Measuring Success in Developer Relations

Developer relations is an integral part of many software companies that hope to win the hearts and minds of developers. You may refer to it as developer evangelism or community outreach but ultimately, it's a motion dedicated to ensuring that:

1. You're proactively listening to what the community needs and looking to see how you can help
2. You're providing a conduit for developers to offer you feedback
3. You have an opportunity to share your vision with the community and hopefully solve some of their problems

In my opinion, this is absolutely the right order to be driving on since it's important to always think of the needs of the community.

But the problem with developer relations is that it's a subjective, somewhat nebulous field that in most cases doesn't involve tangible things. This can make it hard to measure how successful you or your team are and if you're hitting the mark with your community.

What do Developer Advocates do?

From my experience and through many discussions with my peers, the typical developer advocate tends to focus on several key outreach mechanisms to engage with developers. These are:

1. Social media engagement, primarily Twitter
2. Content generation via blogs or 3rd party sites such as Smashing Magazine
3. Screencasts
4. Podcasts
5. Webinars
6. Influencer engagement
7. Local or regional meetups and usergroups
8. Major conferences including speaking or attending
9. Hackathons

The need to scale a message means that tactics one through five will get the most attention allowing advocates to reach the largest possible audience. They're less personal but do afford a big megaphone. Tactics six through nine offer opportunities for more direct one-on-one interaction and engagement with the chance to meet with community members in person, work with influential developers to ensure they have an opportunity to affect your product direction and generally put a face to a name.

Easy Measurements

Of the tactics listed above, the easiest to measure success on are the top five. In most cases, analytics can offer insight into your motions, allowing you to determine how many people were interested in what you had to say. Tools like Twitter Analytics, Google Analytics and Bitly offer tremendous insight into how well your outreach and engagement efforts are doing. The data offered can have a profound impact on how you adjust your tone and message, especially in these semi-autonomous mediums where anything can be misconstrued and left to interpretation.

For example, my post about ngrok really went over well and, based on the analytics, I can say that it was something that really resonated with my audience:

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by Rey Bango via SitePoint