DevRel Weekly - Issue 88 - KPIs, Metrics, and Moderation

Welcome! 👋

Happy #DevRelWeekly day, friends! I hope your week is going well. Below, you’ll find articles about social media moderation, how to set KPIs for documentation, and how to set up an online community for success, in addition to a brand new job posting at ITRenew: Senior Technical Community Manager for their Sesame product and a reminder about the upcoming trainings at DevRelCon London.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or if I missed any relevant articles this week! I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel is a Compounding Effect

Reminder that the value of community increases over time. It's a compounding effect.

My fav part of @CMX is seeing ppl who came to our first event over 5 years ago as beginners, and are now thriving in their career, managing teams, and becoming mentors for new community pros.

-David Spinks

Safety Tip for Conference Attendees

Posting a photo of your conference badge on social media having a bar code or QR code puts your personal information at risk.

Thanks for this important reminder, Sharat Chander!

Testing Your Documentation

Tip for DevRels and the like:

Try build something with your customer documentation, following it word for word. No googling, no asking a colleague, and no using inside knowledge.

How far did you get? Now how far do you think your customers will get?

Make the edits ASAP

-Sam Jarman

DevRel Advice Column: Tooling Edition

What tools do you use to help you come up with a good content strategy for your #community? Does your strategy change over time?

-Chris Detzel

Hey #devrel fam what're your 3 most used tools? Mine are @AzureDevOps which I use as my kanban among other things, @OBSProject which I use for live streams and webinar recording, and @plexamp for music while I work.

-Richard Lewis

Tangibles 🤓

❓Building Communities with Questions, Not Answers ❓

With my journalism background, I have a tendency to ask a lot of questions. I almost always want to know more or understand something more fully. In a profession where we're so often expected to have all the answers, I think we need to remember that sometimes it's more valuable to be asking questions than providing the exact right answer. This article from Rosie Sherry explains why.

Projected Members and Activity Levels

If you're planning for an online community, this article from Rich Millington is a must-read. Too many community teams build out too many features, which not only causes stress and overwork for the team, but creates a relatively empty-looking community. Instead, you should plan for the number of community members you initially project, and then grow the features as your projection grows.

Member Recognition Isn’t All About Swag

How to amply recognize a member’s contribution is a common question these days. Do we reward with monetary perks? Swag? Or by simply amplifying the work that they’ve done? Marjorie Anderson provides a few ways to recognize what our community members have done in this recent article.

Tech Conference Swag (that people won't throw away)

Looking into swag for the 2020 conference season? In this short video, Amruta Ranade walks through the most useful swag she’s received this past year at a variety of tech conferences, as well as what types of stickers she will (and won’t) choose to keep.

5 KPIs For Your Knowledge Base

If your DevRel team is responsible for maintaining developer documentation as well as knowledge base articles, you may be wondering how you can measure whether your efforts are paying off. This article from Sarah Robinson-Yu lays out 5 distinct KPIs that show whether or not the work you’re doing has improved the overall developer experience.

Looking for metrics to track for your social presence instead? Last week's #ESNChat covered KPIs and metrics used to monitor the health and impact of an enterprise social network. Read the full chat.

What is a Community? (And Why Your Facebook Page Might Not Be One)

One of the most common mistakes in Developer Relations is when we conflate audience and community. James Gallagher does a great job of explaining the difference between these two groups and why they requirer different types of attention from us in this recent article.

Tangents 🐰

How Reddit Birthed a Community of Digital Vigilantes

If you’ve been following the conversations about moderation on social media accounts lately, this article by Courtney Linder about how Reddit handles self-policing and allows for subreddits to have their own rules on top of Reddit’s own policies may be interesting to you. It gives an in-depth look at why Reddit employees think content moderation is broken, as well as how they expect tech will help with increased moderation in the future.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

Don’t Let “Scale” Get in the Way of Good Community Strategy with Bailey Richardson - Community Signal. What happens when corporation-led communities are determined to have outlived their usefulness to the corporation, but not to the members? Does this lead to more grassroots-led communities? How will the tools and examples we’ve created serve those grassroots communities?

Events 📆

DevRelCon London Dec 9th-11th

Join dev rel professionals from across the world for a day of training and two days of conference and unconference. Early bird tickets available now: london-2019.devrel.net

Events 📆

DevRel Weekly Events

Finish up 2019 with a variety of information-packed webinars, in-person meetups, or a DevRel conference. View all of the upcoming DevRel-related events we've collected, and be sure to reach out if you know of others we should include.

Special thanks to our new sponsor this week, Hoopy, producers of DevRelCon London. I hope to see you there!

Want even more conference talks and related content? I'm still adding to the Conf Talks & Recaps, Fall 2019 collection -- be sure to check it out today!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior Technical Community Manager

As data & data center usage continues to grow exponentially around the world, ITRenew and the circular economy are positioned to play an increasingly important role in the global Internet infrastructure and ecosystem. Interested in data, DevOps, sustainability, and open source? The Sesame team is looking for a Senior Technical Community Manager to help them build an internal community that is excited to engage with the ecosystem of customers and partners, as well as participate in the wider technical community that will build on and with Sesame data center products.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

Making money is something we have to do survive, but isn't it lovely when making money is part of something we love as well? If you're looking for a job check out our collection of jobs; maybe there's something there that you'll love. Here's hoping. 🤞