This page was created at a previous company, and has been sanitized so it can be used by anyone else. It may not represent what you own at your company, and it may be missing some aspect. I have a plan to rewrite it as a document to explain what I think devrel usually own, why, and how.
Here is an exhaustive list of activities and medium owned by the developer relations team. The goal is to be as clear as possible on what goes under the devrel umbrella.
Owning one aspect of the business doesn't mean that only our team has to participate: mostly everything is a company effort when it comes to developer relations. With that said, we are always welcoming constructive feedback about everything we do.
We own the blog (or developer blog), which means we are responsible for the quality of the published content, in addition to:
- Writing blog posts about our product, our open source libraries or anything else that is valuable for developers;
- Managing external writers, no matter if they are volunteers or paid freelancers;
- Managing employees’ publications.
We own the dev.to profile, which means cross-posting developer-centric content to their platform while also creating original material.
We are responsible for every part of a developer program (see some examples).
We own the documentation and we are responsible for writing its content, in addition to:
- Mentoring and helping the product team when they write documentation;
- Helping external technical writers, whether they are volunteers or paid freelancers.
We are responsible for running hackathons which include representing the company during the event, running contests when desirable and mentoring participants.
We are managing the LinkedIn account, which means creating regular engaging content and replying to people. We welcome relevant status suggestions from any employees or within our community.
We are responsible for the Twitch channel or participation to any other developer or company livestream. We are, as always, happy to mentor or coach any other technical employees who are invited as a guess in someone's livestream.
We are responsible for creating, managing and organizing any company, product or technology-specific developer meetups.
We are responsible for the newsletter (usually when there's no marketing team, or when we have a developer-centric dedicated one) sent once a month. We curate the topics with the help of employees and members of our community to ensure a high level of quality and interesting content for our developers.
We are responsible for participating in external podcasts around technology or targeted at a technical audience or if we have one, own it completely. We will gladly mentor any employee who is invited to one.
We are the first one on the line when it comes to speaking at developers' events like conferences or meetups. It includes the creation of our materials (slides and code demos).
To be able to maximize our visibility, we are more than happy to closely mentor any employees or anyone from our community when it comes to public speaking. The type of mentorship will depend on the level of help needed: it goes from hands-on help at all stages of creating a talk (brainstorming ideas, choosing the topic, creating the abstract, defining the outline, creating the slides, self-promotions and practicing) to giving feedback only once everything is ready.
We own the Slack (or Discord) community which means we are responsible for providing a healthy and welcoming environment for our community. We are also responsible for creating interesting content to grow the positive and helpful interactions with our members.
We are representing the company in the technology-focused media as spokespersons, whether they are traditional (television, radio, paper news...) or more web focused.
If we don't have a customer support team, we are responsible for offering technical support on Twitter, LinkedIn and any other communities we own or not.
We are responsible for technical tutorials about our platform whether text-based or in the form of videos.
We own the Twitter account (usually when there is no marketing department), which means creating regular engaging content and replying to people in public or in private.
We welcome relevant tweet suggestions from anyone at the company or within our community. The Twitter content can be a repetition of the LinkedIn content almost one to one, but some Twitter content won't be repeated on LinkedIn based on the more business and serious nature of the medium.
We own our video podcasts (aka vidcasts) and are responsible for participating in external vidcasts around technology or targeted at a technical audience. We will gladly mentor any employees who are invited to one.
We are responsible for any technical webinars done under our brand.
We own the YouTube channel, which means we are responsible for creating interesting and engaging video content to publish on ours . We are also ensuring that videos, technical or not, created by other parts of the business have the level of quality that defines our channel and ensure that it will resonate with our community.