Marketing Team Notes — August 28th, 2019

Today’s Meeting

Meeting Attended By: @maedahbatool, @siobhanseija, @miker, @jenblogs4u, @NickyKrastev, @Maziar, @dhruvpandya, @OGlekler, @Ali-WPFiddlyBits, @webcommsat

Notes Taken By: @maedahbatool

Celebration Thread

• @miker: We have a local WP Virginia Beach meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. tonight! Have over 10 RSVPs, so looking forward to a great event!
• @Ali-WPFiddlyBits: I attended the 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. Brighton and did some marketing.

Task Updates

• @Maziar: I have a case study task and I’m yet to finish it! 
• @siobhanseija: https://trello.com/c/sKuxBsjX
  @abhanonstopnewsuk rightfully reminded me that this card was waiting for my input so I worked on that today, almost finished. Should be good to go as a blog post after Abha’s final editing round!
• @siobhanseija: We’re in a bit of an in-between phase right now, we realize that! It’s due to the holidays, and we’re looking forward to the strategy session and seeing how we can streamline our processes a bit better again. So bear with us! And if you have anything you’d like to ask or mention today, please do. The floor is all yours.
• @miker: I was negligent in preparing for this meeting, I do have a brief update, I’m just creating the card first. Currently, the first milestone is the scheduled BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. release on 23 Sept.I have been watching the status emails, and it appears we are narrowing down to the features for the release. We currently have a team of 4, myself @jenblogs4u, @marybaum, and @abhanonstopnewsuk that are ready for writing and editing content for the release. Also, thank you very much @jenblogs4u for attaching a checklist to the card!
• @miker: https://trello.com/c/oxkheE1l/286-wordpress-53-launch-content This is the parent card for marketing content leading up to the 5.3 release.
• @siobhanseija: Card looks good @miker. Do you need any help or information for moving that forward?
• @miker: Yes @siobhanseija, but I don’t believe we need anything right now. Reading the channels, it looks like we should be ready to start soon. As we mentioned at the start of the meeting, the strategy session for the marketing team will not be today due to logistical conflicts, but we will have that conversation next week. I want to encourage everybody to think about what we would like to accomplish – and how we would like to organize ourselves – moving into 2020. This should be a great opportunity for lively discussion and I look forward to a lot of ideas! 7:21 PM. To set the stage, I wanted to post a recap of the last meeting (as a thread) so we can pick up where we left off – as well as provide some jumping in points for brainstorming.
• @miker: Our notes on Our ambition as a marketing team, and what we wish to accomplish:
• @miker suggests a focus on content creation, with a specific focus on social. This would include a formal distribution system for partner organizations, and a focus on specific avatars (end-users and partner organizations) to boost WP contributor recruitment efforts.
• I propose we include an explicit focus on social media in our revised mission statement. This would include short-form content (tweets) and image-based content (memes). For this initiative to be successful, it needs to be consistently created and distributed. I propose we make a social deliverable part of our weekly meeting.
• To this end, we should define, create, maintain, and grow a formal WordPress content distribution list. There are a number of organizations utilizing WordPress (and participating in the Hosting Community or other teams) that regularly distribute content to their own user bases. There is always a need for more content to share, and I think we can fill a niche by creating and distributing this content, and encouraging our partners to share it with their customers and users.
• For us to become the go-to place for content, we need a mechanism to ensure it is responded to in an appropriate period of time. I think a solution to this would be a collaborative approach to writing content (group creation of content in a meeting). Once we get into a regular schedule for meetings (with this focus), we should be confidently able to provide a timeframe.
• @maedahbatool sees the Marketing team as the mouthpiece for the WordPress Community.
• Content creation: can be both increased and improved. We should shift to publishing small codelabs which’ll increase the user onboarding process.
• Meetups/Community Engagement: For the community side we already have defined guidelines for meetups, WordCamps, etc. but some gaps do exist. Which we as a marketing team can address these.
• Open-Source contributions: For FOSS contributions again we should come up with some sort of community engagement which unites users altogether.
• @miker: Thoughts on Leadership and how we envision the marketing team functioning.
• @yvettesonneveld – One of my thoughts is: Ideally we’d have more regular contributors with project management skills. They could be in charge of one project, invest maybe 1-2 hours a week, and lead projects. Their meetings would be right here in the channel. They, or an assigned representative would report back in TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. and during the meeting. It would also allow people to join meetings/projects that suit their schedule.
• @miker – I think, from a PM perspective, we should make a concerted effort to formally identify participants for specific projects. In other words, we should make the identification and “recruitment” of contributors part of the project initiation process. This would slow down the rate at which we “accept” projects, but that would be part of the objective.
• @siobhanseija – I agree (again). On one side we have loads of ideas, on the other, we have quite a lot of people that want to join in, but there’s a middle part missing. It’s not just the linking of people to projects I think, but also the scope of what we can do as a team. Like where we can publish. I think quite a lot of people would enjoy writing copy for social media, but we don’t have (official) channels to share that with.
• At contributor events I hear people have great ideas for content, but I’m not sure where we can publish it all. That could, of course, be on me, as there is a lot I still don’t know about WP marketing and WP in general.
• @jenblogs4u – Perhaps we can create a skills/interest form and request all marketing team members fill it out. Then when a specific task needs to be completed, ie. editing, the people who checked off that as a skill or interest can be pinged requesting involvement and being given a deadline. If they are available they can jump in and add themselves to the task. I was thinking they’d be pinged in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., but for those who don’t follow Slack, an email notification would be super helpful. I feel like people often don’t get involved because they are unaware of specific needs that match their skill set. Unless you come to every meeting or are super clear on how to use the Trello boards, it can be hard to identify current needs.
• @miker I know we’ve done this before, however, with so many new team contributors, a refresh of the list and skills would be great. I can create an inquiry form (for next week since my daughter is getting married in 2 days and my efforts are dedicated to that currently). 
• @miker: Initial thoughts on Recruiting new members to the marketing team, and onboarding them effectively.
• @siobhanseija – We need to make sure there’s always work that someone new can join in on. We have tables full of people at contributor days that would love to help out, I would like to be able to use that energy/knowledge/skills/etc. So not just doing work that you already need to be very much involved with the team/community for already.
• @harryjackson1221 – Yes, I think you both have good points. Having someone that helps organize the tasks, and ensure they are clear, concise and the milestones are easily achievable would be a way to help out with this, because it can get overwhelming at times trying to both manage, and produce the work expected. A content scrum master if you will.
• @yvettesonneveld posed a conversational topic on recruiting new contributors that focused on utilizing LinkedIn.
• @miker – In terms of benefits, I think one of the biggest is providing contributors a way to “get credit” for their work.
• One of the suggestions from WCUS was to work on integration with LinkedIn (badges or other recognition there) so that they can clearly showcase their contributions to potential employers. In other words, we focus on WordPress Contributor teams as the way to “prove” your WP experience. This would (ideally) be similar to the mindset developers have with something like GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. This would be what you could share with employers to show exactly what you do with WP. I think that providing clear recognition in that format would be the single most effective thing we could do.
• @Yashwardhan Rana – I agree. For this, badges have been a great motivator for contributors so far.
• @yvettesonneveld – Another thing we can do for each other is to post recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have collaborated with other contributors on a project, for instance.
• Which brings up another thought. We have created an organization on LinkedIn a while ago. We need to promote that more actively.
• And I think it also allows us to link the “organization” to a recommendation. But I’ll try to find out more about that.
• @jenblogs4u – suggests exploring the idea of using the team LinkedIn page as a source of publishing to a wider audience.
• @siobhanseija: Thanks for sharing @miker! So all of the above is from a previous strategy session. We want to continue this discussion in next week’s meeting.