Marketing Debrief of Drupalcon San Francisco

DrupalCon Communications Love.

This year I took on the role of communications manager for DruapalCon San Francisco 2010. We wanted a lot of people to come and feel the Drupal love at the Moscone Center in Downtown San Francisco. We accomplished that goal. San Francisco was the largest crowd of Drupal people in one place at one time yet. Marketing played a part in that.

Process:
The communications strategy had a few elements to it. I tried to keep the channels simple and focused on areas which produced results. So the here are the main areas I focused on:

1.Twitter - I ran the twitter campaign and I do feel this brought a lot of value and clicks to the web site. As I look at the referring sites data from google analytics for the DCSF web site I do see that twitter is #2 in refers - cool! I messaged a lot, possibly too much at times. All in all twitter was effective for - getting information out to those who directly needed it. We managed to sell out many hotel rooms and trainings using the twitter feed. We promoted our sponsors, sessions and schedules using twitter. People tweeted about how Drupalcon helped them.

In the overall statistics of for the Drupalcon web site twitter came in as the second highest referring site.

Below is a list of the top 5 referring sites over the whole life of the sf2010 Drupalcon web site - twitter is #2!

Things I learned: Its a fine line between too many tweets and not enough. Some people grumbled when I tweeted a bunch in a row. Space it out , keep it consistent and people will come to depend on it as source of timely, valuable and accurate information.

2. Media sponsorship strategy. This process involved having media sponsors do some PR for Drupalcon. we had 13 media sponsors and I do feel this was a successful was to get the word out about DrupalCon and increase the visibility of the DCSF banners. This process takes a dedicated person to manage the relationships. Jack Ha was the goto man during DCSF and it kept him pretty busy he did a good job managing the details.

Things Learned: Be sure that all elements of the media sponsorships are worked out, there are quite a few nuances which should be thought about. Like: What are the exact benefits the media sponsor gets, Tickets? Magazines at the event, etc... we found that some of these details creeped up on us. They were dealt with well, but it was a lesson learned.

3. Public Relations Firm. This was the first time DrupalCon put a line item in the planning budget for a real Public Relations firm it was exciting. Then reality hit us and I realized that PR firms are used to dealing with pretty tangible items.

Drupal while second nature to me is not well known in the PR and press community. The first thing I found myself doing was educating the PR firm about Drupal and the Community which surrounds it and all the amazing things Drupal has been involved with.

While this was exciting information for me to talk about it did not resonate well with reporters. I quickly learned that reporters need stories with a direct hook that can be easily digested by some news agency. Items which seems like really relevant news worthy stuff in our community is not that news worthy to reporters. Hooks are quick easy to digest bits of information which the media can deal with.

The first hook I came up with was Drupal training, "Need a job?? get trained on Drupal". That worked and was picked up in CNET news. Once that hit we got over 900 clicks to the web site. Sales for training at DrupalCon began to increase, soon word was out, and the first trainings offered at a DrupalCon were a big success.

Our largest win was the White House. The story was great, so we got many many mentions about the keynote. This was a story which we could not cover too much before the keynote, many of the stories on this came out after DrupalCon was already over.

I have attached a list of all 57 mentions we tracked. I am sure there will be more added as time goes on.

Press Releases - Our PR agency assisted us with official press releases. We wrote 4 press releases in the 4 months leading to to DrupalCon. Be sure you have a good writer on your team, we do, Jen Lampton helped wordsmith all press releases. She relentlessly killed the word "premier" and added great writing to all our releases.

On site press - we had 27 reporters attend DrupalCon. We had passes waiting for them when they got on site. This really helped get the word out about the Keynotes.
Platinum Sponsors got special attention from the PR firm as a benefit of sponsorship for the first time at DrupalCon.

Attached to this post is the summary of PR activity from the PR firm. This was their writeup of the press generated - its a good read.

Lessons Learned: PR firms need to have tangible hooks and stories to write about. What we may think are fascinating stories within the Drupal community, may not be in the eyes of main stream media. If you are responsible for PR you have to think about the way main stream media looks at stories and instances in the Drupal community which fit these needs. PR management takes a lot of time.

4. Drupal.org Home Page posts - This is easy and the most targeted. We posted information about Drupalcon on D.O home page and ran banner ads throughout the site. Obviously this was a huge pull for the conference web site. Its important to keep the information about upcoming DrupalCon well placed within D.O.

5. Mailings to past attendees - mailings were used to all past Drupalcon ateendees and local camps. Mailings are effective. Emails and proper messaging takes time and skill to write.

6. Social media posts - we regularly posted information on Facebook and Linked in Drupal accounts.

You need people to help you do this. This is what you need in an optimum situation:

Messaging manager - person responsible for creating the overall messaging and messaging strategy for the conference. Works closely with the copy writer.

1. Copy Writer - this person would write all the press releases - D.O home page posts and any other relevant copy for the event. Good consistent copy is really worth the effort.

2. Media Manager - person who is just responsible for managing media sponsorships.

3. PR Firm Manager - responsible for managing the PR firm - feed relevant hook stories to the firm so they can shop it out.

4. Social media manager - person responsible for feeding the messaging to the social media channels like facebook / twitter / linkedin /blogs etc...

5. Sponsor media manager - works with sponsors to get media messaging from them to use in overall campaign.

It was the combination of efforts and strategies which worked out well in this Drupalcons PR campaign.

PR for a large conference and Open Source project is a fun challenge

Press Mention List