Status Developer Twitter Channel - WIP Proposal Doc

[ShawnS]

Introduction

The purpose of this article is for us to surface any thoughts, comments, feedback and potential challenges so we can work through them collectively as a team. These are some recommendations which are all WIP and we can begin piloting some of these ideas and iterate as we go on.

Developer Channel Objectives

• Initiative Announcements - As we grow and our initiatives continue to deliver stellar work, we need a platform to surface latest updates from the different initiatives and having them all on the brand channel becomes cluttered and impractical

• Focused Community - Building a more focused channel which will cater to both the inner ethereum community and devs outside the ethereum space looking to enter, all of which will appreciate/engage with more technical content

  • Important note: Balancing this channel to ensure there is content that is inviting and accessible to a non web3 developer audience will be key

• 2 way engagement - Allow a channel for not only CC’s to get involved in more technical conversations but also the developer community who are connected to our initiatives to have a channel to ask questions and seek help.

• CC Candidates - Have an audience for People Ops to tap into when searching for potential new hires.

• Leads for different Initiatives - Creating this focused community could result in future Incubatees or Status Studio enrolments

• Bounty contribution - Encourage developers to contribute by working on bounties (both as part of bounty programs and advocacy program)

Community Value Exchange:

Why do I come here and not somewhere else?

What should I walk away from this channel having learned?

• Information Content - While the main Status brand channel will still serve up informative content, potentially this could be the source of this content (ie. “StatusDevs” channel tweets out an Embark 3.2 announce and it’s RT’d by EthStatus channel) alternately it could be slightly more detailed announce catering for this more technical audience.

• Education Content - With a more technical channel perhaps this is when the shift happens from moving Status Brand education content to be more focused on our values while the Status Dev channel becomes more focused educating you on the technical details of what the different initiatives are doing - ie. a detailed Whisper article

• Inspiration - While inspiration around our values and how they are brought to life would be addressed on the main brand channel (EthStatus), this channel could inspire an inner ethereum community to what application of the technology could uncover, also providing community members with inspiration for their own projects ie. a detailed piece on extensions could inspire a DApp developer

• Opportunities to contribute - We can post links to specific bounties with enough technical detail to encourage devs to get involved. Devs can work and earn money by following this channel for latest updates on bounties

Moderation and Management of Channel

The practical question of how this channel is moderated, who is responsible for responding/publishing/growing the channel?

• Who is the community manager of this channel? Do we feel we can launch a channel without a singular community manager?
• When people ask questions how do we propose answering them?
• Something to note, that if your response rate (responding from the channel itself) goes below 20% of questions on a post this can impact your reach
• How do we grow this channel?
  • Do we want to utilise this channel to identify and tap into existing community conversations to organically grow the channel? Ie. try to engage in conversations related to #clojure or something like that
  • Do we feel cross pollination will be sufficient in growing this channel
  • Do we want to do promoted posts to a very particular audience with highly technical content to try and grow the community?

As there seems to be quite a few members of the core team that are interested in having this channel there could be a few ways of tackling this challenge

• Rather than having a singular community manager or someone with the specific role, we can pilot with 5-7 volunteers where we have the framework and tools to be able to access and publish to this channel and the management load could be shared. Whether this is a roster or more organic is something that can be decided amongst the group. Marketing can assist in providing any guidelines. The idea would be to run this pilot for 1 month, document any learnings and prepare some kind of documentation/onboarding to the tool for any CC or community member who wants to join and help moderate the channel
• Encouraging Core team members to take it upon themselves to jump into the channel and engage with community members directly from their own channel (ie. Iuri jumping in and providing assistance to a thread about Embark)

Content

• Currently we are running into issues of over publishing and being penalised by it. What steps can we take here to ensure that there is a content pipeline and we aren’t just becoming a non stop broadcast channel?

• What is the breakdown of content we expect?

  • Status Produced - ie. Social Post amplifying blog announcing ENS
  • CC contributed (RT) - ie. Tweet from Ben about a new Incubatee
  • Community Curated - ie. Video from a community member reviewing Embark 3.2
  • Conversational (responses) -ie. a Thread answering questions related to accessing extensions

• The question has already been asked by the Embark, Incubate and PeopleOps team of having their own channel. The main challenge in this instance is reach, resource and what will have the most impact, we currently have new channels which we’ve launched who have full-time team members managing and contributing to the channel and yet growth has been slow and even after three months on avg content only reaches 7 people. This is not to say we shouldn’t do it but rather it needs a measured approach.

A potential solution - A two phased approach:

1. Begin with one account but build an identity for each initiative within the channel - through hashtags, Tone of Voice, content themes and visual stylings, all of which Marketing can help the different initiatives develop.

• We create project specific hashtags as aggregators of content
• Visual styles, ie. overlays which made it clear this was an embark post or Incubate post
• Content themes - the different projects may have the same content themes but may go into different depth or have different interest areas and people naturally gravitate towards 1 vs the other

2. Analysis of the channel and the content - As a community emerges ie. the volume of community contributed content increases and the avg. engagement on an initiative specific piece of content increases we spin off a new channel. The identity moves with it (initiative hashtag and visual style) but now we have a community built up and a resource could be allocated to properly grow this community.

Next Steps:

We’d love to have this channel up and running before Devcon so this is what we’ve identified as next steps:

• Provide any feedback/thoughts/comments on the above proposal
• If you’re interested in helping build this channel through content and moderation put your hand up - we will start with 5-7 at first for the pilot (happy to go a bit bigger if there is more interest)
• We will begin working on the identity for the initiatives
• We will map out a few weeks worth of content in order to launch the channel and have a steady stream
• Once the pilot is complete open it up to any CC or community member who wants to help manage the channel and we can provide access and any guidelines or materials to help onboard

[PascalPrecht]

Hi everyone,

first of all, I’m super duper happy to see this thread kicking off. The day where a possible dev channel for Status has been mentioned in a Townhall meeting, was when I got very excited about this and I was hoping that this will happen sooner than later.

You may or may not have read a post I made the other day on Status.app, but a lot of the thoughts left there align very well with this effort here, so it’s great that we can collaboratively come up with a decent strategy.

Big big thumbs-up for that!

Here’s some feedback, most of this is just underlining what has already been mentioned:

Currently we are running into issues of over publishing and being penalised by it.

I have to agree that @ethStatus is producing a lot of content on Twitter and as somebody from the outside (before I started at Status), it can be very very hard to keep up with everything. I had no idea that you’d actually get a penalty for over-publishing, but I think this could be seen as yet another sign that it might be better to put certain content into dedicated channels to spread publishing activities.

What steps can we take here to ensure that there is a content pipeline and we aren’t just becoming a non stop broadcast channel?

There’s certainly different ways to go about this and I honestly don’t have a lot of experience in how this is best done within a bigger organization where a lot of content and strategy is involved. It might be a good idea to plan the content being published over a certain time period. However, another possibility would be to keep this a little bit more “loose”, so that there’s isn’t too much effort involved in getting every single tweet out in the perfect moment.

I assume that the challenges will stay the same, because there’s probably a lot of dev related content that we could tweet about, but maybe one pragmatic and “first make it run” approach would be to introduce simple rules and say:

• Let’s ensure we don’t broadcast/tweet too much by defining a sort of throttle interval, so that, let’s say, only 2-3 tweets should be made per week (just throwing in some numbers here, this needs to be fine-tuned)
• Every dev team, or the “responsible person” for this effort on the team (let’s call them Tweeters for now), knows best what is meaningful content for their platform. To offload the work of figuring out which content to post, and what the tweet should look like, we could introduce a channel were Tweeters would post already ready-to-publish tweets. It’d be then just a matter of taking those tweets and putting them out. In fact that can be done by a single person who has access to the devchannel (I know the idea is also to give many people access, but I’m just throwing out ideas. This can be moved around as needed)

We will probably still sooner or later realise that there’s a “traffic jam” in content that should go out there at which point we’ll probably decide to introduce dedicated channels for different teams (Embark, Nimbus, etc).

The question has already been asked by the Embark, Incubate and PeopleOps team of having their own channel. The main challenge in this instance is reach, resource and what will have the most impact, we currently have new channels which we’ve launched who have full-time team members managing and contributing to the channel and yet growth has been slow and even after three months on avg content only reaches 7 people.

Yes, I can see that this is a tricky thing. So from my experience I can say that this simply takes time. Growing a follower base also means growing trust in your audience and community. And the way you grow trust and followers is by regularly posting content that is meaningful to your audience. Also here, the same applies that, some people might only be interested in a subset of topics, or all of them. That affects follower behavior as well. I for one once unfollowed a lot of accounts simply to clean up my timeline. I could do this without loosing news, because the accounts that I still follow retweet the content from other channels anyways.

For example, I can imagine that there’s a lot of Embark Developers that are really only interested in Embark related things. New features, fixes, tutorials, etc. Those people will very likely follow an official Embark account because they know, that’s where they get first-hand information that they get nowhere else. This might not be possible for channels that tweet about stuff that is accessible from different sources as well, as it makes it harder for followers to find a reason to actually follow that channel.

Either way, this always takes time, but I believe that with @ethStatus having 100k+ followers, this can be used as an accelerator for other sub channels. The rest comes from continuity.

Visual styles, ie. overlays which made it clear this was an embark post or Incubate post

Not super sure what’s meant by that. A tweet is a tweet is a tweet. Or do you mean creating images that have an overlay with every tweet? If that’s the case, this definitely improves the quality and engagement of the tweet, but also slows down the process of getting stuff out there as we always have to cycle through creating a dedicated image.

We will map out a few weeks worth of content in order to launch the channel and have a steady stream

As mentioned above, something we can do, maybe not necessarily needed. But I do see that in a bigger organisation, this probably needs to be coordinated (hint: this gets easier with dedicated sub channels )

Last but not least I can say how for example Google/Angular is doing it:

• Google dev channel tweets about general developer community stuff like events, new youtube videos, initiatives etc
• Angular channel mostly retweets other people’s tweets once per week (usually on fridays) and tweets own content mostly for new releases of the library. This keeps the channel very focused and at the same time demonstrates that other people in the community push the content. Obviously this is not something that works right away as we first have to grow a follower base. But once it’s rolling, this should work for us too

Anyways, those are just some thoughts. Hope this makes sense!

[kim]

I think that’s very insightful feedback Pascal. Agree with much of it. We are building a community that is incredibly diverse and a one size fits all approach to social comms works only to a point. As awareness continues to grow inside and outside our space, there will be a growing need for more targeted messaging with select separate channels that are highly targeted. The primary Status TW channel would pluck the key content to share that aligns with our higher level brand strategy (ie who we are to the ethereum community and broader ecosystem). Test and learn!

[akshifederici]

Shawn and Team - thank you so much for proposing this and pushing it forward. I think it’s a great idea and would like to volunteer to create content and moderate (as part of the 5-7 for the first pilot) for this. I think Studio will be directly relevant to this audience. I am also glad that you will use hashtags to aggregate content around specific projects. Three questions from me are a) how can I help / how can I start contributing content to this? b) In addition to all the great objectives, could one of them also just be to solicit direct inputs / feedback / testing / flagging of bugs / complaints for any products or interim outputs relating to a product that we release? and c) In addition to growing the channel and how to source those growth members, how are we planning to seed / found the initial base of members of this channel (outside of membership from the core contributors)?

Thanks all!

[ShawnS]

Hey @PascalPrecht @kim @akshifederici, thank you so much for your comments and considerations.

We’ve had some time as a marketing team to evaluate the next steps and hopefully we can work through some of the points you have raised in real time as they are all valid points and hopefully can be addressed through trialing with this channel. To reiterate we see this channel as a platform that teams can use to test their content pipeline and engagement strategies (with some help from the Marketing team in the process) and hopefully all spin off into new channels. The next steps we have identified are the following:

• We have a Marketing member allocated to each core team. Their role will be to aid that team in anyway to produce content on the regular whether that be with copy, assets and optimisation however they are not there to approve content and the desired outcome is for teams to all have access to the channel and publish directly (this can be done immediately so if teams are interested this can be facilitated)

• As content increases and in turn community engagement, someone from the team (or multiple team members) can become admins of the channel (we have unlimited keys) to allow for the teams to directly engage with the community relevant to their content (this is if they haven’t already become admins )

• How does publishing work and stay organised? We don’t want to have anyone being a bottleneck so the initial thinking is that people schedule their ideas to a WeKan board a day or two in advance to pushing content live to ensure they aren’t overlapping with others content. This will allow for others to feedback on planned content if requested.

• At first the Marketing team will aid in this process but we’re hoping to allow for as much permission less participation as possible so if you have content ideas or want to help manage conversations with our community you’re more than welcome to become an admin of the channel or put forward ideas to the WeKan board and in turn publish it directly on the Twitter channel as well.

• As a team we’re trialing new processes which will hopefully allow for no single individual or team having ownership or responsibility of the channel and hopefully through this process we can spin off and have channels for each team.

In terms of who the Marketing team member will be to help your team, they should be in contact. Also the channel is now officially live, thanks to the Embark team with some content already!!! Here’s the channel: https://twitter.com/ethstatusdevs, definitely give it a follow

[PascalPrecht]

Hooray!

Quick feedback: obviously that’s a personal taste thing, but maybe we can come up with a different design language / logo for the dev channel?

Right now it’s very black and sad. How about we use some coding related symbols for the channel? Similar to how Google Dev channel uses “< >” characters in their logo.

Glad to see this is happening!

[ShawnS]

Hey!

Yea so @Ned came up with the design for the logo so I’ll let him chime in on what the thinking was.
I’m not particularly opinionated on the matter so I’ll let you guys discuss it here

[Ned]

Hey @PascalPrecht –

My comments here are just to be seen as a suggestion. I think there is nothing stopping Status devs deciding to implement something that best represents them.

So to pickup where @ShawnS mentioned this. If you look at this sketch you will see that we are in the process of developing a unified system where all disciplines feel connected and represent a certain aspect that ultimately forms a whole. (Developers Logo included)

Currently we haven’t collectively agreed on this framework yet, the proposal is being drafted now to move forward after DevCon where each discipline will be interviewed on how they would like to be visually represented in terms of logos, identities, etc

If different parties choose a logo now and the consensus changes later, it will appear visibly ‘out of place’. Hence the decision to maintain the current logo until we can move again together within a visual framework.

In any case, I had also created some quick sketches earlier based on this topic that refer back to your comment. Perhaps the Dev Team would like to have a think about it?

[PascalPrecht]

Hi @Ned!

Currently we haven’t collectively agreed on this framework yet, the proposal is being drafted now to move forward after DevCon where each discipline will be interviewed on how they would like to be visually represented in terms of logos, identities, etc

Makes perfect sense

If different parties choose a logo now and the consensus changes later, it will appear visibly ‘out of place’. Hence the decision to maintain the current logo until we can move again together within a visual framework.

Fully understand! Always good to stay consistent.

In any case, I had also created some quick sketches earlier based on this topic that refer back to your comment. Perhaps the Dev Team would like to have a think about it?

I love the hexagons!