Global Marketing Team Meeting Notes – March 18th, 2020

Introduction 

These summary notes focus on key items and actions from the meeting and to assist with asynchronous contribution to the Global Marketing Team. For those unable to attend a meeting due to timezone issues, please do join the discussion threads and tasks on Trello after the meeting and send your updates.

Find the original meeting discussions on the Global WordPress Slack in the #marketing channel starting at this timestamp.

Attended/Participated Asynch

Meeting led by: @yvettesonneveld
Meeting notes: @yvettesonneveld, @webcommsat

Attended: @mikerbg, @carike, @chaion07, @timbb, @antialiasfactory, @oglekler, @webcommsat, @nullbyte, @megphillips91, @lmurillom, @Gtarafdarr, @mta1, @darls, @abdulwahab610, @maedahbatool, @harryjackson1221, @sharaz, @gkibria69 

@maedahbatool, @harryjackson1221, @darls, @megphillips91, @webcommsat, @yvettesonneveld, @antialiasfactory, @passoniate, @chaion07, @fayazgabol, @kashifgabol, @JillianSMaxwell, @oglekler, @nullbyte, @pmbaldha, @sharaz, @gkibria69, @abdulwahab610, @artisticasad, @larrisa

WordPress Celebrations/Successes of Past Week in the Marketing Team 

General

Update provided by: @webcommsat

Updates

  • Lot of informal, positive work by people to help their local communities during the current global situation.

Coronavirus/ COVID-19 Related Updates

Promotion of key public health info

Update provided by: @webcommsat

@webcommsat asked for input on how the marketing team can help the WordPress community during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Some ideas were:

  • posting daily motivational / mental healthcare-related tweets
  • focusing on what will not be affected by COVID-19
  • posting regular content and information that can connect with the community
  • inviting motivational speakers, mental healthcare providers and business coaches for online meetups to share ideas and best practices for mindset, mental health and keeping your business healthy
  • curating and sharing (on social) playlists of WordPress.tv videos: on work-life balance, staying healthy, mindfulness, improving your blog;
  • hosting weekly Twitter chats with a special hashtag – we could get a lot of engagement that way
  • collecting and sharing tips and experience of companies with remote workers and useful tools
  • sharing fun things/ innovative ways of working from home with a campaign hashtag
  • avoiding the accidental spread of fear by what we produce by focusing on positive things and solutions
  • reminding people they are part of a global community to reduce feeling alone if they are restricted from going out or if they’re unwell
  • organizing a 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. where a cross-functional group of community members can help people who have been hurt financially by covid-19 create or improve their digital marketing and/or create a digital revenue stream.
  • some hashtag suggestions were: #RemoteWorkMotivation, #StayAtHomeChallenge, #WPStayatHomeChallenge
    sharing a series of info and tips on ways to keep the Meetup momentum going but now online
  • creating and publishing short videos or words from local organizers to share their stories on how they are working and contributing through the stay at home advice period

Virtual coffee break

Update provided by: @webcommsat

There seems a strong interest in regular virtual coffee breaks during the week to help counter some of the change in working environments or isolation being faced by many of our team members globally due to the coronavirus outbreak. 

Ideas: have one or two regular time slots which members could join in the 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/. channel or to an audio link and be able to share conversations with others. @webcommsat thanked everyone for sharing ideas , both in the channel, in other channels and by sending private messages. It was felt to be vital to protect people’s privacy/ work confidential backgrounds etc, and a group of contributors will continue to gather feedback and run some initial sessions before rolling out a set of dates.

How can you help?

If you’re able to help facilitate this and have availability for a slot or can provide a pro account video link, contact @webcommsat. To save bandwidth, attendees can decide to just use audio.

Some contributor generated ideas included:

  • scheduling two slots a week to cover different time zones. 
  • recruiting contributors to host these meetups.
  • find contributors who are willing to use Zoom Pro account to host longer meetups. For shorter coffee breaks the standard 40 minutes would do.
  • schedule meetups focused on particular marketing topics.
  • recommend people with lower bandwidths and people who would prefer to not have video displayed to sign in using audio only. 
  • Both Zoom, a video conferencing tool and Discord, an app for text messaging, voice and video chat were mentioned as viable options

Contributor events and onboarding documents

The Community Team continues to do an inspiring job of supporting WordCamps with all the follow-ups involved. Also, they have published an overview of the latest changes to WordCamps. Our thoughts go out to the WordPress events which are having to postpone or cancel.

Thank you to everyone who has helped, volunteered to do more or offered their contributor story for WCEU. We will continue to work with and support the WCEU team. Also, WCEU contributors alongside marketing team members are working on next steps for documentation to help onboard new contributors.

Lastly, WCEU contributors and marketing team contributors will work on publishing the contributor stories that resulted from the Call for Contributor Stories as published on the WCEU website

How can you help?

  • We’re in need of contributors with a journalistic background who can help with editing and publishing these contributor stories. Contact @webcomsat (@abhanonstopnewsuk on Slack) if you’re interested in helping out.

Collaboration

Task: Crisis communication for pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and theme developers

Update provided by: @webcommsat

A team is working on this and will be organizing a meeting to look at scenarios later this week. The purpose is to to prepare a document explaining types of scenarios developers may need to consider in terms of communications with their audiences

How can you help?

If you’re interested in working on this and able to take part in a zoom meeting, please reach out to @webcommsat (@abhanonstopnewsuk on Slack) if you haven’t done so yet, and you will receive a Doodle Poll link to help schedule a meeting.

What else can you do to help the Global WordPress Marketing Team

We are lucky to have a lot of interest in contributing to marketing from both team members and other teams. We do want to encourage active and long term contributing to the team. If you are unsure of how to get started or want the next task to get involved with, please reach out to the team reps or ask in our new contributors’ thread in our weekly meetings. It would be wonderful to increase the number of active contributors and continue to develop opportunities for team collaboration. We particularly need help with a number of tasks. Here are a few:

  • our video marketing resources
  • subtitling of key videos
  • contributor story interviewers and write-ups
  • showcase
  • content marketing proposal
  • language buddies
  • onboarding documents

Come and get involved. Let’s make the WordPress, open-source project even more amazing.

Proposed agenda next meeting 

Our next Global WordPress Marketing Team chat will take place in the Global WordPress Slack #Marketing channel on Wednesday March 25th at 15:00 UTC

  1. Opening
    • Welcome
    • Attendance
    • Quick peek into our daily lives
    • Celebrations
  2. Task updates
    • Contributor events
    • Virtual coffee breaks
    • Online WPMeetup Marketing
  3. Collaboration time
    • tba
  4. New business
  5. Upcoming workgroup meetings