Running a DevRel Program in the Cloud
During my Evans Data Developer Relations Conference 2016 technical session, “Best Practices for a World Class Developer Relations Program”, I presented a slide that was titled “DevRel Program in the Cloud”. The ideas on the slide included the cloud based resources (many that are free) that could be used to run a “virtual” developer relations program using readily available services. Here is the list, with links, for the services I talked about during that portion of my presentation.
DevRel Program in the Cloud
- Content Sharing/Storage – You can place your white papers, articles, blog posts and other files on many different sharing sites including: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. Check out the article “Free Cloud Storage” on thebalance.com.
- Videos – Every company can have a YouTube channel and most do. You can organize your videos into playlists, track subscribers, watch times, and more. Facebook also allows video uploads and streaming.
- Webinars – There are many ways to give live video presentations and webinars. Here are a few of many: FaceBook Live, YouTube Live, LiveCoding.tv, Skype Group Video and Twitch for Developers.
- Feeds – to track developer news, articles, competitors and more – there are many RSS feed readers and systems available including: Feedly and InoReader. There are many others.
- Questions & Answers – StackOverflow is the one you want to definitely use for developers. StackOverflow is the first place most developers go to ask questions and find answers. Remember to use tags appropriate to your company, brand, products and services.
- Feature requests – Wantoo, Userback just to name two free and fee services. You should also check out Uservoice. There are many others you can try.
- Code Sample repositories – Here are the “big four” if you need version control for your code samples (see content sharing/storage above if you just need to put files up for download) – GitHub, SourceForge, BitBucket, CodeProject.
- Event Calendar – TeamUp and Google Calendar just to name two. Also check out Bitrix24.
- Social Marketing Sites – create your own pages, groups and more – the top four to definitely use include LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Google+.
- Social Marketing Tools – Buffer and Hootsuite have free service levels.
- Newsgroups – Google Groups, Tumblr, Google+, Reddit (Note: when your Reddit account is more than 30 days old and you have acquired a small amount of positive karma, you can create a subreddit of your own)
- Finding content about your company, products, services – Google Alerts
- Meetings/UserGroups – meetup.com – find like minded developers and visit with them or create your own meetups, schedule meetings and go meet with developers.
What cloud based services do you use for your DevRel program?
There are so many cloud based services that can help you run your Developer Relations program. I have only quickly scratched the surface about what is possible. Send me an email and let me know what cloud based services work for your Developer Relations program. davidi@evansdata.com
PS: Check out my recent blog post about the tools and services I use for developer evangelism.
