I recently read a great post about the often misunderstood, yet important role of marketing in open source community advocacy. To paraphrase the author, open source marketers succeed when they deliver relevant content to developers and commercial decision makers, enable communication, and highlight the achievements of community members.
That thinking squares with my experience so far at the Eclipse Foundation. In just over three months as the Head of Marketing, I have learned that we have an amazing global community of passionate engineers. These are folks who contribute their expertise, time and energy to solving complex problems and delivering capabilities that enable value creation.
They also really don’t want to be marketed to. So we don’t.
Instead, we work to increase project discoverability, promote linkages and interactions between community members, and drive adoption to maximize outcomes and returns to all stakeholders.
Which brings me to Jakarta EE marketing.
April 24, 2018 saw the culmination of the largest brand launch in the history of the Eclipse Foundation. With the orchestrated support of key enterprise Java ecosystem players, we were able to execute a complex multi-channel launch. Some of the highlights in April alone include:
- We delivered the Jakarta EE announcement at JAX 2018 developer conference in Mainz, Germany
- We launched https://jakarta.ee for our new community
- We unveiled the results of the 2018 Developer Survey of over 1,800 developers
- We issued 2 press releases
- Member companies published 8 blog posts
- We delivered 5 analyst briefings
- We conducted 11 press interviews
Many thanks to all of the working group members who contributed quotes and blogs in support of the launch! Please visit jakarta.ee to see a complete listing of the Jakarta EE Working Group members.
To build on this momentum, and to develop and execute a long-term marketing strategy, the Jakarta EE Working Group Marketing Committee was formed in April. The mission of the committee is as follows:
Through various marketing activities we will promote awareness, contributions, adoption, and support of Jakarta EE as the future for Enterprise Java for microservices, cloud-native, light-weight, and traditional enterprise Java applications.
The committee is currently comprised of the following member representatives:
- Michael DeNicola - Fujitsu
- Amy Krofssik - IBM (Chairperson)
- Ed Bratt - Oracle
- Debbie Hoffman - Payara
- Cesar Saavedra - Red Hat
- Amelia Eiras - Tomitribe
Participant and Committer representatives will be elected and joining the committee in early July. The committee meets on a weekly basis to review the status of ongoing activities and discuss future plans. Representatives of the Eclipse Foundation attend these meetings as well.
With your help, we want to bring the power of the community into Jakarta EE marketing efforts.
Community-generated content is key. In fact, one of our most popular tweets so far is Testing Java EE backward and forward compatibility with Servlet, JAX-RS, Batch and Eclipse Microprofile, which came to us from Víctor Orozco, a leader in the Guatemala JUG.
To get involved, please send any news, updates and community announcements to jakartaee_news@eclipse.org.
We are working on a process to streamline community event submissions and updates on https://jakarta.ee, so stay tuned for that.
Social Media Policy
At the end of May, the Marketing Committee adopted a social media policy to enable consistent and focused messaging on the official Jakarta EE social channels.
The official Jakarta EE social media accounts are as follows:
- Our Twitter account (@JakartaEE) is a feed of Jakarta EE general news, updates, events and community announcements. It also includes re-tweets from Jakarta EE-relevant accounts, blogs and websites.
- Our LinkedIn group provides Jakarta EE news, updates, events and community announcements.
- Our Facebook page @JakartaEE provides Jakarta EE news, updates, events and community announcements.
Here are some of the highlights of the social media guidelines.
Do’s and Don’ts
Do’s
- Respect our audience. Post meaningful, respectful and positive comments
- All statements must be true and not misleading. All claims must be substantiated.
- Tell our own story
- Re-tweet blogs that talk about Jakarta EE
- Share occasional messages about 3rd party events/initiatives that we feel may be of interest to our followers
- Provide alerts about new content on our website
- Welcome feedback from our followers and, where possible, try to join the conversation
- Be selective about who we follow
Don’ts
- Do not make product or vendor comparisons (exceptions considered - based on circumstance)
- Do not make statements that are off-topic or could be interpreted as threatening, harassing, or defaming.
- Do not comment on anything related to legal matters or litigation
How We Respond
Our objective is to respond to social media mentions within 24 hours, though in sensitive circumstances we will endeavor to respond within 4 hours.
- We will respond to:
- Questions about Jakarta EE news, events, community announcements
- General enquiries about Jakarta EE
- Media reports about Jakarta EE
- We may not respond to:
- Vague/general statements
- Insults
- Repetitive aggression
- Inappropriate comments
- Repetitive questioning by an individual once original question has been replied to
Who We Follow
- We will follow:
- Respected / notable community members
- Jakarta EE Working Group member organizations in the context of their efforts in the Jakarta EE space
- Events / initiatives of interest to our followers
- If accounts follow us, we will not automatically follow them back. This will help our followers easily identify other accounts that we are following of particular relevance to our community.
- Suggestions of accounts to follow should be made through jakartaee_news@eclipse.org. Please include some information as to why the account is of relevance to the community.
- A biannual review will be done of the list we follow to determine if any should be removed.
The Way Forward
Our mission is to be awful at marketing to developers!
In all seriousness, we want to focus our energies on delivering the right information to the right audiences at the right time. Our goal is to help the community communicate and collaborate effectively on driving the success and adoption of Jakarta EE.
To succeed in that mission, we need relevant content, news and announcements from the community that we can promote and share via our official channels.
We need everybody’s help, so please get involved, be heard and share your successes with us at jakartaee_news@eclipse.org.
