 Hi, I'm Ricky. Welcome to Marketing Open Source. Today, I want to set expectations. You will not learn everything you need to know about Marketing Open Source, but we want to give you a jumping off point. Deirdre and I will talk about how to get started with Marketing Open Source projects. We'll run through a checklist of ideas and questions you'll need to ask yourself and answer to create a marketing plan and begin rolling it out. By the end of this quick talk, we will have outlined a checklist for you to get started with marketing your Open Source project. I'm Deirdre, and I'm here to talk to you about marketing, starting with why you need it. I know that the commercial emphasis of traditional marketing can feel uncomfortable in the open source world, but I invite you to think about it this way. In open source, you may not be asking directly for money, but you are asking people to give their time and attention and perhaps code and other kinds of contributions to support your ideas. Time and attention are valuable resources. To attain them, you need to do marketing, even in open source. Here's why. The open source marketplace is huge and growing. There were already over 100 million projects on GitHub a year ago. How does anyone choose which projects to give their time and effort to? Marketing can help people make those decisions. What will marketing get you? The main resource your project needs are people, users and contributors. They may make contributions to a project entirely on their own time, but more commonly nowadays, people are assigned or hired to work on a project by a company. Either way, people are your primary resource. The other resource a project may need is money, or the things that money can buy, which includes people's time to work on it. So yes, money does come into the equation even when the thing your marketing does not have a price tag. So how do you get started on doing the marketing that will attract the human and other resources you need to a project? First, get organized. What resources do you have now? You will want to work within what's reasonable for your resources, whether that means budget, staffing or technical resources. So if you only have a three-person team, do not roll out a 20-person marketing plan. In a previous marketing-related job I had, I was asked to help build a large user group community of industry experts, but I wasn't giving any additional staffing to do it, and building and managing the community was supposed to be on top of my regular full-time job. As I dug into what it would take to build and manage the community, I talked with colleagues who managed a similar community within our organization. They confirmed my suspicions. The effort was simply too big for my team's current resources. The other team had multiple people dedicated to their project, whereas my team was attempting to tackle something similar with no additional staffing. Although I could have moved forward and created a new community, our strap team would not have been able to collaborate effectively with it or maintain this new user group. Ultimately, I shared my findings with my manager, and I recommended that we hold off launching community-large, community-related marketing efforts until dedicated staff could be hired and trained and put on the assignment. Do, however, work with your existing and growing community. What people say about your product or project can carry more weight than what you will ever say about it. Make marketing your project easy for your community. With that in mind, let's take a moment to talk about the marketing power of stickers and open source. If you don't have a large budget for swag and sponsorships, at a minimum send out stickers. A few years ago, I interviewed a bunch of open source folks for an article on opensource.com called Sticky Situation, the Serious Business of Stickers and Open Source, and I was fascinated by how enthusiastic people were about collecting, displaying, and sharing stickers. I interviewed Ben Cotton, the Fedora program manager at Red Hat, and he told me that his favorite stickers are ones he thought likely earned. Can you have stickers that community members earn for your project? For example, Ben's favorite is the one he gets for the annual SysAdvent blogging month, in which community members contribute sysadvent-related blog posts throughout the month of December. Maybe this kind of idea could help engage your community and create content on your site. For example, could you ask community members to send in stories about ways your project does help them, or perhaps have your own how-to writing challenge in which contributors answer questions your project users have as part of the blog series? There are many ways to engage your community members to help improve and promote your project, and for some of them, an exclusive sticker can actually be a big incentive. Or perhaps you can provide virtual incentives and online recognition, such as membership in the Community Advisory Board. I don't want to dive too much into communities, the community management in this brief talk, but do not make the mistake of thinking that community will create and nurture itself around your project. Someone will lead the community, and if you want to be involved in the direction the community takes and help lead the conversation, you or someone in your organization needs to be in the thick of it. Assuming that community is everyone's job is a great way to make sure that no one is nurturing your community. Outline your marketing goals and writing. Think of it as a thesis statement in an article. It helps keep you focused. Having clearly defined reasonable goals will help your team stay focused on the marketing that matters, rather than throwing messages against a wall hoping that something will stick. What are the desired outcomes of your marketing efforts? Do you want to increase product adoption, gain contributors, or something else? Build your marketing content plan around these marketing goals. Content that does not support your marketing goals might lie outside the scope of your marketing efforts. It might sound like fun to create that content, but if it doesn't help you hit your goals, maybe it needs to be fun for somebody else to create. Having a smaller, focused, high quality content approach will help serve you better than creating and blasting large quantities of low quality or off topic content out into the wild and hoping that something works. You need to identify your audience. Marketers use the concept of the persona. A persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For an open source project, likely personas include developers, DevOps, IT managers, maybe CTOs and CIOs. When evaluating software, they all care about somewhat different things, so effective marketing will include messaging designed specifically for each of them. Having clear personas in mind will help you focus your messaging so you can get better results with less effort. The point of marketing is to persuade someone to do something. In commercial marketing, you generally want someone to buy something. In open source, you probably want them to use and contribute. You can use personas to help you understand your audiences and then to think about what to say to persuade each of them to use and contribute to your project. Locate your audience. You have people you want to reach. Where are they hanging out? Once you've identified the audiences you want to reach, you'll need to figure out where and how to reach them. Where do they hang out and where do they gather information? This will vary by persona and by the individual. They might be reading one or more company blogs or blog sites like Medium and Depth 2. They might be on Stack Overflow. They might watch live coding on Twitch or tutorial videos on YouTube. Maybe they're really old school and they're hanging out in IRC. They're probably doing a few of these things. Wherever they are, you need to be there too. And if you don't have the resources to be in all the places, and you probably don't, you'll need to make the tough call. Where can you get your highest return on your efforts and what will work within your resources? How do they consume content? Unless you have a large team, you cannot create content for every platform. What content makes the most sense for you to create? What will give you the highest ROI with the least amount of effort? For example, why create your own company blog if you don't have the resources to edit, promote, manage, and maintain it? Instead, consider publishing on existing platforms. For example, community blogs and sites like Depth 2 and the Newstack and opensource.com. Newsletters are a great way to connect with audiences, and of course, speaking at events is a good option. What content does your audience want and in what formats? Some of the best content advice I've ever gotten in my creator was to give people content in a way in which they want to consume it. Will tutorials work best for your audience? Developers, for example, tend to like quick how-to videos and articles and deep-dived technical tutorials. Do people have questions about your open source project? Answers to questions are potentially great topics for articles and videos, and they tend to do really well in search. Even better, they don't have to be long articles or videos. Short answers that solve problems on golden. Live coding is a thing that some people really love. Is this a potential low overhead way to reach your audience and help them use your solution? Or maybe you have case studies you can share. YouTube how-tos are a great way to reach a large audience. Also, depending on the topic, YouTube video transcripts can be edited pretty easily into blog posts. Are events a good option for you and your topic? If so, what does that look like now for you? Should you participate in existing online events, or is there an option for you to host your own small, highly focused online event, or weekly online Q&A, office hours, or coffee breaks with developers from your projects? Would developer presentations to teams, organizations, or other audiences be a Zoom or other video conference and services work well for you right now? How can you help your audience? Always focus on the problem that your audience faces and how your project will help solve it. As a creator, it's easy to get excited about just how cool your technology is. And indeed, it is. But what your audience cares about is how they can use your cool thing to do their own amazing stuff. So it'll be very clear not only about what your project does, but when and why and how people can use it to do great things, provide solutions. People often tell you directly or indirectly what they need. For example, when a question shows up repeatedly, say on a discussion forum, that's an opportunity for you to answer it once and for all in content that you know will be popular. Make those solutions easy to consume. Short articles and in-depth tutorials will often work better than white papers or long videos. But what works best will vary both by broad categories, in other words personas, and by individual tastes. For example, for an in-depth technical tutorial, some people prefer learning by reading and trying things out on their own. Others prefer to watch someone else do it by a live coding or in a video. We'll talk later about how you can satisfy the needs of different learning styles without breaking your budget to create many different kinds of content. Make those solutions easy to find. As we said before, know where your audience is hanging out and speak to them where they are. But you can also try to reach new audiences who might not yet be thinking about a technology like yours. For that, let Google help you. Use search engine optimization on your content. Over time, you will likely find that most of your traffic comes from search engines. Search engine optimization can help you get more. SEO is an arcane art with best practices that change constantly. But very broadly, getting attention from search engines involves creating lots of relevant content with the right keywords and keeping it fresh. You can help those search engines and people find what they're looking for by using the keywords, tags and categories features on whatever platform you use. In addition to the audience hangouts that we asked you to identify earlier, you may already have some ways to reach people. A company or personal blog, social media accounts, YouTube, mailing list, discussion forums. Social media is useful for getting traffic to projects and content and for having conversations. Which social channel is best? As you said before, go with your audience. You have to be a good place to put content beyond just the code and documentation. It may also be to help with your community. Create a content plan. Outline the content you want and need and develop deadlines for creating and sharing it. For example, you could create a list of the topics that you need to cover. Then create a list of blog posts or video title ideas. I found that if you ask someone to create highly specific content, for example, by proposing the article or blog post title to them, you can get a better response than if you just ask for content on a broader, more general topic. How will you get the content once you determine what you need or want? Will someone on your team create that content? Or is this an opportunity for you to connect with members of your community? For example, if you notice that community members have created content on their personal blogs, it would be a great fit for your site visitors. You can work with the writer to republish it or to help promote the content via your social media channels. Do you have existing content that could be used? If you're part of a larger organization, there might already be content on internal Wikis or GitHub accounts that could be revised and used as documentation or blog posts to help meet your marketing needs. Do you need to hire freelance writers or collaborate with partners or other communities to get the content? Once you determine which content you need, outline deadlines for getting and publishing the content. Having deadlines for content will help you actually get it. And a pro tip is to keep the deadlines short. I tend to offer two-week deadlines for writers. Whether you offer two weeks or two months, most folks are going to write it the night before it's due anyway, so why drag it out? Most writers actually prefer working with deadlines, so be sure to set that expectation when you have their original content conversation. If you don't have a deadline, don't expect to get the content. Aligning deadlines with events and product launches is also a way to help yourself get more visibility through your messaging. As we said earlier, you likely won't have the time or resources to create content from scratch for every possible platform and format, but you don't have to. Each type and piece of content can be repurposed and reused in multiple ways to extend its reach to more people and platforms. For example, conference talks tend to run pretty long, but we know that attention spans on YouTube tend to be short. Most viewers don't get past the first three minutes. So even if your 40-minute conference talk was filmed, the bulk of it may be wasted on future viewers. But you could slice it up into shorter segments, either directly from the conference video, if that's available to you, or by reworking the material and filming shorter segments yourself. A long conference talk could also be transcribed and used as the basis of several blog posts. So as a general technique, break up long things into short things. We can also aggregate short things into collections, such as YouTube playlists or blog posts series, where each element will help drive traffic to the others. Those are just a few examples. You can see more here on the slide. You will want to measure and report on success. The metrics should not be the goal. The metrics should tell you whether you're hitting your goal and whether your content is the right content for your audience. Page views versus unique visitors versus time on page all tell a story. Do not get stuck in the vanity metrics trial. Creating controversy and spreading gossip will get you lots of page views, but it's probably not going to help you hit your actual marketing goals. Share results internally. Transparency helps your colleagues learn what works and what doesn't work, and it helps engage them. For years now, I've shared weekly and monthly metrics with my team and other internal teams and stakeholders. Writers want to know how their content performed, often with vanity metrics. But more importantly, sharing those metrics help colleagues see what content your community prefers, and it can help inspire others to contribute content or provide feedback on your efforts. Over the last few slides, we've effectively given you a checklist to get started marketing your own open source project. To reiterate, identify the resources you already have available. Outline your marketing goals in writing. Figure out who your audience is and find out where they are. Learn how you can help them. Create and execute on a content plan to meet their needs. Find ways to repurpose that content. Measure and report on your success. So now you're ready to get to work marketing. Thanks for listening to our talk and good luck with your marketing efforts. So we have a couple of questions, Deirdre and Ricky. I'm going to give the first one to you, Deirdre. Bruno is asking, what should we not do to market open source projects? You've done a great job of telling us what to do, but what should we not do? What are your thoughts? Yeah, Bruno, thanks for the question. To an extent, do the opposite of what we told you would be the thing not to do. I'd say don't just randomly go out and start doing things because you can do them easily, for example, or because it's an aspect of the project or the technology that's exciting to you. As Ricky said, you need to have a content plan. So make a plan first, stick to that plan for what it is you need to cover, why you need to cover it, and always keep your audience's needs in mind. Amazon has a leadership principle about starting from the customer and working backwards, and that works in just about every situation in which you are marketing to somebody. Think about their needs and address those. So anything you're doing that is not that is probably a thing not to do in marketing open source. Okay, so kind of an add-on to that question then. What about social media platforms? Are there some platforms that are more conducive to open source marketing like Twitter or LinkedIn or even GitHub? Do you guys have any recommendations there? In general, you can use GitHub to do a lot of the communicating about your project, but it shouldn't be the only thing you use. Twitter is a good place to spark interest and have conversations. It's not a good place to go in-depth, so you can use Twitter to direct people to more in-depth conversations and places to have those. LinkedIn may be interesting. I've seen some good results from it. Facebook, I don't find Facebook a good place to discuss technology myself. Okay, make sense. All right, I have a question from Liza. She is asking, what would be a good tool to find SEO? What are your thoughts there? Honestly, that is a landscape that changes quite rapidly, and I would not like to offer an opinion on what's the best thing at any given time. It also is going to depend a lot on budget, because it used to be that you could get a lot of very helpful information from Google for free, but they have cut that off, and so now there are very expensive enterprise tools. I would go out and search for something on that topic. Let's say ping me via email, and I've got a friend who might be able to give some advice. All right, good. Next question is from Richard. He's asking about, is there any advice on researching or determining the addressable market in open source? That's a tough one. I would think it would be similar to addressable market in any other way. I don't know, Tamara, you might have thoughts on that one. Yeah, I would start with the more popular open source projects and look at some of their communities and some of the foundations that are around them, because they've done a pretty decent job of addressing the market. For example, Linux has got a lot of great foundations. I work specifically with the Hyperledger Foundation, so if I'm trying to understand who the blockchain community is, I would probably start there, just for an example. That question on the addressable market, because I mean, as a question is, are you going to create your product around what the market is missing? Is that what the question is? Because otherwise, yeah, I guess I'm not clear on the question, sorry. Yeah, they're just wondering how do you determine what the addressable market is? How do you know who you're, if you're going and creating personas as we've been doing, how do you go and figure that out in open source? Yeah, okay, yeah, that's a big question. I think that could be addressed in an entire talk. Agreed. Okay, let's see. We have another question from Takanori. What do you think we should do or don't do about marketing in open core model OSS project? Because some parts of the project are open and others are not. It can be different from usual OSS projects. So the open core model OSS project. Well, I'd say for starters, you need to be very, very clear and honest with your audience about which parts are truly open source and which are not. When you create any confusion about what people are free to use without hindrance or risk, then you are damaging trust and damaging your market. It was an open source project should be truly open source and the parts that are not safe for the open source folks to use, they need to be clearly signaled what those are. So I would say mainly draw bright sharp lines between the open source part and the open core part and make sure that people understand what those are. Okay. Do you have anything to add Ricky on that one? I actually don't have any experience working on open core products, so I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to offer advice there. I just don't have that experience. Okay, fair enough. We have another question here. What is the best way to market commercial services slash products based on open source projects? What do you think, Ricky? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure there would be a dramatic difference there on how you would approach that, whereas I feel like it might be with open core and that's why I didn't feel comfortable saying on that. So I don't know that I would take a dramatically different approach. Okay. What do you think, Dodra? Yeah, that sounds reasonable, except the obvious difference that in this case you are asking people to spend money. So there you would need to differentiate what is it you're offering over and above what people could get by running the open source themselves. What do you see as the intersection of marketing and public relations for open source? The intersection of marketing and PR for open source? There can be a place for PR in open source marketing. This talk specifically was aimed at small to medium organizations or possibly even independent projects who just may not have PR specialists available to them. But when you have that help available to you, by all means, use it. Just be careful of sort of traditional public relations tends to approach things in a way that we've all seen for many years which sometimes can be off-putting in an open source project. You definitely don't want to come out smelling like a commercial project. And one final question. Would you spend your own resources to market the open source project on search engine advertising, like AdSense, Bing, etc.? That's, I would say that would depend partly on how much competition there is. Because you would have to do a whole analysis of what keywords would bring people to your project. And some of those keywords are going to be very, very expensive. I believe Google still does provide free tools so that you could get an estimate of that. But if this is a project you are not yet making any money on, it could eat up a lot of your budget. I have also been told that paid search engine advertising may work well for the period that you are running the ads. And then it doesn't, and then it tapers off again as soon as you stop spending money. It does not build up long-term traffic. So for projects, I would recommend more of a content marketing approach where you are building up lots and lots of content that's going to bring in organic search. Lots of blog posts, web pages, documentation, etc. Make good use of search engine optimization on those pages and posts and so forth to help you get the organic traffic. And that way you're not going to be spending money for it and it will last over time. Okay, sounds good. Well, that's all the questions we have. I want to thank you, Deirdre and Ricky, for your presentation and for your wisdom on marketing open source projects. If anyone has questions, feel free to email these guys directly. I want to thank everyone for attending today. It's been great. Thank you. Thank you all.