I think we need some new ideas to get the word out about the site.
What do you think would be a good way to encourage people to visit and contribute to the site?
asked Apr 3, 2013 at 10:26
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3 Answers
I suspect that those that were already active in the community are already here.
We will change the community and increase participation here if we can convince three groups to participate:
- Long-time Tridion implementors
- Customer employees
- Management at customers and partners
I've noticed a strange pattern that some of the most qualified Tridion experts aren't visible. They don't blog, they don't ask questions, they don't answer. But once they do, they quickly catch up and share, help, and participate as much as anyone else. Ping your experts with a specific question that they can't pass up.
Customer developers and IT personal often work in large enterprises that have strict rules on what and how to share. They've used SDL Tridion long enough that they're possibly self-sufficient or have ways to handle their issues through support and professional services. If possible, show customers how other customers have asked and answered questions in corporate-policy-friendly ways.
Convincing these groups to participate requires a personal touch at different levels:
- In the sales engagement, highlighting the community and TRex's part in it
- During engagements by answering questions with TRex Q&A
- When engaging Executive Management and managers in meetings, events, workshops, etc
If the boss doesn't think it's a good idea, then employees won't participate. If you have a chance to influence a customer's or a partner's management, demonstrate the value TRex has to their bottom line.
In the long run, as digital natives reach executive positions, I suspect online participation will be the norm. It's already happening within SDL's Content Management Technologies group--most of my peers know about and are participating.
IMO, beyond knowing about this site it's really about giving ourselves permissions to participate.
My 2 cents:
- Promote it from the inside out: let Tridion PS and CS have a line in email signatures. With that you definitely reach a lot of people;
Evangelize in trainings;
Replace the Tridion forum with StackExchange. I know the hassles about that, but imho this site works a lot better (well, faster and it has no invalid security certificate) than the forum.
Put a separate article on sdltridionworld.com? It's now mentioned at the bottom of one post there.
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SDL has some strict guidelines for employee signatures, though I have shared community posts and TRex in my emails. We can ping the training lead (Kelly Thompson) on the connection between Training and community. Ideally everyone would take training before implementing Tridion, right? And Bart got your last bullet with his latest post. Commented Apr 4, 2013 at 21:28
I think of following options: 1) Putting up words about it on all social media - Facebook page of SDL Tridion, All SDL Tridion related groups on Linked in, on twitter feeds
2) Expecting all the partners to participate in this and request them to spread this across their organization (or at least to all those personnel working on Tridion/CMS)
3) Putting up some material rewards for contribution or having some challenges/competition like the way it happens on Code Project sites
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11 & 2 are already done, so apart from repeating it which does make sense of course, there is nothing new there. But option 3 intrigues me. Can you elaborate a bit on that in your answer, like how could we attract new members with a reward exactly or what kind of challenges or competitions you have in mind? (with any competition we should of course ensure that Nuno doesn't win, since he already is Mr. Jon Skeet here ;o) Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 12:18
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1 & 2, I think we should keep doing it periodically as a marketing and branding strategy. For 3 - for example: we may put up a SDL Tridion design challenge on our site and put up a pre-condition to participate (may be the participant need to commit to the site and should have a particular reputation)...we may drive this for few weeks or may be having such challenges on per week or fortnight basis. Announcing the winner, giving some material rewards (may be in terms of coupon, invitation to event, membership etc.) or something similar. it may be a design or coding or Arch related challenge Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 13:31
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I am pretty sure that a lot of SDL Tridion professionals are not even aware about this site, and in fact I know few people to whom I have mentioned this site and they were really surprised to know about it. Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 13:42
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I agree that there must be a lot of people unaware of this site. I think the problem is, how do we reach them? If they haven't picked up on what we placed out there, we should probably find different channels, that's I think what Rob was asking for... Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 13:59
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The best place that I can think of is Linked In. We can search for personnels with keywords SDL Tridion and in fact for any competitor like Sharepoint, Site Core etc., Get their groups that they regular follows and post about this site over there or may be we can send them messages keeping in mind the site policy Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 14:08
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Interesting. I think we'll get the best contributions from challenges that focus on prestige and competition, with any material reward being a secondary goal. Maybe something team-based (regional offices) would help encourage participation? Commented Apr 4, 2013 at 21:30
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Ofcourse, the best rewards is high prestige and recognition. In addition we can try to enforce this from SDL Tridion partners to encourage all their people to contibute their learnings. Let me tell you what has happened when I was working with one of such partner, We received email about Area 51 and our site on StackExchange, and this has been shared to only key peoples in the organization and eventually only TL, PL, PM makes part of the site. Commented Apr 5, 2013 at 3:31