A few years ago, we had a wildly successful “online education” webinar program at JBoss. Twice per month, we would feature a different technical topic, presented by one of our core developers, explaining some cool new feature or technology in a hands-on training type of way. We could have anywhere between 50-150 people show up to the live events, and thousands more watching the archived versions. And in hindsight, the invitation process that seemed so simple it was nearly automatic was actually quite unique. We’d simply send a single invitation email, to our in-house list of registered community members, and people would register. The catch? That list was huge – nearly 150,000 people who had opted in to our communications specifically.

So what do you do when you don’t have a list like this? There are new ways to engage with our target audience via social media. One of the ways we’re exploring is how to use Facebook groups and event invitations to spread the word about our webinar program.

The screenshot above is from an invitation published today via our Facebook group. Anyone who is a member of our group, or a fan of WSO2, will receive the invitation. Since we started using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote our webinars, our attendance has gone up 50% on average. (This could be due to the subject matter, but for the sake of argument I like to think we’re better targeting, and reaching more of, our audience.)

We recently revamped our main developer resource section of our website, called the Oxygen Tank Library. Here is a screen capture of the front page:

The changes are in line with the rest of our wso2.org site overhaul, which involved simplifying and cleaning up the overall look and content. Instead of a long list of every single resource that had been published lately, in chronological order, we’ve categorized the content into presentation type, and included more search options. This is better because a user can search for resources by product name, by certain predetermined technology keywords, or using a built-in google search box. Or, the user can browse all webinars, podcasts, flash demos, articles, and more.

So how is this new design working out for us? I’ve compared the first full month post-changes, to a full month prior to the holidays (the calendar month prior to the changes involved Christmas and New Year’s holidays, which would skew the data somewhat).

• Views of the Library home page are up 285%
• Time spent within the Library is up 20% on average
• The exit rate has dropped 10%
• We’ve broken our own record for number of single visitors in a given day

I’d say it’s working fairly well so far!  We are still fine-tuning this of course, making it possible to preview certain types of content (especially articles; we have more technical articles than other types of multimedia content, and want to reflect this relative weighting somehow on the front page).

This was a huge undertaking, but our marketing manager who owned the project took a few key steps to ensuring success.  To summarize some of the things we learned:

1. The first step is content inventory – what types of content, what topics, and how do they map to specific segments of your target audience?
2. Figure out the common use-case scenarios.  Do most people arrive at the site by referrals from google, directed to specific technical articles?  Or do they arrive from a banner ad campaign dropping them on the front page?  Make sure you have a path to get them from the entry point deeper into the site.
3. Meet with any internal stake holders from the beginning.  We met with our Director of Engineering (since this is a site that supports all the developers, project development, etc), to make sure we had consensus for the changes being made.  We also involved development team leads and business development managers in various stages of the design process.
4. Even when you go live, the project isn’t “finished”.  Keep tracking the analytics, and be open to feedback.  We’ve made several changes to the usability of the Library after the launch.

(Twitter is almost as distracting as Vegas...)

A few days ago I reentered the Twittersphere.  I had taken about a month (or two) off – I just found it too distracting.  It’s such an important component of social media, and can be an incredibly valuable tool for obtaining great marketing advice, opinions from your potential customer base, and even for generating leads.  However, it can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.  There’s a lot of noise.

When I tweeted the other day that I was “back” and would try to find a better work/life/Twitter balance, I immediately got a reply from @shannonpaul (one of the bigger names in social media in the Twittersphere and beyond).  She hooked me up with advice from several people on how to manage Twitter more effectively.

Some of my favorite responses:

• From @BrandonWJ – “Use tweetdeck to put together a list of people you always want. Limit ‘all following’ reading to under 1 hr/day. Skip picture links”
• From @chrisjlee – “work in 48/12 increments. Work for 48 minutes take a 12 minute break: http://bit.ly/4FUUL”
• From @jsant – “I catch up on twitter every 3 hours or so. If I leave it on all day, its too distracting.”

Then today I stumble across this great article (as shared by @problogger): “How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You – 5 Tips”.  I feel a lot better equipped to handle Twitter now, and don’t plan on taking another hiatus anytime soon.

Adding Mediation to WSO2 WSAS

We plan on doing a lot more of these, at least one for every product.  The idea is to show the product in action, so a user or potential user can see how it works in specific scenarios.

Screencasts are also a great component of our content creation strategy because:

• The engineers who develop the products can complete the recording on their own
• Ruwan (our engineer who did this screencast) said it only took him less than 2 hours, and it represented “0.2% of the effort it took to code the actual product”
• They require minimal editing effort from marketing
• They can be hosted on YouTube as well as on project pages on our own websites, increasing their exposure
• When a screencast is published, it’s the perfect candidate for sharing on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn et al, and is a good candidate for a “personal release” announcement
• Prospects can see a variety of resources for any given product, increasing the perception of (a) the viability of the product, and (b) the credibility of our paid support expertise

In 2008, we revamped our dot-com site to better tell a story about how all our products fit together.  We had been calling ourselves “the SOA company” for a while, but because we are 95% engineers, we have had a hard time explaining this self-definition without immediately diving into product features.  So we introduced a new concept explaining how SOA is all about the services, and if you think about it, you can group all SOA-related activity into 4 main categories (service creation, service connection, service composition, and service governance).  The new dot-com site is cleaner, simpler, easier to use, and most importantly, it answers the question “who are we?” much faster for a new visitor.

Our biggest challenge yet would be to replicate these benefits through a refresh of the dot-org design.

It’s a well-known, if often ignored, rule in marketing that you shouldn’t just refresh your site design “just because.”  It’s a risky move: it can break links, remove keywords or thwart SEO, confuse repeat visitors, and cause a lot of headaches in general.  But in the case of wso2.org, we had to do it.  We have 14 WSO2 projects, and are involved with countless more Apache projects, all of which must be documented and supported on our community site.  Sometimes I found myself lost within the site, and *I work for the company*.  I could only imagine some first-timer to the site – if that happened to them, would they even bother coming back?

Our new site launched over the weekend, in conjunction with the release of 4 (!!) new products and the WSO2 Carbon framework.  We centered the homepage around the same project categorization that we’ve used on dot-com (create, connect, compose, govern), but we wanted to make it seem simpler, less marketing-y, and more appealing to developers.  Instead of trying to list out all 25+ projects right on the page, we simply link to “all other projects” in the WSO2 family.

The other cool feature I like are the 4 orange blocks at the top of the page.  These can quickly be modified to promote any new project release, an upcoming webinar, anything, with maybe 2 minutes of effort.

Our main resource center on the site, the WSO2 Library has been redesigned from the content up.  This took place a couple weeks ago, and now visually matches the new site.  The biggest changes are deeper than the surface design however: how the content is organized is now greatly improved.  You can look for resources by type (webinar, podcast, article, etc), by project/product, or by pre-set keywords in a “search cloud”.

We’re immediately following this up with reorganization of both our downloads and projects pages.  I’ll share with you when these are live, and some of our thought processes behind the changes.

Fortunately, one of the many benefits of having a large office in Sri Lanka is getting to experiment with vendors at a fraction of a cost for similar US-based services, such as professional videography.  Last year, when our leadership team was meeting in Sri Lanka, we were able to hire a video crew to take the raw footage (at about 1/10th of the US cost).  It took a while to get the editing done, but here’s the first short video clip.

 
WSO2 Elevator Pitch

We prepared a few simple questions in advance, to ask Sanjiva (our CEO) and Paul (our CTO). Their answers were recorded a couple of times, from different angles. Things we’ve already learned from this process for next time:

• Prepare LOTS of questions in advance.  More than you think you’ll need.
• Record way more footage than you think you’ll need.  If you want a 2 minute video, take at least 10 if not 20 minutes of footage.
• Background is important.  Ours isn’t very interesting – I think we erred on the side of caution, not wanting to distract from the interview too much.  I’d like to try this with a different, more casual setting possibly.  Like maybe Paul and Sanjiva having lunch (so the viewer feels he’s just sitting down to a table conversation with them?), or in the common space of the office, with people mulling around in the background.
• Consider background music.  Our in-house video editor (among many other titles!) selected a generic drum beat, which works just fine.  It’s something you can play with though, but I’m not sure how this would work with copyright issues.  But then again, music is very subjective, so if you put a lot of time into getting it “just right”, there would still be plenty of people to disagree with your choice.
• Other visual elements – we’ll have to try this with future videos.  But you could keep a single audio track of dialogue, while cutting away from the visual image of 2 people talking together to show other things such as images of engineers working, architectural diagrams, customer logos, and lots of other things.  This should probably be thought through before recording, included in the original storyboard.
• And don’t forget branding and SEO elements – make sure you title and tag it appropriately, to help make it easier for viewers to find.  (We’re still tweaking this now actually.)

Today we published our first official ebook at WSO2. This is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while, ever since David Meerman Scott began talking about ebooks as a valuable viral marketing tool. 

It was more difficult to write than I thought it would be, as most first-time experiences tend to be.  As opposed to longer more formally written datasheets and whitepapers, this had to be a completely different style.

The writing style of an ebook is most similar to a blog post actually.  The paragraphs should be much shorter, with one key point per paragraph.  Sentences should also be as short as possible (I’m terrible at that; I tend to over use semi-colons and parentheses).  

From a design perspective, it took us several overhauls and the input of at least 3 designers to get to this point.  Our internal graphic designers are fantastic, but have engineering backgrounds.  This is a huge asset when it comes to drawing architectural diagrams or visual representations of highly technical concepts, but I think it’s more difficult to give an engineer a blank slate with the instruction “draw something interesting and cool.”

The look we attempted is clean “web 2.0″ styling, with strategic use of white spaces and bold subheaders.  There are several types of images, ranging from technical diagrams to a cartoon bee.  (In case it needs explaining, the product, WSO2 Carbon, is a set of components which we visually likened to a honeycomb; hence the bee.)

As difficult as it was, I think future ebooks will be significantly faster to produce.  But I probably won’t mention a new ebook project to my team for at least a couple of weeks, lest I get laughed out the door…

We’re trying to refine this now at WSO2.  When we create a new flash demo or screencast or video, we publish it on wso2.com or wso2.org, then hit Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  

One more interesting point – the article notes that 60% of social media users are only part of one network, so you have to “go where the people are”.  It’s the marketers trying to reach the audience who have accounts in as many networks as possible…

I’ve worked with a team in the past who experimented with a fairly large monthly AdWords budget (not just in relation to the marketing budget, but as a percentage of the entire company’s expenditures, it was impressive).  

(Random AdWords screenshot, not my real life example...)

The more we spent, the more we found we could drive up a selected action: a product download.  And by managing the time of day, maximum bids, ad content, and other variables, we could begin to drive down this “cost per download”.  

Some lessons from this experiment:

• Trying to figure out all the variables at play, and their correlating impact on results, can drain an amazing amount of time, to the point where it becomes an obsession.
• It feels really really good as a marketer to demonstrate quantifiable results.  All other projects that can’t be measured as clearly and easily may quickly be deemed inferior.
• Google changes its algorithms all the time.  There’s no such thing as “set up AdWords, optimize, and let it run”.  It constantly needs tweaking to obtain consistent results.

Ready for the excuses? Well, there was a 2 week holiday at Christmas, that started it. Despite big plans to write profusely during the off time from work, I didn’t. And as soon as we started back after the break, our team has been moving full steam ahead. We’ve got a major product release next month, and all the productization stuff that goes along with it (new demos, datasheets, ebooks, etc) belongs to the marketing team.

My writer’s block has now gone beyond the blog. Combined with stubborn jet lag (oh yeah, did I mention the last couple of weeks in Sri Lanka?), I’m feeling pretty unproductive. But the blocked item in question is now a new customer case study, which I’m hoping to finish up soon, as well as a new product presentation. I’m learning some best practices along the way, which I’ll share here soon.

Just keep writing…