Reposted from Tales of The Community
A key success factor to “getting your message heard” is understanding who you are targeting and how to reach them. I wanted to share with you my experiences of reaching for community members to join the BugSquad and what I discovered about our communication channels by doing so.
When we launched the BugSquad we decided to start by ramping up by stages, ensuring we understood the challenges faced by contributors and we could address them with a short turn around. We assumed that our main communication channel to the technical community was our blog and that it would help us attract most of our contributor base.
We announced the launch of the BugSquad via different channels at different times (weeks apart) , this allowed us to measure the success each communication (in terms of new joiners to our email list compare to clicks on the actual announcement). Here is my interpretation of the results:
Our Forums: Our forums are mainly read by technically minded people that are engaged on Symbian based projects and are able to contribute to platform initiatives. This has been by far the most efficient channel to communicate to code contributors ( for development and test).
Our Blog and Twitter accounts: By regularly posting in our blog, we have achieved good awareness of the Bugsquad with technical bloggers and internally at the Symbian Foundation. However, it is difficult to link to specific contributors joining the Bugsquad due to its usage. In a broad sense, the same applies to our Symbian twitter accounts.
Our Member Company News Letters: We targeted this channel when we wanted to increase the number of participants from member companies in the bugsquad. The result was a significant mount of interest that we had not manage to rally using the previous methods.
This knowledge has enabled us to ensure our message reaches the right audience. So, do you understand your communication channels? Do you know who is listening?
Victor Tuson Palau 