Developer Advocacy Handbook (15): Understanding and Using Social Networks

Author: Christian Heilmann
Translated by: Zhuang Qi

As a developer evangelist, the internet is your biggest playground. It’s a global, round-the-clock information and communication channel that allows you to get your message out there.

By understanding and using social networks, you’ll also find that others become relayers of your great stories, and people might even translate and publish them in their own markets.

Social media has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years and takes up a lot of our time. Some people have made a lot of money offering “social media consulting” and “growth hacking” training, which is easily reminiscent of the “search engine optimization” days, using the same techniques. While the techniques taught in these trainings will give you instant success, this success will also fade faster than you can say “hype.”

Warning: Be aware of this, your job is to use the internet as a communication and distribution channel, not to make quick money in a week. This will kill your reputation, and as mentioned before, your reputation, integrity, and honesty are what make you a developer evangelist. Losing these will make it almost impossible for you to be listened to in the future, which will make you useless to your company and damage the reputation of the developer evangelism industry.

Finding Great Web Content

Since the web is where you want to publish, you also need to be interested in it and find good things to tell people about. As explained in the branding and competition chapter of this handbook, you can’t just talk about your product.

Tip: The most time-efficient way to find content is to use a news reader. With the demise of Google Reader, I switched to Feedly, and while RSS as a news source seems to have fallen out of fashion, I still find a lot of good information through it without the noise of more immediate products.* Other great resources are thematic mailing lists and news aggregation sites. Don’t just look for things—make sure what you find is approved by people you trust. Then you can safely rebroadcast it.

Republishing Web Content

Once you’ve found good content, rebroadcast it. The reason is that you have a different network than other people, and you should never assume that people already know what you’ve found. It also makes sense to add more information to a link, telling people what it’s about or why it’s great. This makes the resource you’re promoting see you as a multiplier, and I’ve often gotten opportunities with companies and products this way, which is much better than a cold call or an email to contact@.

You can republish web content in several ways:

You can write about it on your blog.
You can add it to social bookmarking sites and add a good description and tags.
You can use it in a presentation.
You can quote it in a mailing list or forum to add more relevance to your post or email.
You can write about it on Twitter.
You can mention it in one of your videos or tutorials. For example, you can show an implementation and point to a resource for in-depth information on something you used as a step.

In any case, the most important thing is that you attribute the content to the original author by name and resource. The reason is simple: publishers track what people do with their content, so if you blog about a topic, your blog will appear on their radar. The same applies to retweeting. In other words, you get known by them, which can be the start of an interesting two-way exchange.

Getting Known on the Web

If your job is to bring interesting news and explanations for web products, it should be obvious that you shouldn’t be a stranger on the web either.

Sign up for mailing lists, post on forums, use Twitter, lurk on various channels, leave comments on interesting news articles in tech magazines and online journals—don’t be shy to give your opinion or real advice whenever you can. Sometimes it may simply be saying why you liked a piece of information. We don’t give enough praise online, and it feels really good to receive it.

Keep an eye on new and upcoming web and social applications and sign up for them as soon as you get a chance.

Visibility is especially important when you work for a large company. Tech news portals love to bring news about big companies—especially bad news. It’s surprising how often these news items contain distorted information, if not outright falsehoods.

Since your company’s marketing and PR departments are likely unaware of these technical publications and will rarely step in to correct errors, this is a good opportunity for you to take action. Stick to technical, factual information and provide evidence for your points. Some comments will side with the misinformation because “sticking it to the man” and fighting big institutions is cool, but the quieter majority will at least get the real story from the horse’s mouth. However, be absolutely sure of your facts if you do this.

Fact: When you work for a large company, people will automatically try to disagree with you and try to “expose” you as a company puppet. This has always irritated me to no end. If our so-called best practices and standards aren’t adopted by large companies, they’ll never spread across the market—so fighting large companies is actually hurting the cause. I call this the prison tactic: a new inmate has to fight the biggest, toughest guy to make sure everyone else leaves him alone. Maybe that’s successful there, but it’s annoying and pointless in the IT industry.* Social media experts and entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s crucial to use your real name, have a domain with your real name, and make it very personal. I’m a living example that this isn’t necessarily true if your motivation is to educate and help people, not build a personal brand and make a living by constantly running the same workshops. Sometimes a more technical or quirky name will actually give you more credibility and make people more willing to listen—especially if you’ve used it for years in other circles and stick with it.

Social networks evolve almost monthly, and especially now, there’s always something new popping up. That’s okay—it’s an evolution, after all. For you as a developer evangelist, this can be an opportunity.

Write about new social media products. Play around with them and note your first impressions.
Keep an eye on new products. If you sign up quickly, you’ll usually get invite codes (a very common practice at launch events). It’s a pretty cool move to have these invite codes as one of the first products and say so on Twitter.

In addition to the new kids on the media block, it’s important that you know the great established resources that have expert networks and allow you to easily store and access content.

Flickr used to be a leading photo-sharing community that allowed you to store photos and screenshots. Flickr is still a great resource for Creative Commons-licensed photos for your presentations. It used to be a large community and a great way to interact with people. It still exists and has high-quality content, but for quick photo publishing, it has long been replaced by sites like Instagram and Imgur.
YouTube is the world’s number one video-sharing site, operated by Google. It’s very easy to store videos on YouTube and embed them on your blog or website. Users can comment and tag. Support for annotations and captions helps create accessible content and allows you to add extra information to video content. You can have your own channel and have draft and scheduled video publishing. You can also go live on YouTube and have your own show. There are quite a few people making a living on YouTube now, so it can be hard to stand out.
Vimeo is another video-sharing site with the same functionality as YouTube but with higher quality content. I find it works better for higher quality, longer media.
Archive.org is the Internet Archive, which allows you to easily store videos, audio, and images that you want to make public.
GitHub is a social code-sharing network. Git is a version control system, and GitHub allows you to store code there, have a wiki to explain information, and make it easy for other developers to fork and watch your code. GitHub also comes with a nice code display and automatically creates archives of your code for people to download, so you don’t need to zip it up after each change. If you stick to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can also host your product there, right next to the source code. The online version of this book is hosted on GitHub.
LinkedIn is a professional network where you can find other evangelists and key people at companies you want to reach out to.
Facebook I’m sure I don’t need to explain. Great for organizing events and quickly contacting people, but not so useful for photo storage due to their terms and conditions.
Meetup revolves around real-life meetings and events.
Twitter has taken the web world by storm. It’s still reinventing itself every day, trying to define what it is, but one thing is certain: it’s an amazingly easy way to spread short messages very far and very fast, and a great way to keep in touch with people when you’re on the go.

These are just a few of the sites that make sense as a developer evangelist. This market is constantly evolving, and there are always new players that people flock to. You can take the time to try them out. But for the developer evangelist role, I think it makes a lot of sense to pick a few and stick with them. If you’re part of a team, it makes sense to split responsibilities and have different colleagues take charge of different channels—those they feel most comfortable with.

Tip: I’ve found that every successful social network isn’t primarily centered around the network, but around one thing people care about emotionally—pictures, videos, travel, music, and so on. A pure network has a hard time keeping an audience’s attention for long.* Like anything, the usefulness of these resources depends on what you contribute to them. Good title writing, descriptions, annotations, and tagging will make them more useful to the world and make it easier for you to find something you put up weeks ago. Some newer social platforms define themselves as a place for quick publishing that automatically disappears. This is great for news announcements and quick excitement. The problem is that their impact is often short-lived.

Using the Web for Storage, Distribution, and Cross-Promotion

The web is a network of products, files, data, and websites, and to make the most of it, make sure to spread your content around it. It’s great to have a product somewhere, but people have to find it. If you put parts of your product in different places that are designed to host a certain kind of content, you give web surfers and app users more chances to find your content.

Tip: Don’t forget that social networks can be very siloed, and not everyone has the time and energy to be active on all of them. So having information that’s useful for the nature of a certain network, pointing to the complete product elsewhere, makes you part of the network but also gives people an incentive to follow your links to check out what you’re discussing.* There are many benefits to spreading your content across different platforms.

Multiple storage points: Even if a very successful blog post kicks your server off the web, the information on other platforms is still available. This hasn’t been much of a problem lately, but it’s still something to plan for.
Multiple feedback channels: People can comment where they feel comfortable, be it YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, or anywhere. All these sites spend a lot of time building tight communities, which means more expert feedback for you.
Automatic conversion and hosting: Flickr specializes in hosting and converting photos and short videos, YouTube does the same for longer videos, and other specialized sites know how to adjust their servers and how to convert and send their specialized data the fastest—something you don’t have to think about.

Example: Suppose you have a new code solution. You could write a blog post explaining it, put screenshots on Flickr and Instagram, put a video on YouTube of how to use the interface (or install the solution), have a presentation about the solution on a slide-sharing platform, and host the code on GitHub. This way, by using all these systems the way they’re meant to be used, your potential audience increases fivefold.* Spreading content is part of the solution that will make you successful. What you need to make sure of is that you link all these pieces back to the main product. Write good descriptions for videos and screenshots, use informative tags (one of which can be the product name), and track feedback across all channels to be able to answer people’s questions immediately. Multimedia resources on the web don’t make much sense if no one knows what they belong to.

Hints, Teasers, and Previews

Social media has a lot to do with exploring and showing off how much better you are at finding new information and learning about new products than others.

Fact: This is a universal phenomenon of the web. People have downloaded gigabytes of information, or are waiting to read in their tabs, but instead of consuming that information, we spend most of our nights hunting for more information, adding to the big pile we already have. It’s a human thing, deep in our psychology—since we started stockpiling food for the long, cold winters when we had to stay in the cave.* You can use this to your advantage by previewing, hinting at, and teasing upcoming information. I do this often—not consciously to manipulate, but because I get too excited about things and tend to post before information can go public. Instead of posting early—which is disastrous—I started doing some of the following:

Upload screenshots of upcoming products: This leads to pretty cool comments and people tagging the photos with keywords you might not have thought of, which can be content for product documentation.
Upload screen recordings to video sharing sites: For the same reason, but with more impact. However, remember that watching a screen recording expects more consumer commitment than looking at a screenshot.
Hint at cool upcoming things on Twitter: This will cause many of your followers to message you directly for more details—you can give them preview versions and make them the first to talk about it.
Ask outright for testers: People love to get their hands on things before they go public. The feedback I’ve gotten this way has helped me discover problems I wasn’t aware of on multiple occasions and enabled me to fix them before release.

Once the product is out, don’t forget to add the real URL to the previews you’ve already spread online, so all the latecomers know where to go. You can also use a short URL that redirects to the preview first and to the complete product later.

Tracking Your Impact

There’s not much point in putting your content on the web without knowing what your impact is. You can track the effectiveness of your publications in several ways:

Add telemetry to your documentation and blog: It’s not really the hits and getting high scores on that that count there, but looking at referrers. I’ve found many interesting things pointing to my content this way.
Subscribe to the comment feeds of articles you’ve written or commented on.
Use URL shorteners with tracking: These are not only easier to read and have fewer characters to type, but you can also change the target if the old URL has any problems.

None of this is hard science, but it can be very powerful and teach you how different styles of publication succeed.

Building Networks

Since the web is much more social now than it used to be, you have it easier to connect with other people. You can get the latest information from people on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and you can get information to the right people with the right network almost instantly.

You do this by contacting people, retweeting cool things they talk about, and reporting system issues you find.

Example: Sometimes being in the right place at the right time with the right mindset is everything. For example, when Microsoft released their Bing API, I played with it and complained on Twitter that the documentation was hard to read (it was an MSDN-style frame monster back then until you found the “low bandwidth” version). A few seconds later, I got a message from the head of the Bing API team at the company telling me what I could do to fix the problem. From there, we had a short conversation directly with the people who could make changes about what I liked and didn’t like. Years later, when I joined Microsoft, people still remembered how useful my feedback was.* Once you prove that you have interesting things to say and that you find and retweet, bookmark, or blog about great content, the people who really master social networks will be happy to answer you. It’s all about making our research time shorter and our lives easier. Evangelists are social by definition, so don’t be afraid to talk to people and point out things that excite you.

Once you’ve successfully done this, you’ll find that you get good information earlier and earlier, and before you know it, you’re the one with the private beta invite codes, knowing about and talking about cool new things in the making.

Create or Participate in Newsletters

I always thought newsletters were a thing of the past, but they’re still a very effective way to deliver a lot of information to people in a relatively simple way. While social networks have a lot of real-time and up-to-date information, not everyone wants to work at that pace. That’s where newsletters come in. Not only is it very effective for you to sign up for some newsletters and get information that way, but working with newsletter publishers and giving them exclusive information and things to publish can yield many good results. If you’ve collected a lot of interesting things to talk about on social media during a week, why not wrap them up at the end and publish them as a newsletter?

Create or Participate in Podcasts

Podcasts are another thing that seemed quite outdated but has seen a resurgence lately. Music services are picking them up as a new featured medium instead of having to install podcast listener software, which has given them a new wind, and you can be part of this movement. Creating them is relatively simple with today’s services, and if you like audio, why not give it a try?

Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »