Today’s Meeting

Meeting Attended By: @maedahbatool, @siobhanseija, @miker, @harryjackson1221, @yvettesonneveld, @MichelleAmes, @abhanonstopnewsuk, @MarcusBurk, @OGlekler, @bseekins, @Maziar, @jenblogs4u

Notes Taken By: @maedahbatool

Slack Timestamp

New Person Thread

• @MarcusBurk: Hi, I’m Marcus. First time here in the weekly Marketing Meeting. I’m the Head of Marketing at Inpsyde and would love to contribute regularly if I can.
• @miker: Welcome Marcus! You picked the perfect time to get involved. Things slowed quite a bit over the summer (as things tend to do), but we are now getting ready to close out the year with a bang!
• @JoséSotelo: Hello! would love to contribute.

Celebration Thread

• @miker: We had like 15+ people come out to our most recent WP 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..
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: Lots of work on identifying #wptv videos which market WordPress and the community. Had a stream of new submissions come in from WordCamps and people who have contributed previously coming back as they had a bit more time. Wonderful to see many repeat contributors to this and it continues to be shared at WordCamps and Contributor Days. Well done everyone. If you want to participate, let me know and we have lots of people who can now help you get started with it. Opportunities for translators/polyglots too.

5. Strategy Brainstorm

• @yvettesonneveld: As we discussed before, we are looking to set our priorities for the next 6 months. Over the past few years, our main focus has been creating copy for all sorts of on and offline content. We know, however, that you all have so much more to offer than “just” copywriting. In addition to that, we have had two leadership transitions in the past year, and we may need to review our leadership structure. We’d like your thoughts on the direction of this time, and because of that, we’d like to put together a survey. During this meeting, we’ll brainstorm the contents of this survey. We’ll use the input of the strategy meeting that was held on July 24th as well. So we’re thinking about a survey that has a combination of closed and open-ended questions. I’d like to use this document to gather the questions. Here’s the doc — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Blb8mpWwFmkET-qt6e4yEOEbedZpxY-0aGervzCW500/edit
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: Hi @yvettesonneveld and @miker are there particular aspects which have been discussed on the purpose of this survey and key things it is trying to discover, please? This might help with people suggesting content for it. This may also help people contribute to async.
• @yvettesonneveld: So any thoughts on how to formulate in an introduction for this?
• @miker: How about encouraging each person to start with a single bullet point. It keeps the document from getting overwhelming and encourages people to prioritize their main point/thought.
• @MichelleAmes: If we want to gather a lot of replies, we should post it in multiple arenas….on the .org site, on Twitter, and even on the dashboard announcements. We can also use the Meetup newsletter to share with meetup organizers to put out to their groups. And we should encourage WP companies to share the opportunity within their circles as well.
• @yvettesonneveld: Let me give some pointers, and you could use suggestions to share thoughts? So, please feel free to either start editing, share your thoughts here on the channel, or using comments. There’s no wrong way here. There are no “stupid questions”.
• @OGlekler: About lack of “middle man”… Maybe contributors can be organized dynamically by a group of interest with a tree hierarchy. In this case, each will have someone particular to ask questions like what to do in each case depending on what you are interested in and this can be viewed somewhere.
• @miker: That is a pretty succinct way to describe what we are looking to do. We are looking for the best ways to organize this type of workflow. At least my vision is people can jump into the meetings, we have a list of open projects – and people pick what they can/want to get involved with. Do you have any thoughts @OGlekler on what we can do to better enable this type of system?
• @yvettesonneveld: @OGlekler could you check out 4b, I’m trying to rephrase your thought into a survey question. Does this reflect what you have in mind?
• @OGlekler: @miker I haven’t. It’s horrible looks like MLM…. but I think they don’t have such clarity as we need. @yvettesonneveld It’s a great question, but I had different meaning… more simple… There are jobs to be done from most important and general like “To make everyone to know and love WP” to less important like checking the document and actualize it.  So, when I like to make a job – I see clearly how important it is, what is timing, how big is work, who else is working and who is in charge. It all should work 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., but now it must be actualized and someone, who can prioritize should do it. It isn’t interesting if no one answering you and no clarity about how actual the work is.
• @Maziar: Does the WordPress organization ever think about the wordpress.org social media presence? The accounts I see are literally abandoned.
• @miker: That is one of the things we are talking about! You are right that we do not have much visibility/role with those accounts, but I think this is one of the biggest things we can change.
• @siobhanseija: At this time, we do not have access to them @Maziar. We might be able to discuss that further if we have more of a plan, I can imagine.
• @Maziar: Absolutely! and I guess that’s one of the major points of difference how likes of Wix are trying to target(/(poach!) customers.
• @miker: When I think of social, I think we have two main opportunities: 1). We have a number of social accounts for WP.org that are underutilized. (This includes LinkedIn, etc)
  2). We have a number of partner organizations (hosts, etc) that would distribute WP content if we had it. I think the answer to both is that we need more content created for social sharing. If we create content more regularly, I think we have the channels to distribute it.
• @jenblogs4u: This falls in line with the need for content and social strategy, but it would be awesome to have an ongoing list of needed content topics so if someone wanted a quick project, they could pick something to work on with little or no direction. The copy could be kept in a folder and edited on a weekly basis and published as appropriate.
• @Maziar: I agree Jen. There should be something like an editorial calendar for every week and month where we list, track, produce and promote the content for each and every day.
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: Social communications are a big opportunity, but needs to be on-brand too and ensure they can be long term sustained. Official social responses can also often mean someone needs to be constantly reviewing them, updating them and ensuring posts are not against the principles of the project, the codes, checking against hijack of hashtags and discussions, and avoiding a sporadic approach.The community has been doing some work on official social media channels and also on where they are owned in terms of access, which I have been participating there and as some of this affects the social media document for WordCamps. I would suggest any work on posting to all WordPress.orgsocial channels (we would not be affecting WordPress.com) would need to work with this.A good start would also be on exploring the hashtags in use and what could be done more easily using these for spreading the word.In any survey questions on this marketing team posting to all social media channels, can I suggest we could include a basic line about what the current situation is? This will also mean that respondents can give a meaningful and contextual response to the questions, and feel more supported in expressing their views and giving their time.
• @Maziar: I agree about all points Abha. We should work hand in hand with the Community team. Research hashtags also in the survey ask people what they think our situation is. I am actually excited to kickstart this project because I believe .org deserves a lot more social presence than it has right now.
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: There are issues about social media channel rules and ownership that we just need to be aware of and avoid causing any difficulty to any processes in place to secure accounts, comply with channel rules, etc. There was some data I produced a while back on measurement and evaluation of the key hashtags in circulation and relevant to the project, trends/difficulties, usage, use of those tags for 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). The document should be in the Google drive. What would be useful for the survey is incorporating a question on what hashtags respondents use when posting about 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/, the contributor teams (this will also have some overlap with the group looking at contributor event communications) and the WP community. @siobhanseija @yvettesonneveld, and @Maziar. There is an appendix in the social media doc about hashtags in use, which was updated at one of the camps recently as a separate document as various parts of this have now been reviewed, and some with assistance from the channels. There have been some delays with changes in people, but thanks to London and Europe contributor days, there has been a lot of update checking work done and with professionals who work in the various channels full time. Thanks to some specialists in Ireland, some more work is scheduled on this for October and early September. The community will be doing further work on this after this as this document is for the handbook. The appendix on hashtags could be added later once the marketing survey returns more data on hashtags in use and these can be evaluated.
• @yvettesonneveld: One not of clarification, especially regarding social media. While we may, aa a team, have the ambition to be involved in social media, and can potentially be of substantial value, let’s find a way to earn the respect and trust of those who currently have access first. I know I wouldn’t hand over social media to someone I didn’t know, like and trust either. So if we have the ambition to get involved, lets work towards building that know, like and trust. There are lots of ways to be of value without having direct access to the accounts.
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: Excellent point @yvettesonneveld. The hashtag and analysis work can be updated and show this value. Perhaps we need to identify the areas where the marketing team can add value as you suggest. This ongoing encouragement for working more as a team and combined community across the whole project. Through this and all the amazing work being done in every corner of the project, we will never be short of material to market it! Yeah, @yvettesonneveld.
• @Maziar: @yvettesonneveld do you mean we should not claim or request the owner of social media accounts under the name WordPress dot org?
• @yvettesonneveld: @Maziar, yes, that. While the marketing team may seem the obvious team to manage those, those accounts existed before our team was created. I know we have lots of value to offer. but we don’t want to step on any toes either. We’ll get there. By earning know, like and trust.
• @siobhanseija: I think what Yvette means is that we’re probably not going to get it as easily as it might sound here. A first step could be creating some content and asking “them” to publish it for a while, to earn trust and such. I think (correct me if I’m wrong @yvettesonneveld) she just wanted to say so as people are super keen to get on this, but we need to stay realistic and know it’s not as easy as just asking for it. Just to set expectations a bit!
• @MichelleAmes: Another idea: we could do online/video focus groups based on those who may opt-in through the survey. For example, if we find data leaning in one way or another (or ambiguous) we could hold 4-5 focus groups (so we do times that work around the globe) to get more qualitative inputs.
• @yvettesonneveld: That could absolutely be an idea. I have added some thoughts to the wrap-up section.
• @yvettesonneveld: Any final thoughts? Ideas on how we could improve collaborate content building like this?
• @Maziar: I’ll share my detailed proposal on how to initiate and conduct our social presence Yvette.
• @OGlekler: Can you do a test survey before do a general one? It can raise some new questions.
• @yvettesonneveld: @Maziar yes please on social. And I think we’d invite a small group first. If anyone has ideas on how to make that work without losing the input or having anyone have to fill out the survey twice, please share!
• @Maziar: Ok so I’ll form my thoughts as a survey and share on social media (will get it approved here first). Just can we use different social media accounts for this not only my personal account? Maybe everyone who is interested to help in Make team can grab the survey questions and help to promote the survey.
• @MichelleAmes: Will we create another doc (maybe in a Google form) to start to flesh out what the actual survey might look like and how it could read? I’m happy to help with this. I have a lot of experience from my master’s work on Survey Design.
• @siobhanseija: I had only one thought that might be good for the next time @yvettesonneveld: let’s wait with commenting too much on what’s being written till afterward. Everyone should feel safe to add in any ideas and thoughts, at a later time we can look at how we’ll work it and what will actually stick. Would love to have everyone feel like they can pitch in! On that note: that is harder when we add in notes anonymously like a lot happened today. Which is also a way to make people feel safe. Tough one!
• @abhanonstopnewsuk: I think for next time, choosing where you want people to add comments, and more importantly at this stage, questions about the area rather than its final wording, would be really helpful.Documents saved in the marketing drive can I think to be set so that everyone has to sign in to comment. I think Dwayne put some useful instructions in on this to avoid the long term issue of items being changed by those finding documents on google. Perhaps @siobhanseija might know. It may also help people start a positive dialogue on a question and together find some solutions/answers. Lots of good discussions today and ideas, and as it is still holidays for some people, more will no doubt join later on. Can we regularly publicize 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/. in advance of these strategy discussions the date and times, and even help people by listing some of the areas to be covered or you will want them to be thinking about Yvette? Well done for all the work on this to date by everyone.