Mike Reid 9:50 pm on November 6, 2019  

Marketing Team Meeting Notes – Nov 6, 2019

Meeting timestamp on 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/. for full notes: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1573052444304800

Attendance 

@miker, @dhruvpandya, @OGlekler, @maedahbatool, @harryjackson1221, @Webcommsat , @Maziar, @MichelleAmes

Celebrations

@miker brought up the outstanding turnout and level of engagement at the marketing table 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. US (WCUS) 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/..

@webcommsat has been part of many great initiatives with more upcoming, including WordCamp Dublin, Stuttgart, and Mumbai. More updates on the projects from these WordCamps will be shared over the next couple weeks.

@MichelleAmes was a WCUS Organizer and is thrilled at the success of the overall event. Thanks to her and the entire organizing team!

Main Tasks

WordCamp US Updates

Bye Bye Beyonce, you changed on us. LL Cool J uses WordPress, though!

At WCUS, we updated the Parallax image on the homepage after running an audit of the current Showcase. We are also developing a process to check those sites on a schedule, and update that image as needed. We replaced 7 of the screenshots that composed that image, and shared it with the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team to get it updated.

Marketing Content for Contributor Teams

At WCUS, we met with roughly half of the contributor teams, interviewed members and started creating content we will use in 2020 to better tell the WordPress Story. The specific objective will be to highlight the benefits of becoming a WP Contributor and the professional development opportunities that come with it. We also started working on a formal distribution list for more consistent sharing of created content.

New Marketing Contributors

Unfortunately, due to logistical issues we did not get a full list of all participants at the Marketing table. However, we would like to recognize the new contributors who join the Marketing slack for the first time at the event:

@James Britton, @Debbie Flannery, @Donnie, @koop  , @raym, @Phillip Lane, @Artur, @Paul Wilson, @Mitchell Maling, @Ashley Haines, @Sarah Hackman, @mta1, @Richard Thaler – ClassyTurkey, @Jen

WordPress Social Media Marketing Strategy (update @miker)

The Marketing team has spent several weeks talking about a revamped marketing strategy to produce shorter pieces of content aimed at distribution via social media. This conversation continued at WCUS, and we have a rough plan with a couple of key objectives:

  1. The Marketing team is looking to be able to respond to requests from other contributor teams more quickly and consistently. While some groups work closely with Marketing to promote initiatives, it is clear there are a number of teams that are unaware of how to request content. We will address this through education and awareness-raising so all contributor teams know how best to involve the Marketing team.
  2.  Create an official WordPress Marketing Content Distribution list. This list will store contact information for various WordPress Partner Organizations that can be utilized to share marketing copy for upcoming initiatives.
  3. We will be working on a form to request the information, and a system to store the contact information in a formal asset.
  4. We will be working to identify a distribution mechanism, potentially an email distribution list. This will need heavy vetting before it is put into operational use. 

WordPress Showcase Redesign (update @harryjackson1221)

At WCUS this past Sunday, we got approval to move forward on the redesign that we began back in January this past year.

Super exciting, right? But, we need help getting everything ready, and forming a team to make this thing work. We will also need an outreach process and team, and a content team to help the featured items stay fresh and engaging.

We want to meet as soon as possible to get this together and ensure we do not lose momentum. The first goal here is to get a tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket in with the details to begin the process. Once we do that, we can get a stamp of approval and off we go. In the meantime, we can begin outlining the project and milestones for it. This is a great opportunity for contributing, and we would love to get as many people pitching in as possible.

  1. We audited the current entries, and started the removal process. Thanks to the entire team that helped!
  2. We met with Meta to get an exported list of the submissions waiting to be approved to find additional influential sites that can be showcased.
  3. We updated all the featured entries, and will be removing the non WordPress sites this week
  4. We discovered that 84% of the sites in the current showcase are still on WordPress, and would also like to develop a process to follow up with the site owners that have moved away from it, to get information about why they have moved away
  5. We got approval for the Showcase Redesign, and will be meeting this coming week to ensure we have the correct mock up and functional requirements before submitting the trac ticket which has been pre-approved!

WP User Survey Marketing Copy (update @miker)

We completed the card for promotional content for the WP User Survey, which included a newsletter blurb and various social media pieces. This was discussed with @andreamiddleton at WCUS.

Very special thanks to @OGlekler, @aurooba, @yvettesonneveld and more for working on this!

Digital Citizens Week (Update @yvettesonneveld)

This was complete previously, but was inadvertently not published through the blog. @yvettesonneveld shared that The Digital Citizen Week series got great feedback and thanked everyone for the team effort especially @webcommsat and @josephahayden.

@webcommsat reports that we are collecting case studies which could be potentially used in a follow up piece.

Also thanks to @MichelleAmes, @OGlekler, @marybaum, @Daria Gogoleva, @alexdenning and more!

Promoting sustainability for WordCamps (Update @webcommsat)

We have a number of updates on this card, which will be broken down into smaller card for more focused contributions at upcoming WordCamps.

  1. The surveys and case studies will continue to be worked on at Contributor Days at Stuttgart and Mumbai this coming week, and were expanded at Dublin and Zurich in the last few weeks. We now need to focus on more specific case studies and are looking for contributors who would like to assist with case study interviews to identified camps.
  2. In November/ December, the survey will be returned to community for finalization. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.
  3. If your WordCamp has a good sustainability / environmental or eco story/ data, please let me know.

New Business

Meeting Time

The weekly Marketing team meeting will remain on Weds at 10:00 EST/ 1500 UTC. This may result in a time change, depending on timezones and observance of daylight savings time (DST).

Notes Update

We did not have a meeting on 2019/10/30 due to WCUS travel. We met on 2019/10/23 but did not actually publish our notes at that time. Due to the time since that last meeting, we will not publish those notes seperately (summary added below post meeting).

Summary of meeting on 23 October 2019

Meeting timestamp on Slack for full notes

https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p157183927319280

Attendance

@miker, @aurooba, @OGlekler, @nullbyte, @yvettesonneveld, @maziar, @rbickett, @YashwardhanRana

Celebration Thread

Digital Citizen Week series received great feedback. @yvettesonneveld thanked everyone for the team effort.

Main Task

Promoting the WordPress User Survey

https://trello.com/c/qcUYK1yG/298-marketing-plan-to-publicize-the-wordpress-user-pro-survey

Request from @andreamiddleton. During the meeting, all the attendees collaborated in this document. 

@miker summed up the needs as: 

  • Some copy (paragraph length) to promote the survey through newsletters / emails (like what a host would send to their clients)
  • A tweet we can use to promote the survey directly to end users
  • A tweet we can use to promote the survey to clients of WP partners

Basically, this survey is highly important to the overall health of WordPress as it is the main vehicle users have to provide feedback directly to WordPress, which informs the overall state of the platform and how make teams are organized and run.

Although there is a detailed blog post about the survey here, there were still questions left unanswered.

Questions on the survey that came up during discussion:

  • Are there any particular examples we can point to that have come as a result of previous surveys? For example, does anybody have an example of a GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ enhancement that came from previous surveys/ This may be something @andreamiddleton could provide some context on async.
  • It would be valuable to know much time to plan for when taking the survey. First of all to help set expectations. If it takes too long, then people may tend to just leave.
  • Do we know if answers are recorded, regardless of how many questions are filled out?
  • Do we know how long the survey is available?
  • Do we know what platform the survey will be using?

@yvettesonneveld suggested: consider creating a slimmed down version of the survey and allow people to choose. It may boost participation. For example, a landing page with 2 choices:

1/ I have 5 minutes available, give me the short one.

2/ I love WordPress and I have half an hour available. Let me grab a coffee and my favorite playlist and I’m good to go.

WCUS Plans (update @miker)

https://trello.com/c/4dthpD4q/296-2019-wcuscd-tasks-organization

We have a plan for the contributor day linked in this card. Thanks to @harryjackson1221 for working to help organize that.

Diversity Speaker Training Marketing on WP Marketing (update @aurooba)

https://trello.com/c/eNghs0YZ/278-diversity-speaker-training-marketing

Aurooba is creating content starting today and will share the link.

New Business

Updating the 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. board

This was noted as a future task.