cool stuff. We're sharing chocolate. I'm just hanging out. I'm telling you a funny story, right? We do this all the time. And that literally is the funniest story I know. So, which, by the way, says a lot about me, so. Anyway, but if I'm a reporter and you're reading a website or a newspaper or whatever, this is the way I'm gonna tell you the story. Because talking about it and telling a funny anecdote, I've buried the lead, right? But in a news story, you want the lead up front. You wanna pull people in, okay? And regardless of the story and the value thereof, that's what you're gonna put it up front, okay? So, lesson number one, know your audience. If you're a community person and you wanna talk into the media, you're gonna have to know who you're talking to, because what's important to you about your project may not be the thing that the journalist is interested in, and it may not be the thing that the journalist's leaders are interested in, or viewers, if you're talking electronic media. Media has their own story to tell, okay? And most reporters, if they're any good, are probably gonna look for things, for a story, about major changes in the industry. News is about change. It's not about the status quo. Nobody's gonna, I'm sorry, nobody's gonna do a story about the fact that every deaf woman in five-stem is jammed, okay? Because that's not news. That's like saying, oh, look, the sun came up today. Okay, that's, but if somebody did a story like Heaven Forbid that Bosnian was under attended, you know, that might be a story, okay? It's a change, something new, or something that has larger system effects, okay? An acquisition of one company here might affect a broader ecosystem in the technology. A change to a community project and their dependencies may have ripple effects all across your ecosystem, okay? If you decide to, like, I don't know, switch from one compiler to another, you know? This is an example. Those are the kinds of things that journalists are gonna be looking for when you talk to them. And the problem is we usually have the story in our heads that I'm writing the coolest piece of software ever. And it's gonna be awesome. And it really probably is, okay? But the thing about it is so is everybody else. They're all writing the coolest piece of software. So you have to figure out a way to tell your story in a way that makes, you know, a media journalist kind of figure out, you know, how to tell your story too. You've got to get them interested. So how do we get them connected with you, okay? So there's three major ways. First thing is to get personal. Time and time again, what a lot of people do is so talk to somebody who's in public relations. And the public relations person says, well, tell me about your project. I'll write a press release for you. And we'll send it to every reporter we know, okay? I can guarantee you that every reporter they know has seen wave after wave of press releases that may or may not interest them. And even if they are genuinely part of their, you know, the beat that they cover, they're just gonna hit delete. Reporters have bandwidth issues. They can't cover everything, okay? They can't talk about every new startup. And PR people who will tell you that the best way to go about hitting the media is to just blitz everybody, they are sadly mistaken. I guarantee you that most reporters are just gonna turn that off. It's just noise and they don't want to hear it. So you have to be targeted in who you talk to. You, as a community person, if you don't have a budget for a PR person, you're gonna have to do this yourself, okay? So you need to think about who is writing in my industry. Like when, if I'm working on, I'm just gonna pick on this, a virtualization project, okay? Who's writing about other virtualization projects? Not mine necessarily, but you know, who's talking about VMware? Who's talking about cloud services and, you know, whatever, KVM, you find those people and you target your message towards them, okay? Another thing that you need to do is pitch softly, okay? You wanna make sure that the writer, once you find the right journalist, and I do say writer a lot and I'm not discounting radio and television, but in our business, probably the first people you're going to reach, unless you're very lucky, is gonna be somebody who's writing for a website or a blog. You wanna find, once you find a writer in question, you wanna fine-tune the pitch to them. You don't wanna, you know, you wanna make sure that you look at the recent work and find connections to the story that they told, or they've been telling, but you also need to be careful here, because I've seen this, you know, so a nicer way of doing this would be, hey, I just saw your recent article about, you know, high-tech blankets and I wanted to mention the Warm Feet Project, you know, which is, we feel is a great way of solving the eternal problem of freezing feet, okay? Something like that. I'm a journalist, not a novelist. Take it easy, okay? All right? But, what you don't wanna do is say, hey, I just saw your article and you didn't mention the Warm Feet Project at all and you just are a title writer and I want you to write an article about my project right now. Hand to God, I've gotten dozens of those, okay? What do you think my reaction was? You don't know me very well, yeah, well, delete, yeah. I might actually reply, but that's another thing, but, okay. So you wanna be cool about it, you know? Yeah, hey, you were talking about this, we're part of that technology sphere too. Would you like to look at us? And if they say no, that's okay because you're trying to establish connections. It may be slow and that's frustrating, but you gotta do it and basically be relevant. What you do not want to do, how many people have heard the term open washing? Or cloud washing, that's a good one. Do you know that when I was a reporter, well, no, you don't know, I don't even think I counted. How many times I got some press release or pitch that was talking about now made for the cloud, you know, like toothbrushes made for the cloud. I'm not kidding, okay, you get that stuff all the time and something washing is a common effect in this industry. Oh, cloud is hot, so I'm gonna try to make my whatever, my gizmo, my software, whatever, I'm gonna try to make that relevant to the hot thing. Right now, it's containers. So if I were a reporter right now, I'm sure my inbox would be full of container-oriented stories. Okay, don't do that unless it's valid. I mean, if you've got a container story, then by all means go tell your container story, but don't change your story or try to paint a new picture of it just to try to get in with a certain media person or media outlet. Key that in, stay on target. I like Star Wars, so it works. Okay, you wanna be talking about what you are good at. I call this stay in your lane. Last week, a reporter from AP contacted me. I wanted me to answer questions about how Red Hat was dealing with the specter and meltdown crisis. I'm like, I don't know anything about that. I'm a community guy, I'm not a kernel developer. Now, if I were an idiot, I would have said, sure, I'll talk to the reporter. You know, no, that's bad. I stayed in my lane. I found somebody else to talk to the reporter. You need to do that too. If don't get excited if somebody says, hey, you wanna comment on this? And you think, I'm gonna get my project in the website or newspaper or whatever. Don't do that. Stay relevant, okay? Other things that you wanted. So, you know, talk about what you know and don't stray from that. Also, a related point, don't be a gossip. Three weeks ago, I got somebody from a popular radio show in the US. I don't know where these people are finding me. They wanted me to talk about IBM. Okay, I don't know what they wanted to talk to me about IBM for, because I've never worked for IBM, but I was not talking to them about IBM. Because I don't, you know, I use their computer. You know, no, it's Lenovo. I don't even use their computers anymore. I got nothing, you know. Don't be a gossip. Because every once in a while, like, oh, let's see, I'm trying to think, there's this guy, he developed a Linux kernel and sometimes he says things controversial. What's that guy's name? Something, I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, so there will be people come around and say, hey, what do you think about what Lena said? You know, you know, and you'll be like, well, that guy's a total, you know, don't do that. It might get your name in the website. It might get your project in the website, because you're gonna want to say so and so of the such-and-such project said this about Lena Sorovall. That may have, not only are you burning bridges, then you kind of get the reputation of somebody who's talking out of schools, we say, in the United States. So you don't want to do that, as tempting as that is. No comment is a great way of doing it, even if you think you're sacrificing a way to connect. Also, be reachable. I know we live in an era of privacy. I know that privacy is very important, it's certainly important to me, but you need to have your contact information out there so people can find you, because this has happened to me as a reporter a billion times. Hey, I bet the person that runs Project Awesome would be great to talk to you about this story I'm doing about awesome tech, you know, and the coolest software projects in the world, if only I could find his or her email address. Oops, you know, and that has happened so many times. You've got to be reachable. Make a fake email, like press at yourproject.org or whatever, do that, maintain your privacy, that's cool, but definitely have a contact link so people can reach out to you and find out what you're about. Another thing you need to do is make sure you onboard for the media too. Now onboarding is a concept that really needs to get a lot more attention. Onboarding is when you make it very easy for new people to come to your project and figure out what it is, how to use it, and why they want to use it. And then make sure you give them a link to download it if you're software, okay? Or buy it if you're hardware, whatever you're doing, okay? Onboarding is very important for new users and it is very important for journalists as well. Journalists need to see what you're doing and what you're about. It's very difficult for journalists to come in because they just don't have the bandwidth and try to sit there and say, is this a cloud project? Is this virtualization? What's going on? I don't know, you know? And so, you basically lost them. In the old days we used to hand out kits, physical things. We'd have the software, we'd have pamphlets, we'd have sheets of paper with folders and they were all laminated and multi-tasked and tabbed and things like that. We don't do that anymore. You put that on your website. If you really, really want to have something to hand out, put it on a USB stick and hand that to a reporter at a conference. Build something, make sure that you have a very clear, concise language on what your project is. Make it easier for media people. Also, be concise, okay? Journalists and writers used to have physical constraints when I started as an oldster on the paper with actual ink, right? I, stories are measured in inches or centimeters in Europe, okay? You had a certain amount of space. If you wrote too much, your story would be cut, you know, cut off. Electronic media like websites, we don't have that problem anymore. You can pretty much write all you want but there is such a thing about being brief, okay? So, don't be surprised if the story that you started telling the reporter about the dumb thing that your developer did like last Tuesday, you know, finally ends. So, that's it. I did wanna, yeah, question. You put your questions and I actually have a question. Yeah, you can give me, yeah, so you can give me a question, go. So, in the past, there were, you know, resources to help media out were, like, the actual? Yes, Harrow, she's referring to an online database that sort of like kind of tried to connect all the different disparate free and open source projects known as Harrow. Harrow is still out there. I have used it in quite some time so I'm not sure how active it is but there are places for you to go in the free and open source software community to kind of get your name out there. Your website should be your front door. Definitely. Your social media presence, which I didn't really talk about, is also a way to do that as well. There are a lot of people who say, why do I need to worry about media when I've got social media and I can just tell my story all the live long day. There's a certain US politician that uses Twitter a lot. I don't see a decrease in the amount of news story about this guy, okay? So you can tweet and Facebook and Google Plus and diaspora all you want, that's fine. But the content that you do on social media that's most compelling are actually long form articles about you, okay? But yeah, so to the question, there are additional resources out there. And I'm not saying, by the way, that all PR people are bad. You just have to find ones who know what they're doing and don't promise the moon. Question? You. Oh, I'm good, no. Yes, and I brought up the example of the blanket and the warm feet and things like that. If you are a part of that broader ecosystem, then definitely jump in. If you are, as you say, orthogonally tied to that, yes, do that, but you need to be very careful. It's gotta, it can't look awkward, okay? It's gotta be a legitimate connection and that's the important thing. But, and if some people have done this, they're like, oh, everybody's moving to the cloud. We need to add cloud functionality to our application. If you have done that, then yeah, that will tell the story. This is an example. Sure, I mentioned that.