Why we can't afford to ignore self branding in DevRel

Aya Tokura: Good evening, good morning, good afternoon. I hope everyone of you are enjoying DevRelCon Earth's online event. My name is Aya Tokura, IBM developer advocate based in Tokyo, Japan. Today, I would like to talk why we can't afford to ignore self branding with Zebrel. Hope you're gonna enjoy.

First of all, let me introduce myself quickly. I joined IBM in 2018 and just finished two years anniversary in May. I have around seventy years comprehensive experience with IT industry as a support engineer, Symantec security engineer, VeriSign product marketing, Microsoft sales, Microsoft Technical Evangelist, Solo Startup, CDO, and IBM Developers. Many, many experience. And I'm being fan of open source software and Japanese anime.

If you have something in common, please follow me on Twitter Mark, a y a t o k u r a. I currently belong to IBM Drover developer advocate team, and the Tokyo City Team is evangelizing around IBM Cryotechnology with one leader, Akira Onishi. He's also ex Microsoft technical evangelist. And we there are four developer advocate for Citi team, Taiji Hagino, Kyoko Nishito, Noriko Kato, and myself. And there are one client developer advocate, Yasushi Osamoi.

Last year I published Deborah three seed book with other two influencers in to introduce Debrael for beginners. One author is Atushi Nakatsugawa. He's already known as a Deborah Guru who imported the word Deborah in Japan. And Hideki Ojima is an apparel market er and evangelist who is working for several IT companies such as LINE, Stripe, CircleCI, and so on today. He's also taking care of community marketing community meetup, which is promoting the benefit of community marketing based on his seventy years experience of AWS marketing Japan.

If you're in Japan, you can buy it at any bookstore in Japan or at amazon.com. Taiji also published a DevRel Q and A book last year. Unfortunately, both books are only available in Japanese. So, one day we hope these books will be translated into English or other languages. Empowering developer to solve the word problem.

Smarter, faster together. This is our robot team mission and it's my favorite phrase of IBM developer way. If you want to learn more details about IBM Developer Way, you can access to IBM Developer website. It's all available in English and Japanese. By the way, it's for your information that developer often means programmer in Japan.

IBM Japan has been redefined the word developer as person who solves social problems with the power of code. Well, here's a question. How many people are doing DevRel today? If you are watching this video, please let me know by tweet or chat or no chat comments, so please tweet if you are doing DevRel with DebrelCon hashtag so I can connect with you. Next question is, can you get the attention from developers without giving your company name during your developer activities?

In Japan, many business person always carried business cards to let attendees or customers to know who they are and that's kind of a cultural thing. But it's very important to let people to make sure where they belong to. But if you don't give them company name, what's going to happen? Before I talk about that, let me cover what I learned when I was enterprise sales before I became technical evangelist at Microsoft Japan. One of the following played a major key as a touch point for customers to purchase the product.

First one is company branding. Second one is product marketing. Third one is sales. Robot companies like Microsoft already built a strong company branding and product branding. But they have a Japan office.

You know why? Because because of sales. They need to accelerate their business by performing their own local sales activities. Developer experience team had already when I joined Microsoft in 2011. At that time, Microsoft didn't use a DevRel phrase and they were using term of DX as developer experience.

And I was a technical evangelist at the DX department. They need to leverage their deployment tool to drive an application deployment by strong relationship with developers. Therefore, developers had a touch point with companies, products, and DX team. Generally, many companies' public relations covers company branding and product marketing taking care of the product branding. And how about developer advocacy?

As you already know, it's a role of developer relations. Next question is, Who is executing DevRel? In many cases, technical evangelist or developer advocate handle this position. So, what does developer advocate look like to developers? I mean, developer usually see developer out of pocket's personality or the way they act, especially when they first meet.

I will share my story going back to 2012. I changed my role as a technical evangelist from sales in this year. When I was assigned as a technical evangelist, Microsoft had already had a mascot character for their public cloud service. Her name is Claudia Madobe. Somehow, her and I had a same birthday on November 20.

It was the first day of Windows one point zero. I knew that many Japanese developers have grown up in anime and manga culture. And many people are saying that anime and manga usually makes people to more easier to understand technical or difficult information. So, I valued her unique sense of the word and decided to do Deborahl by taking care of this character with character communication strategy. You may think it's kind of crazy, but by that time, the character strategy helped Microsoft Windows DSP sales grow.

As a result of Windows character sharing developers, it triggered to let them interested in the public cloud service. This movement had spread to Singapore and Taiwan. I hide my real name and conducted Derral while managing this character so that I could make more get attention from developers. The Twitter account got a lot of attention as a mystery character. Later on, I published a technical description book with Comic Appendix and I even appeared as her at technical seminar.

Two years later, as a result of this branding, one of the startups with interest in self branding gave me a chance to become their CTO. By becoming CTO as Evangelist, I was able to learn how startup can leverage Microsoft technology and success to build a greater relationship with startup developers. Guess what? I was happy for a while, but one day I got tough feedback from many people. Fight with real name.

It means I should execute Debrael with real name. This word made me think about my career and my branding again and again. In 2015, finally, I decided to deliver my first session at Microsoft Developer Event called Decode twenty fifteen about Visual Studio Code with Real Name in Japan. In 2018, I joined IBM. At first, it was very difficult to change my branding since many developers recognized me as Crowdia and also Ayatokura as a Microsoft employee who are strong with Microsoft technologies.

And I had to keep three things. Number one, don't give wrong company name during my self introduction. And number two, don't give wrong service name during session. Number three, I'm not Claudia anymore. Meanwhile, I decide to be become contributor for Microsoft open source project.

Every month I contribute to the Visual Studio Code localization project and my name was posted in README file. I believe contributing open source project is good thing for developer, any developers, but it delayed the change of self branding since the way I act look like Microsoft employee. So I decided to pay attention to two things. First one was to have a perspective to see myself as a part of a product. Second one is to create synergy by increasing the market value of my own self branding without company name.

If you are in similar situation, I recommend you to question the following questions for yourself. What are your strengths? How can How can your your activity be useful for developers? How to produce your own style? Today, I strongly feel that it's difficult to gain the trust of developers without increasing their branding value.

There may be many developers, developer advocate that used to work with company branding and company budget. From developer perspective, activities that they weigh on corporate branding look like developer marketing. As you already feel, we are about to change a new normal era. Because of COVID nineteen, some companies started to have very limited budget and people started to using internet more than before and we started to connect with internet more tightly. So, I would say self branding, can establish branding with a limited budget, is very effective.

And using variety of SNS based on self branding works very effective. I'm using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. And usually I decide to decide to use SNS according to log file and usually check how I can reach people and how I can engage with developers. My favorite SNS is Twitter, so I keep tweeting what I learn. As a result, I get the highest engagement rate with developer compared to other SNS.

It's kind of interesting that I've had less follower after I joined IBM, but I kept tweeting constantly. When I tweeted about the news of Red Hat acquisition last year, I got a big reaction from many users and developers. This overwrite my record when I tweeted about Microsoft news with my real name when I was technical evangelist at Microsoft. Currently, I have over 10 ks followers and I really appreciate their followers support Because it was tough to keep my self branding and motivation, especially when I had to switch my branding. Once self branding is established, people recognize me as influencer.

That was a very good thing. I've got the opportunity to become speaker at the Micro Oracle, a code Tokyo 02/2018. That has never happened when I was working at Microsoft. And last year, Microsoft invited me their developer event called Microsoft Build as Influencer. During build event, I kept sharing what I learned and became the number number one influencer in worldwide other than Microsoft employee.

And currently, I am also working I'm working to empower women developers in Japan. Many companies and community that found out about my activity via my SNS welcomed me as keynote speaker and special speaker. It made me very happy and be able to promote technology diversity and inclusion. So, here is my conclusion. To gain the trust of the developer is to share my own successful experience and passion via self branding.

Become influencer by increasing the value of self branding gives me the opportunity to reach out to people who cannot reach as IBMer. It's just SNS, but it's still important for self branding. Let's boost your self branding and accelerate your DevRel. That's all from me today. Thank you for listening.