CI/CE — Community Insights and Community Engagement

I could have planned this campaign better, had I spent a little more time getting to know the community. If you are a product leader with technical or developer audience as a user or a customer, a DevRel, a community manager or a tech product marketer, the above scenario is probably familiar.

Developer focused campaigns require a deep understanding of the target audience. This understanding is not limited to knowing what they are trying to buy or try. One needs to consider the content they want to read, the problems they are facing, the features they are requesting, the communities they go to for help, and the forums they have conversations.

Finding where the community hangs out

To understand what the developer community is talking about, one should know where to go. Two aspects need to be considered — the managed community, who you already have a close relationship with and the larger external community.

• Forums and communities where relevant topics are discussed- e.g. Stack Overflow and Github
• Company managed community forums — e.g. Discourse
• Communication channels used by the community — e.g. Slack
• Social media channels where conversations happen — e.g. Twitter
• Content platforms where relevant organic and sponsored content is shared — e.g. Hackernews, Medium, Dev.to, Reddit and Blogs

Understanding users and making sense of conversations

Now that you know where the conversations happen, the next step is to figure out

• How to identify the most relevant conversations, and stay on top of them.
• Which influencers to follow in the technology industry.
• What intelligence can you derive from these discussions?
• How can you apply it to your content, events and campaigns.

At the end of these two exercises, you might end up with 10–20 technology forums, and over 50 evangelists/influencers you need to follow and connect with. Even with a relatively large developer relations team, it is still a lot of work. If you have a smaller team the challenge intensifies. How do you empower your teams with the market & developer community intelligence to bring the most ROI of the webinars, hackathons, workshops or any other initiative.

The struggle to find a tool for tech & developer audience

A few years back, while running Halosys, a Mobile API platform company, I was frantically looking for a product that would help streamline our developer engagement and community experience. The only products that even came close were some generic social listening tools. However, while these are great tools for other industries, we were unable to use them since they were NOT built for APIs, Open source, DevTools or any company that has tech or developer audiences as their users or customers.

The acute need to automate the community insights and engage with the developers, from all managed and external channels, was the genesis of Weavr.

The dawn of a CI/CE platform

Community Insights & Community Engagement

Coming from a CI/CD world, we realized we need a similar philosophy but with the much needed empathy and human touch to nurture communities. Weavr is being built as a CI/CE (Community Insights & Community Engagement) platform with a mission to help organizations grow thriving communities — by integrating in their existing products and technology stack.

The platform provides an intelligent way to integrate across multiple technology forums, combine insights from managed as well as extended online communities, into a single viewpoint. This way, you are strengthening the scope of your community with the opportunity of gathering more insights.

Developer community pulse & actionable insights

Given the noise and the plethora of content, we started by building a solid technology knowledge graph driven learning engine, that helps in categorizing, labeling and tagging any post or conversation with the relevant context. Weavr Signals now helps in keeping a pulse on all communities by monitoring conversations around specific topics.

The platform is integrated with wide variety of channels Reddit, Hackernews, StackOverflow, Medium and could soon be connected to managed communities (Github, Slack channels, Meetup groups and Discourse). Users can also set up custom google alert fields to your Weavr Signals.

Workflow automation for DevRel, community managers & product leaders

Support is the new engagement! To provide a timely support to developers and users, we built workflow tools to help work DevRels and community teams work with other team members. These tools include — Slack, Microsoft Teams, Rocketchat, Mattermost and all products that connects to Zapier.

The aggregated insights and the workflow automation tools help DevRel and tech product marketing teams produce stellar developer focused campaigns and outreach. It provides a 360 perspective of the conversations relevant to your community and helps you become an active contributor.

Top voices & technology influencers

Weavr Top Voices and Influencers helps identify individuals who are subject matter experts in the technology industry. A single place to follow the thought leaders who can contribute to your content, speak at events or developers who could be invited to your champions program.

Measure & share the impact of your efforts

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it! Weavr provides on-demand reports including the growth analytics for the ‘User Share of Voice’ to help prove the ROI of efforts. The Share of voice report helps analyze the growth metrics based on channels, communities, keywords and against competition.

Weave-it-forward

With Weavr, we are striving to build more than just a great product. We hope to make an impact in this community-led growth era — helping companies, weave thriving communities and support developers at every step of their journey.

If you are engaging with a technical or developer audience, planning a developer outreach or growing your community, we believe you will like what you see on Weavr.

Request access here www.weavr.ai

Want to see something else in our product? We love feedback and take every input seriously. Please DM me @avharsh