Turning a community into evangelism helpers

Christian Heilmann: Hello. Oh, yes. Let's give a standing ovation. Thanks.

Speaker 2: There's nothing more terrible to do to somebody who lives in England like that. Giving us applause before we've done something just feels awkward. The best is when you get people like in America, high five. We're like, no. But don't because you get rained on, so you never put your arms up.

That's why you don't do that. I love my favorite high five ever was at an internal conference at Mozilla where one of my blind colleagues was singing at karaoke and the karaoke DJ, they wanted to high five him afterwards. That was a wonderful awkward moment when he stands there like, that was amazing. And the blind guy looks in the other direction and he's like, what? Not good.

I wanted to talk, well, I wanted to. I was asked to talk today about scaling yourself as an evangelist and as an advocate. But then having been in a war room for Microsoft Build the last three weeks and getting catering, I realized that scaling myself just reminds me terribly of what happened to myself. So instead I called it about turning your followers or turning your community into evangelism helpers. And I want to talk about my work that I've been doing at Mozilla in the last four years and a bit what I've done with Microsoft and before that with Yahoo as well.

Because we talked a lot about scaling already, but we haven't talked much about the thing that actually makes it really interesting, which is scaling to where you not are. And right now, we actually talked all about how cool it is to travel but we didn't talk about the other countries where all these developers are that we're normally not reaching. So when I come to the Silicon Valley, I don't see it as developer evangelism here. I see it as influencer marketing because most of the developers here are not people that I'm interested in because they are little startups that have to build things and discard them and build things and discard them and not use systems like iAdvocate or best practices that I advocate. That means you build something maintainable for the next ten years, five years.

That's not so interesting for people here. So I'm Chris Hyman, code poet on Twitter, and this is how I think about the mobile web most of the time. I wrote the Developer Evangelism Handbook. In case somebody of you haven't read it yet, it's nice to read. It took me two afternoons, so that I didn't use for personal grooming.

So take a look at it. It's free. It's online. You can play with that. It needs a bit of a refresher, but I sadly enough don't have much time to do it.

But I promise I will do a better version soon. As we're in San Francisco, I thought I'd make my slides a bit more colorful and more interesting and I'm going to go through all these points but you don't want to worry about them right now. So first of all, why include the community into a developer outreach? A lot of people spend a lot of money hiring developer evangelists or developer advocates, whatever you want to call it. And then why would we want to get the unwashed rubble of the other people in the company to actually do outreach for us as well?

The biggest is basically that you cannot be anywhere at the same time. I've been accused of cologning myself and being several people on Twitter before, but that's because I'm just prolific and I just don't shut up. But I cannot be in every country at the same time. And as much as we said that traveling is fun, 518,000 air miles is what I have right now, it takes a toll on you. And it's not as much fun anymore after the fourth year, and it's not that amazing if you realize that you don't have the impact that you would love to have.

Cause for me being a presenter, being a trainer, being somebody who goes into a company, I want to make one thing. And that is inspire people that they learn something and go out and learn more. I want as a presenter you to go back to your boss and be able to say one thing that you learned so your boss is excited that they sent you to that conference. It's not about selling my stuff. It's getting you on the way.

Because as humans, what we learn on our own accord, what we learn the way we learn, we learn 10 times better than just hearing it from somebody else. So instead of just telling people what the real is, you point them in the way and you stop them when they're going the wrong way. This is the best way of teaching something. And we cannot scale by just being there physically all the time. And it's sad that too many people think that's a necessity.

The amount of people that have to move to the Silicon Valley to work to a company that works on the internet is just mind boggling. You know, we managed to descale the internet to one city and made it impossible to pay rent here. Really? Whereas testing your platforms and testing your systems with different connectivity in different time zones means you write a much, much more robust and more interesting product than something in the Silicon Valley where people where all have the same MacBooks and are all on one fat connection. And if you look at the world and you don't look at the projection that we had is the political projection where England is the center of the world and the most important thing.

If you tilt this ball of us, well almost ball, of us around and you see the size of countries and the size of people that are not online yet and will be online soon and are interested in new stuff and not already bored by them, then there's a market out there that we're completely not thinking about it. The outline here, the gray one that America, China, and India is in is Africa. This is how big Africa is. This is how big China is compared to America, and Australia is almost the same size as America as well. And we always just see America as the one market to care about because the others, well, they don't properly speak English and these kind of things, and they don't even use new build scripts every week and win hacker news instead of writing code.

There's a great website called the truesize.com that shows you just how important it is to think worldwide and to also think in time zones. When I worked as an engineer in Yahoo, I built a product with a team in India, in England and America. We had a twenty four hour coverage of the product. The most important thing were the hours where we talked to each other and we handed over information to each other, but we managed to get twenty four hours coverage for the product and released it in three months rather than seven months which was originally planned. The other problem is of course that language barriers are still there.

And there's nothing better than having somebody in the country who speaks the language fluently and stays there for people with questions later on. The amount of times you go to a conference and you give a talk in English and then the audience, I mean I speak three languages, four, but none of them really, really well. So the problem is that you get questions and you just cannot answer them. But information, for example, in France and Germany, in French or German, is much more disseminated across the country than American or English content. The most important part there is that American or English content is seen as the cool new stuff, but people don't feel good enough.

They don't feel switched on enough to disseminate it in their own country. So giving them materials in their own language makes the barrier go away and they're like, okay, I send you I reuse your slide deck because it's not in English and I understand what I'm doing and I put my own little words on top of them. The other problem that I have is this parachute speaking. You come into the conference, you inspire people, everybody claps, and then you go home and then you don't have any time answering all the emails that are coming in and all the tweets that are coming in. By involving the community and getting speakers to speak with you, local people, and introducing them to the community as your colleague on the ground, all their answers will be answered.

All their questions will be answered and you've got time to do other things like personal grooming and basically staying in the place that you pay rent for. And it's very very important to think about this. You inspire people but you also depress them if you don't follow-up and you just don't have enough time to follow-up all the requests and understand some of the requests. I get about 600 emails a day from different sources. A lot of them are from people that are inspired at conferences that have very adventurous English and I really don't know what they want from me.

But then I talk to locals and they're like, oh, yeah, that was actually badly translated. In Portuguese it means to us and this is the question that that person had. So involving the community and not just being the, hey, I'm awesome and I'm going back to America is very, very important and I think it's the best way to scale your outreach. You share, inspire, and explain. That's the first thing to do with your content.

Everything you do for your company that you want to give out to the community, give it out there. Release your slides. Release them with notes. Release the original slide format in PowerPoint or Keynote or HTML or whatever you use that is editable. Not just a PDF so people can see your whole talk.

That doesn't help because a presenter should own their slides. Slides are basically wallpaper for your presentation. But sadly enough, we keep elevating slides to something much much bigger. But share everything you do. Share your code examples.

Share where you got your pictures from. If you got royalty free images that you're using, that you found, like creative comments images, share them with the community as well so they don't use illegal materials in their slide decks, which people are prone to do. And that can be in some countries a legislative problem. Make yourself available and show that you listen. Make yourself available in the team and say like, here's my internal email.

If something from that comes, I know it's from the community that I'm supporting and you will be the first to get answered. And say like, you can call me, you can be, can DM me on Twitter. Find ways where your community is. That sometimes means using systems that you don't use. Google plus for example is not big here, but in South America it's still used by a lot of people.

In India it's used by a lot of people. So make sure that you are on these places. Have a repository of your slide decks in an editable format. In my case, it's just a Dropbox folder that I share with the community. Here's the Keynote files, here's the PowerPoint files, here's the HTML files, here's how to edit them.

Share out interesting talks and point out why they are great. When you find some great talks, send it out to your community and say like, this speaker did some very cool thing at 08:00 at eight minutes in explaining these bits. Or this is a great example how to explain a very complex term. You learn a lot by listening to other people's talks. I watch them in the gym.

When I'm going on a cross trainer, I watch TED Talks, I watch TED Talks. It's like that thirty to forty minutes is a perfect workout and you're not bored and your brain doesn't melt away because you watch daytime television. It's a very, very good time to actually go there because you're stuck anyways and you might as well do something with it. Create explanations for your company products including demo code and share it out with the community. And these are not massive slide decks.

These are not ten minute videos. These are like three sentence explanations what this product does and how they can tell people about them. Share and comment on great examples from community members. That's very, very important. People send you all kind of stuff.

Sometimes you have to mentor them. Sometimes you have to go back to them and say like, okay, this is not the way to do it. But if it's great, just be as loud as possible in every different directions and make your community members more important than you are because that's what it's about. They are giving their free time away. They're not getting paid for this stuff in most cases, so we make sure that works out.

Record and teach recording. That's a very, very important part of what we're doing. When I coach people in public speaking, I explain to them that you sound completely different on a recording than you think you do. The reason is that your head vibrates when you talk and it doesn't vibrate in the recording, so you sound completely different. Who is this stranger?

This stranger is somebody you have to start to love because then you become a good presenter. When you realize who you project rather than who you are, then you become a better presenter. And the good thing is by recording everything that you do, I normally record screencasts of everything I do, I record meetings and sending them out, you have a track record. And you see people getting more and more used to hearing themselves, and you also know what people have been doing. They show how you deliver some content you talked about.

It's a recording. When you say like you've sent a slide deck out to community, but you also send out a video of you presenting it and saying like, this is one way of presenting it. And then, oh, now I understand the slide deck much better. They give you an idea how much coaching a community member needs to become a presenter. So when you ask them to record their stuff, sometimes before I do a mentoring on speaking, I make them record a two minute video just talking into the camera, introducing themselves.

Then I already know what kind of problems they have, what kind of interests they have. They allow people to get used to seeing themselves as they appear to others. As I said, we're not appearing the same way. But we got to get used to that person and we got to make that person better and by that we ourselves become better as well. And you recreate reusable content, screencast, tutorials that people can localize and talk over in presentations.

A bit of a tangent, I hate live coding. I think it's a parlor trick and it's absolutely and utterly unnecessary. If shows you something cool, fine. If the audience cannot repeat what you did because you have it in a massive build in your machine and only in that configuration where it works, you wasted everybody's time. It's just showing off to each other in a high school jock fashion how cool we are on the command line.

In essence, if you have a, if a live, if you have a code example and you want to show something in a live environment, make a screen cast. Then, it, you're independent of connectivity, you're independent of the computer that you're presenting from because sometimes you have to use somebody else's like here. Or you basically have not the problem that you type in your password for everybody to see because you put it in the name field rather than the password field when you show a live system, which I've seen as well. So make sure to get yourself make screencasts are great. Not screencasts where you talk over, because they're intrusive.

They're great for disseminating them on YouTube and then sending them around. But for reuse, having a screencast with a script that people can talk over on stage is much much better than explaining to everybody in the community how to set up their computer to show a demo. Avoid the magical PowerPoint. Every company wants you to write that PowerPoint slide deck to send out to the community for them to localize for the next two months with all the with all the great sound bites and all the great information that the company wants you to do. People in the company ask you to for these kind of things.

Especially in a company like Microsoft, I had people that like, oh yeah, where's the slide deck for this month that are gonna give it presentations? I'm like, what do you mean? Yeah, we always got a slide deck with the newest stuff and then we localize it and then we talk over that one. I'm like, don't you wanna own your presentation? I can do that?

Yes, you can. Because if you're on stage just repeating as a robot what everybody else has written for you, that's boring as toast. That's absolutely terrible. So the magical PowerPoint that is reusable and is presentable by everybody does not exist. It's nonsense.

There is no such thing as a magical PowerPoint and everybody can present. And that's why I split that up. That's the most important part that I learned in Mozilla that makes it much, much easier for people to reuse your stuff by not having one presentation, but having a picket mix of different things that they can put into presentations in a presentation format if necessary. So instead, I had a wiki where I talked about talking points and examples of resources of different technologies. And that one, for example, was about HTML five video.

A few bullet points explaining what HTML five video is, what the encoding problems are, the issues of it, how to solve these problems, and demos to how to show what HTML five video can do when that came out. So So instead of giving people the thing to show, I point them to the resources that they then can pick and mix and translate into their own language to give out to people. I then put them also into presentation templates. That sounds strange, but people don't start with an empty PowerPoint. They feel they don't have style, they they don't understand how to use PowerPoint properly.

So giving them just a template with the logo in there and maybe an outline and maybe a few images gets people started much faster than just asking them to build their own little HTML template or their own little PowerPoint. I found myself using HTML templates is really bad because I love HTML and CSS and JavaScript and I start coding more in my slides than writing them. So in the end, this is distracting for me as a developer. And I also found that going to conferences where accessibility is important, you have to give out your slide decks in portable and printable format to the translators, and that is not an HTML slide deck that uses all kind of woosh and zingy things. So presentation templates were very, very important just to get people going.

It's a liners blanket. Even if they think they're not good enough as a presenter, here's the Mozilla logo behind me and Mozilla trusts me that I can speak for them. That's pretty cool. And what I did is actually write an HTML one back then because everything that is closed technology like PowerPoint and Keynote in Mozilla is basically the devil and we cannot use it. And to avoid these discussions with the really, strong minded people, I just wrote an HTML slide deck.

That slide deck had notes in it. And when you rolled over each of them, it explained you in the notes not what to say, but what the message, what the gist of this slide is going to be. So then people can translate that, can cut that down to what they want to say. It's not like a script that they have to follow which I couldn't follow myself anyways. And then I had these information slide decks in there and they just said like, okay, the next section is all about apps and here is the main points about what apps are about and then each slide is a different one.

And I put this massive blinking red thing in there telling for information only do not present, and I still saw it on stage from time to time. But that's a very very good point to explain to people that your PowerPoint is not your talk, but you have to actually cut it down and write it and rewrite it to what you want to present. And then there's videos in there for people to talk over as well because they don't want to set up their Firefox OS phone or something like that. They just could show the video. The system itself was written that you just by clicking different little buttons, can read the notes and you can just turn the ones off that you don't want to show.

So if you want to show it from your local hard drive or from GitHub, you can do that just by picking and mixing much like Keynote and PowerPoint allows you to turn off different ones as well. There's also code examples in there. That's very very important to show people to make it as simple as possible, your code examples and not the big ones that normally put people put out there. The fun thing about that one was also, I was wrecking my brain. How do I get notes from an HTML document onto a second screen when I'm presenting on stage?

I was like, okay, WebSockets. Okay, like popping up all kind of cool stuff. And I realized console log. Open the developer tools on the second screen and just basically show the logging there and show your slides on the other one and you got already a two screen experience. Then people translated that because it was an HTML, and they translated it for their community and did like trainings in the community themselves.

In this case, this is Spanish. No, yeah. And translate to people what's going on there, and change the images around to what is more important locally as well, something I could have never done. But by giving them the template, it worked out. And that's when delegation comes in.

Delegation is very important. Sooner or later, you want to scale, you don't want to do everything else. So if you find somebody in Paris that is really good in that community, you promote that person across that community and say like, hey, you already got Jean Jean, like whatever. And he actually can be that person that I could be because I can't be there all the time. So, and they can also help making materials for these different countries.

And it was wonderful to see the wiki explode with localized versions of the content that I've done by giving people the chance to do it. Translation localization is a very important part. Localization very much. The amount of American slide decks I see with like sports metaphors that don't make any sense outside this country is just painful. Don't do that.

I've seen people in Romania go up on stage like, go Giants. And people are what, Harry Potter? Or what about which Giants? I don't know what you're talking about. Or even better, I was in a middle in yeah, in some country where basically, Beirut, conference in Beirut, and I was a UX guy in America and he's like, imagine for two hours each day, you don't have any electricity.

How much more effective would you be without all these distractions? How much more could you concentrate on doing the things that you do? And he found that really inspiring, not understanding that the government shuts down electricity for eight hours at a time every day in Byrard. So they're like, two hours would be great. I would have six hours more energy.

This is great. I could do things. Captioning and transcription of demo videos is another very important part that the community can do for you. Demo code cleanup, demo creation. Like again, oh, this needs a fat connection to connect live to something.

Okay, I wrote a proxy that gets it from Brazil rather than just from an American server. Testing and recording across different platforms and conditions. You don't have the Windows machine. You don't have the Linux server. You don't have that six year old Android phone that somebody in your community in India has that can test your stuff on it for you and make a video of it that you can use then.

Maintenance of resources, like cleaning up these resources that I showed about HTML five video, That was nice to write but keeping it maintained is the annoying task. And somebody who just wants to get into writing, they could learn a lot from maintaining a resource like that. Introducing local community members to the world and to the community is the way to avoid that parachuting presenter thing that I talked about. Mention them in your talks and as a resource to contact. I had them as a slide in there.

Hi, I'm Chris. I'm going to be here for this conference and then I'm going to be gone. Here's Miguel. He's actually local. He works in that company.

We don't have time to bring him on stage, but hey, he's the guy that I actually talked to here. He got me here. Please talk to him if you have any follow-up questions. He can field them for me and when he gets stuck, I will answer your question as well. Co present with them at events as well.

That works really well. It's hard to do a good presentation with two people sometimes, but it's really, really good if one of them is a local person and knows the local idioms, and knows how to actually talk to people rather than us doing a bit of wiki research, than doing something completely wrong because it's ten years old what we thought this country is about. I've done some really, really good stuff with that. It was really exciting to see people move. The only problem is as soon as you promote them like this, they get hired by America and get sent over here and moved over here.

So you have to find the next person again. Introduce local companies and influences to your local counterpart. A lot of times people don't listen to somebody local, but if the great American or British guy comes over and introduces them to the massive bank in their country, oh you trust this guy? Okay, then we trust him as well. And that's a very, very good way of getting people in the door.

And some people are really good at that. Our Australian team was really, really good in sending me around to every partner that they couldn't get talked to. And all of a sudden they got access now. Once they are trained up, tell other company departments about them. That's another very important part.

Make sure that your company knows about your outreach stuff because that way you get support for later on. Otherwise you just you just run run yourself raw and you don't know what to do any longer. Make sure that that you that people realize that there's people worldwide that can do things. That way, you don't have the localized marketing department of your company working against you either. They know that somebody is in that country, so if they actually do two videos with the press there, they can get somebody local together with them rather than just sending somebody or hiring a third party company.

The last bit about this to a degree is that guidelines and access are very important thing. You have to make your community understand that you're trusting them, but that also means that they have to deliver to a certain quality. Not necessarily great speakers, these kind of things, but being like a good and kind and interesting speaker that doesn't basically bad mouth the competition, for example, which inexperienced speakers do all the time. And it's a very, very terrible thing because you burn bridges and a small mall market. You will always come across the same people here.

So in my case, had this developer group. I made this group about evangelism reps where you can become an evangelist. But I said like, here are your responsibilities. What do you have to do to be part of this group? We don't do it for everybody.

And if you fail to fulfill these responsibilities, sorry, no more support for you. No more t shirts for you, no more stickers, no more sending you to conferences, because you don't do it. So you have to make sure that people see your support as something that they have to fight for, or something that they have to keep, keep being up to speed for rather than just getting it for free. That sounds cruel, but it's very very important for quality. Because there's so many PR nightmares for people using their own stuff and talking about your company.

So one thing one thing I did is speaker training, and it was general training and advanced training, and people had to apply for that. People had to write some blog posts, people had to record some videos, people had to basically show that they're really interested and not only that they want to get a speaker training. For example, in places like India, a speaker training from a company basically gets you a better job. So you want to make sure that those people also stay in your company afterwards, rather than just getting a great training for free and going for it. I always love it.

You go to conferences there, and you give a talk and people come up to you. Can I get a certificate for listening to your talk? Sure. You got a printer? Because, I mean, I've got word.

You know, I kinda know what that thing means, but fair enough. And for conferences as well, when I sent people to a conference, I made a playbook. It's costly to send people to a conference. Me speaking here was about $2,000 for my company because I had to fly over here, I had to pay for the hotel, and I'm now speaking in our office here, is kind of weird. But it costs money and time to go to conferences.

So make sure when people go there, they have a playbook that they have to go for. They have to take on speaking engagements, they've how to prepare for it, to prepare your talk, your delivery, your talk follow-up, and the conference follow-up. We want you to be part of that conference and not just be there, give you a talk, and then go to the city with friends and go drinking. This is not what I pay you for to go to a conference. Anybody of my team when I was a lead developer that I sent to a conference had to give a presentation after the conference in the office what they learned and what was important at that conference.

So I want to make sure that they are actually listening to things rather than just having a jolly. Official channels are much much better than personal blogs. This is a very very dangerous thing to do. I mean it was great in Mozilla, especially we had massive fights over that, because Mozilla is all about hippie horseshit, free stuff, everybody's allowed to say whatever. But then you have a technical article on somebody's blog and the right hand navigation has all this personal blog posts that gay people are Satan and should be set on fire.

And that's not a kind of message that you want to give as a company. So make sure that when you have people in your community, you give them access to the official channels. That way you separate personal views from company content. You have this on your Yahoo, on your Microsoft, on your Mozilla blog. It means that these people, you separate it from the rest of their website.

When their website gets hacked and actually redirects to pawn sites or something like that, that's not a good message as well. If your own blog gets redirected, then you have a different problem but we can talk about that as well. You control the platform. You control these channels. The security, the future plans, where they are going, the archival and these kind of things and you don't have dead links to content.

So it's very important to use your official channels. You benefit from the reach and give kudos to the community member. How cool is it for somebody from Bangladesh to have out of a sudden a blog post on the official Microsoft blog rather than on their own blog that he hopes that people are coming to. That's a great thing to have. And once you have them there, then you have to start communicating sideways and up.

And this is where the long term plan of supporting a community like this comes in. For sustainability, you have to get company support. We heard a few talks earlier today about how to get this, how to talk to your CEO, and how to do these kind of things. Communicate out successes company wide. Send an email, copy directors in.

Who cares? Most of time it's their PA anyways reading it. But basically, don't be shy about being very, very proud of the community members that you elevated to a new status of presenter, of innovator, of talking to companies out there. Get different companies dot departments to maintain and give input to the community materials. Once you got that grab bag of materials and that pick and mix slide deck, instead of writing for different departments, get some engineer of that department to maintain that technical part of this.

That way it becomes much more sustainable than you being the person to maintain that one slide deck. Flag up great community members for hiring as full time DevRel people. How cool is that? You know, when you got people in Brazil we had that, we had people that got hired in. One of them is working for Boku now.

Other people are working somewhere else. And it's like a great message to say like, by being a community member that became evangelist rep, you became a great worker somewhere else. And this is basically all I had. So I'm on CodePoet on Twitter. If you have any more questions, thank you very much.