Social Media Outreach

[larsiusprime]

(Hope I'm doing this right)

I'd like to briefly discuss what sort of social media outreach strategy we might want to set in place. So far it seems to mostly be left to random community members, which is fine, but I feel like we had a LOT of great content come out of WWX 2015 and I'd like to make sure the tech community gets to know about it at the very least.

For instance, I think the word has gotten out pretty well about my own talk, and I'd like to see if we could do the same for some of the other ones.

Yesterday:

• Front page of reddit/r/programming, 40+ upvotes.
• Front page of HackerNews, 150+ upvotes.

I didn't actually post either of these, the reddit submission was my writeup of my talk, the hacker news thread is just a link to OpenFL.org, but uses as its title an exact phrase from my talk so I suspect that's the origin of that.

Today:

• Front page of reddit/r/gamedev, rising as we speak.
• Slashdot submission

I posted both of these, we'll see how well they do.

I know OpenFL tends to get a lot of the attention from outsiders and I'm sensitive to that fact so I'm doing my best to mention the other frameworks and Haxe itself in the comment threads and the articles themselves.

There's a couple of things to discuss about social media strategy:

1. Reddit's draconian anti-self-promotion policy

Don't get me started, but basically Reddit doesn't like it if you post your own material as more than 10% of your submissions. Bottom line is that this favors huge established people who have an existing army of existing fans to publish material to reddit for them as soon as any news hits. It's pretty easy to work around this but one has to be careful -- explicit voting rings and such are probably a bad idea. But a good strategy is when a good article is written, to ask someone in the community who is NOT directly involved with the project to post it to hackernews and a relevant subreddit with a descriptive, catchy, title.

2. Early comments to head off misconceptions

A big thing we learned with OpenFL was that people would have all kinds of weird notions about it being a custom Flash player or something like that without ever reading the article. So now I try to watch out for OpenFL threads and get in early with an educational comment explaining what OpenFL is and isn't, and just as importantly, explaining that Haxe is a separate thing and why it's important all by itself.

3. Generating shareable material from our news & events

A TON of fabulous material was just shared at WWX 2015. In my estimation at the very least 4 of those talks should be able to do the circuits through social media and get the attention they deserve. I would strongly encourage the authors of the talks to do an early slide-dump (preferably with some representation of their speech text) in an easily digestible and readable form, and then we can find ways to spread that material online.

I don't have the WWX schedule in front of me but a couple of obvious candidates are:

• UFront
• Kha
• Nicolas' Evoland talk

And I'm sure there's plenty more, just don't have it in front of me.

Anyways, I think I've gotten kind of good at getting attention for my own stuff and I'd like to help out the broader Haxe community if anyone else thinks this is a good idea.

Did I do this issue thing right? I figure -- discuss first, then turn into actionable idea, assign ownership of issue.

[Merelleya]

You did right!

I will be more than happy to work on a social media strategy with you. So far, I have kept up regular posts and shares on both twitter and facebook and started to use google+ a little more. However, I would really love a "map" and maybe a nice checklist including other outlets.

I can get in contact with both Jason and Robert regarding their respective talks and see if there is anything we can do to help them get the message out there. We should not forget our own talk, though.

@ncannasse do you have a writeup of your talk that we might want to publish? I could also do a voiceover, if that would help.

Generally, I am happy to help spread the word and coordinate content from our community members but I also need to focus on the content we want to generate ourselves, so I would really appreciate the help!

This will probably tie in with the next issue I am going to open...for the community/dev blog.

[Simn]

I don't think Nicolas' talk this year was particularly newsworthy. It was a good conference opener but in my opinion there were several other talks that had more punch to them.

[hughsando]

I guess if you are looking for a headline (PR?) then "Haxe turns 10" is a pretty good one.

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 12:10 AM, Simon Krajewski notifications@github.com wrote:

I don't think Nicolas' talk this year was particularly newsworthy. It was a good conference opener but in my opinion there were several other talks that had more punch to them.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/Project-Management/issues/22#issuecomment-108952178 .

[larsiusprime]

@hughsando your talk was super awesome, btw, if anyone can think of a good venue for that sort of thing.

[larsiusprime]

@Simn I was actually referring to the "Tech behind Evoland" talk -- I think that would be a good candidate for a Gamasutra featured article at the very least.

[Simn]

I see, I have to admit I kind of zoned out during that one because it reminded me of university when he started talking about shadows. :D

[Merelleya]

I am happy to reach out and coordinate. From a position of self-interest (or rather foundation-interest) I would dearly love to have some more Foundation/Haxe in general centered Content, though.

[larsiusprime]

@Merelleya: Okay, so let's think of a "map." Generally the process for me is something like this:

1. Identify the content source (say, a WWX talk)
2. Someone (author or volunteer) gets it into digestible format (ie, my slides -> article dump with pictures + text)
3. Match it to useful venues:
   • GameDev related (tech/biz/design/etc) : Gamasutra.com (I know the editors & can help get featured), reddit (/r/gamedev)
   • Tech related: hackernews, reddit (/r/programming, /r/webdev perhaps), slashdot, etc
4. Avoid self-promotion posting policies without doing anything "naughty"
   • Reddit is super strict in principle but haphazardly enforced so watch out
   • Reddit strictly forbids author or poster using social media to directly ask for upvotes
   • Slashdot is fine with self-promotion and ENCOURAGES you to twitter spam for upvotes
5. Haxe audience spreads the message about threads when they see them
6. Get informed haxe audience into the threads for clearing up misconceptions and answering questions.

None of this has to be super formal or organized, it's just the steps that someone has to do at each point along the way for the effect to work. Sometimes that cascades naturally if high quality content is pushed in the right way to start with.

Sharing to facebook/twitter/google+ etc is easy. Just log in and post, share, retweet.

The tricky thing is that you really can't do anything unless there's good, digestible, well-formatted content to start with. Of course I have total control over all content I author (which tends to be OpenFL and Flixel related as that's what I'm using all the time) -- not to say it's perfect, just that I can make sure it fits the format I think will get the most attention. For other people's content we could perhaps poke people to "hey, write this up so we can share it!" and give them tips how to improve the formatting / presentation.

I'm more than happy to share good material other people author, in fact with reddit that puts me BACK in good standing as it increases the ratio of material in my account that's not self-promotion (I've dug myself quite a hole from years ago and could by the rules be banned at any time).

[larsiusprime]

We also should consider getting some haxe-focused communities some more attention. There's a reddit.com/r/haxe subreddit for instance that is kind of a ghost town, we could perhaps put a link to this somewhere prominent to give it some traffic, and start submitting important things to it, to give it a shot in the arm and help it grow. Right now it's mostly Haxe roundups, but there's no reason we couldn't give it more material, and thus attract more readers.

[larsiusprime]

Speaking of, we're on the front page of Slashdot right now: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/06/04/1725230/open-source-haxeopenfl-platform-will-support-home-game-consoles

Maybe jump in with your comments as soon as you can, Slashdot commenters can be particularly weird and misinformed about everything.

[larsiusprime]

Incidentally, I echo @hughsando's viewpoint that a good, solid "10 years of Haxe" article could be great. Just talk about Haxe itself and the foundation, a wonderful and solid, comprehensive introduction to the programming language and its larger community, as well as who is using it, could be great and should be able to do pretty well on the media rounds.

[Merelleya]

And there we are back in content-creation-land xD.

Your plan looks just like my publication "checklist" so I guess we agree on a lot of things. I am additionally monitoring on Analytics to evaluate what kind of content produces results in terms of downloads, new users, etc.

it looks like this (I use asana for my own stuff so you will have to make do with a pdf dump):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5g3ps7umvL3cEN4eHVzUjBJWVU/view?usp=sharing

The time-intensive part is creating the content and/or getting other people to create nice things to share. I also have workflows for that xD. I am happy to do some out-reaching to maybe help things along but we will have to spread the monitoring and commenting, since I am not that technical and also not everywhere, sadly.

[larsiusprime]

I think the most sustainable approach is to acknowledge we have limited efforts ourselves and that we should leverage the community wherever possible to do these things in a mostly "automatic" way. There's some manual nudges to make, like I've been nudging Rob to dump out his Kha slides, for instance, but in terms of "setting things on fire" we have limits to doing that by hand.

For example, we could perhaps set up some twitter bots to watch submissions on reddit/slashdot/etc, so we don't have to personally invest effort into alerting the community when they should jump in and help with spreading the word. Then all we would have to do is periodically say "want to help Haxe? Follow some of these useful twitter bots", etc. I think we have one for stack overflow that we could give some attention too, and perhaps then we could naturally see more participation there.

[Merelleya]

That reminds me...

[Merelleya]

I will put this into the backlog and make a to-do list including the above points once I get around to it. (In terms of "launching content" and "curating/promoting content").

[Simn]

What's the status here?

[Merelleya]

It has been incorporated into my "things I do with new content" checklist so this can be closed.