Less than Best Practices for Developer Marketing and Developer Relations

Next week, at the 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference (#DRC2017), I will be giving a talk titled “Assessing a Bad Developer Program and Prescribing Fixes to Rescue It”. DRC2017 takes place March 27 and 28 in Palo Alto California at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. In this session, I will take you on a tour of a bad developer outreach program. You’ll see some of the worst practices of developer marketing, developer relations, deliverables for developers, SDKs/APIs, content, social media, videos and more. I could take attendees on a tour of some of the worst examples of technology company developer programs, but I won’t. Instead, I have created a fictitious company, “Eureka Digital Works” that has a developer relations program that has some serious problems. Come to my session and see how I’ve prescribed the fixes to rescue it.

Examples of Bad Developer Outreach

Here are a few signs (in no particular order) that you might be part of a bad developer community and the outreach that should be avoided in your developer marketing, developer relations and developer community.

• Too much sales and marketing in a technical newsletter
• Ads in technical white papers, technical articles, uses cases, and developer blog posts
• Developer outreach emails that contain more sales information and less technical information
• Webinars that are advertised as “How To(s)” but contain mostly sales pitches
• Quick Start Guides that contain too many pages and steps
• How To articles that are more than 5 pages long
• How To videos that are hours long
• Developer Community site that is full of large sales and marketing ad banners
• A Developer Conference that is more sales and marketing and less technical
• Lack of developer tutorials on the developer community site
• Missing or out of date documentation for APIs and SDKs
• Unskilled, Untrained, non-engineer staff answering technical questions on a developer community forum
• Lack of or slow response to critical bug reports
• The developer feedback black hole – asking developers for suggestions, road map items, etc. but not accepting any of them
• Lack of new, timely content, blog posts, events, videos, and other staples of a well run developer relations program

Developers and Developer Relations Professionals – send me your less than best practices examples

Calling all developers: if you have a list of things on your worst list for developer outreach, send me an email and I will add them to my list. Calling all developer relations professionals: if you have things you have tried that caused your developer community members to push back, send me an email and I will add them to my list.

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/