The Four Horsemen of WordPress.org Marketing

Contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe was very interesting and exciting for the marketing subgroup. Around 20 people showed up for the marketing subgroup which, not to knock on any of the other groups, was a relatively large turnout! 🙂 It’s great to see marketing growing every year.

I started out in the session with a bit of a reality check: I reiterated the mission of the group and the necessity for people to want to volunteer time since no one is being paid to contribute to .org marketing (specifically myself)! We’re all volunteers here, and we get out of it what we put in. We have great contributor days but very little happening between those in-person sessions.

We spent the first half hour or so talking about why people were there and what part of WordPress marketing they were interested in. There were a lot of different reasons people but we then grouped them into four main categories, which I’m calling The Four Horsemen of WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ marketing:

  • marketing WordPress to developers (Group 1)
  • marketing WordPress to agencies and clients (Group 2)
  • marketing WordPress to end-users (Group 3)
  • marketing the WordPress community itself (Group 4)

A little more detail on each one:

Marketing WordPress to developers: this subgroup focuses on providing development– related information, technical use cases and examples, technical best practices, and in general help developers understand how, when, and why to use WordPress when developing websites. Providing information for theme and plug-in developers would also fall in this categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging..

Marketing WordPress to agencies and clients: the subgroup focuses on materials and supporting information useful for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises where the decision-making or platform choices may be happening inside the company.

Marketing WordPress to end-users: the subgroup focuses on marketing to end users, those single site owners or small business users of WordPress, and content creators and bloggers. Information is more focused on the usability of the software, Features and integrations which will help them self-manage their websites, and information comparing WordPress to other website solutions.

Marketing the WordPress community itself: this subgroup feel strongly that the community is a very big selling point of the software, and promoting some of the things that are coming out of the community would raise awareness and encourage adoption of the software; that could include raise awareness about accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) or internationalization advancements, or even helping local groups with marketing materials or resources for their community.

With these four subgroups it becomes clear how diverse marketing WordPress is and how it’s important we concentrate efforts in the subgroup which interests and benefits us the most, I expect there to be some overlap between groups, in both interest and efforts. With these four subgroups we can also ask some of the bigger organizations and agencies in WordPress to focus their own contributions & donations in the form of people-time as one of these groups may more closely align with their efforts.

I think moving forward it’s going to be easier to concentrate efforts around specific objectives and I’m excited to see who will show up. I’m going to be posting the notes from each of the WCEU Contributor Day subgroups in a subsequent post, but I wanted to separate this concept out moving forward to highlight it and get some feedback, too.

And, if you’re interested in a particular subgroup, please comment below! Note: You don’t have to limit yourself to just one, but please be realistic depending on how much time you have to contribute 🙂