Presentation held at Microsoft Ventures with Victor Coisne

1. Community Marketing at Docker
By Julien Barbier, Sr Dir of Growth, Marketing & Community at Docker & Victor Coisne, Community Manager at
Docker – 45 minutes presentation at
#dockertour

2. About us: Julien Barbier
• Julien Barbier {Epitech 2006.}
• 2004-2008: Software engineer & Product Manager
(Paris, France)
• 2008-2012: Entrepreneur (Paris, France & Miami, FL)
• Oct 2012-now: co-Founder of #while42 (International
French Tech Engineers Network, 1500+ members in 30+
chapters around the World)
• Oct 2012-now: Sr Director of Growth, Marketing &
Community at Docker (ex-dotCloud, San Francisco, CA)
• Contact me: julien@docker.com | @julienbarbier42

3. About us: Victor Coisne
• 2007 - 2010: Student at Novancia / University of the West of
England, Bristol
• 2010 – 2012: Marketing, Sales and Project Management
in a web agency (Paris)
• 2013: Student at UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
• Sep 2013-now: Community Manager at Docker
(ex-dotCloud, San Francisco, CA)
• Contact me: victor@docker.com | @vcoisne

4. About Docker
• Build, Ship and Run Any App, Anywhere
• dotCloud, Founded my Solomon Hykes
{Epitech 2006.}, in France (2008), and
“relaunched” in SF (2010)
• dotCloud released Docker open source,
Mar 2013
• Huge traction since then, in both user and
enterprise adoptions led to a pivot
• Huge online and offline community
• www.docker.com | @docker | @docker_fr

5. Community is the new marketing
• Community represents 80+% of our “Marketing”
• Lower budget, Higher conversion rate vs traditional marketing
Your product/brand is
NOT what you say it is.
It is what THEY say it is.
#dockertour

6. Community, TL;DR;
• Community is like a network
• A community/network is as strong as the number of links between its
members
• IRL links are more precious than Online links
• You do NOT own or control the community
• It is NOT your community: you are part of it, you can influence it, but you
do not own it
• It is not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your
community
• Your product/brand is not what you say it is. It is what THEY say it
is.
• Lower budget, Higher conversion rate vs traditional marketing
• Communities everywhere!
• At the end of the day everything is always about people
#dockertour

7. People, TL;DR; #dockertour

8. Track and monitor EVERYTHING
• Track and measure EVERYTHING
• If it is useless now, it WILL be useful later
• Integrate tracking and metrics EVERYWHERE
• Should be part of your product release cycles
• Should be part of every offline & online
marketing campaign
• Measure the impact of every change,
update, new feature, campaign, tweet,
meetup, event, press release…
• Be both HUMAN and DATA DRIVEN
#dockertour

9. The San Francisco Docker VIP club
• Jan 18, 2013: Initial commit
• Closed source
• Private presentations to startups by Solomon & Andrea
• Word of mouth
• “VIP” club on GitHub, by invitation only
• Belonging, Self-Esteem
• Mar 20, 2013: the project leeks on Hacker News
• Hits front page & #1
• 15K visits in a day
• Huge interest from the
HN community
#dockertour

10. Hacking Hacker News 1/3
• HN = Tech early adopters
• Use / Create tools for monitoring
• Reminder: Track EVERYTHING
• If the tool does not exist, create it!
• Track your company and product &
join the conversation as soon as possible
• And track competitors too!
• www.hnwatcher.com
• Upvote and get to the front page
• More traffic and brand awareness
• Join the conversation as soon as possible
• Your product/brand is not what you say it is.
It is what THEY say it is
• Create and/or Post Content that
this community like
• It is about what you can do for your community
#dockertour

11. Hacking Hacker News 2/3
• Timing is important
• Experiment
• And track + document
• Target different groups
of people by posting at different times
Source: http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hackernews/
#dockertour

12. Hacking Hacker News 3/3
• Do not post obvious marketing content
• Remember: you are here to help this community
• Post in other social networks BEFORE
• You will get more upvotes due to community posts
• Belonging, Recognition
• If it’s good content and if it does not work, Recycle!
• Try same blog post but with a different URL
• Try with different format
• Blog post, Gist, Slideshare presentation, Youtube video, e-book, …
• Help the Docker community
• It is about what you can do for your community
• Upvote and post their content too!
• Recognition, Respect, Love
• Add more links to your community
• More brand awareness
#dockertour

13. The social network strategy
• Tips from HN strategy are true here too (cf previous 3 slides)
• Be everywhere!
• Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Slideshare, Youtube, GitHub,
Stack Overflow…
• But do know where to put more efforts when you do not have enough time
(track & measure!)
• Use the specificity of each social network
• Different users, different features, different post previews, etc…
• Join the conversation as soon as possible
• Your product is not what you say it is. It is what THEY say it is -> you
want to be part of this conversation!
• Identify leaders / influencers on each social media
#dockertour

14. Twitter tips of the day
• Include authors & companies handles in your
tweets
• Recognition, Respect, Love
• Add more links to your community
• -> More RTs -> More reach -> even more links for
your community + recognition for authors
• NOTE: this is true for your team too!
• Your team is a community
• Everything is a community!
• NOTE2: this is true for journalists too!
• Everything is a community!
• NOTE3: this is true for partners too!
• Everything is a community!
• It is ok to post several times
#dockertour

15. Twitter love + belonging example #dockertour

16. Which twitter account should I use?
• Founder: 5K followers
• Company / product / brand: 500 followers
• Who should post product releases, news & co?
• Brand!
• Build your company brand first!
• Build your company’s community (vs founder’s community)
• Be careful of Ego / Personal branding
• The founder may leave, but the brand will stay
• You don’t want the community to leave with the founder
• Have the founder(s) RT the company tweet
• Your logo is (theoretically) more eye-catchy & recognizable than your
founder’s picture in a twitter stream
#dockertour

17. Social Networks: more tips 1/2
• Post / RT your community’s content (blog post, articles,
videos, …)
• It is your way to say thank you
• It is about what you can do for your community
• Belonging, Recognition, Respect, Love
• Add more links to your community
• Encourages them to write more
• Do the same for every social media
• Use specificity
• Don’t be lazy!
• Do NOT use automatic / auto-posts tools
• Do NOT use AddThis (or equivalent buttons) on your blog and websites
-> terrible branding!
#dockertour

18. Social Networks: more tips 2/2
• Include Photos / pictures in your articles
• Or even better: Use Open Graph or equivalent
(ogp.me)
• -> More reach! (min 30% more clicks when you
have a picture)
BAD GOOD
#dockertour

19. Social Network: tracking tools
• Use the right tools
• It does not have to be fancy or expensive
• What we use at Docker for Social Networks
(& web)
• Mention.net
• HNWatcher.com
• Twitter.com
• (+ Google News for press)
• Forget about Google Alert, it does NOT work
• Track EVERYTHING

20. Content strategy
• Write good content, unique & relevant
• Write content your community wants to read
• It is about what you can do for your community
• Target likely amplifiers!
• Forget about your SEO magic tricks
• It does not work in the long run
• Encourage your community to build content
• Say thank you, repost, post, upvote, RT, include them in your
newsletter, itw them, …
• Belonging, Recognition, Respect, Love
• Your team is your community too!
• Say thank you, gamify, hall of fame, tweet, post, recycle, etc…
• Belonging, Recognition, Respect, Love
#dockertour

21. Google search auto complete
• This is what your community is looking for
• Free tool!
• Automate: http://keywordtool.io/
#dockertour

22. Buzzsumo
• Find out what content did buzz on social medias
#dockertour

23. Why IRL community is so important
• Community is like a network
• Adds more link to your network
• IRL links are more precious than Online links
• It is all about people, so you want to meet them and build a stronger relationship
• People like meeting other people to talk about ideas, problems, discover
new tricks, etc...
• Belonging, Self Actualization
• A “meetup” visitor has more “value” than a website visitor
• More engaged
• More likely to stick with the product
• Actually more likely to stick with YOU, the person they have just met
• It is all about people
• Use IRL as many times as possible / Be open
• Mix formats
• Regular meetups, Panels, Hack day, Hackathon, etc…
• Provide Food + Drinks + Wifi! :)
#dockertour

24. Start small, and scale
• Target meetups in your area
• Target by topics, competitors, & attendees personas
• Hijack competitors’ meetups
• Try to get a team member to talk (lightning talks)
• Meetup co-organizers are looking for content help your community
• Create your own meetup group
• Can be in your office
• Treat the first members with care and love
• A first meetup /w 5 ppl is already a lot!
• Invite ppl from your community to co-organize / speak
• It is what you can do for your community
• Adds more links
• Scale yourself
• Create second, third group where your team can go
• Research and anticipate the seasonality / calendar of your
industry
• Takes time and effort to grow the Offline community but ROI is
sustainable
#dockertour
Be sure to track this too!
RSVPs
Attendees
Members of local groups
Feedback (online/offline, surveys)

25. Help the community build the community!
• Help Meetup (co-)organizers with
• Best practices
• Updates on the product & messaging + Content
• Your product/brand is not what you say it is. It is what THEY say it
is
• Tools
• SWAG
• Tee-shirts
• Stickers
• Invite users to speak
• People love to hear real life stories
• Your product/brand is not what you say it is. It is what THEY say it
is
• Users love to speak (Recognition, Mastery, Self-Esteem)
• Don’t make it a sales event!
• It should be about the community first
• Help them promote their event
• Event page
• Twitter and co
• Newsletter
• Love, Recognition, Belonging

26. Bring IRL back online
• Adds more link to your community
• Tweet about IRL events
• Quotes, photos (tag ppl -> love!), numbers,
interesting facts, etc…
• Follow up with emailing / survey
• Say thank you (send love!)
• No sales speech
• Add content they care about (it is about helping your community)
• Include links to presentations they just saw
• Include links to anything that could answer their questions
• Include a link to your newsletter and / or online tutorial…
#dockertour

27. Bring online back to IRL
• Adds more link to your community
• IRL links are more precious than Online
links
• Add a page with the upcoming meetups and events
• Include meetups and events calendar in your newsletter
• Use twitter and co to inform people about the next event
• Find any excuse to invite people to meet you
• Regular meetup
• Giving a talk at a conference
• Panel
• Celebration
• Big news, Announcements, Previews, Proposals…
• Hack day
• Hackathon
• Product update

28. Docker Global Hack Day
• 1500+ attendees, in 30+ cities around the world
• Includes both Online & Offline communities
• More links!
• Belonging
• Each meetup group provides a (safe) venue + food + drinks + wifi
• Main event in SF was broadcasted live
• 2500+ views in 64 different countries
• Recorded -> great content we then did post on social networks and co
• Preview of 3 proposals
• Self actualization
• And get feedback from the community
• 4 Partners involved (MSFT Azure, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Online Labs)
• Partners are part of your community (everything is a community, give love to your partners too)
• 1 customer involved
• How Docker is used at Yelp (Achievement Mastery Recognition Respect for the speaker)
• People hack on Docker
• They have to submit title + video + description -> great content
• Best hack wins tickets to DockerCon Europe
• DockerCon sold out, this is the only way to get tickets (Achievement Mastery Recognition Respect)
• The community votes on social networks for the winner

29. Show the example
• Show the example
• Pre-brief co-organizers
#dockertour

30. The voting page
• 36 projects submitted
• Tweet to vote!
• Add team twitter
handles in the tweet!
• Recognition, Love
• Reach on Twitter: 3M+
• https://docker.com/community/globalhackday

31. End result
• This was super FUN
• Huge reach & noise everywhere
• So much that press already referred and linked to content in several articles. (more SEO)
• Thousands of tweets around Docker
• And Docker Global Hack Day
• Great position + Messaging was out and buzzing
• Great feedback from the community
• Great content was built
• The whole Maslow pyramid was covered
• We strengthened the community
• Co-organizers
• Hackers
• Partners
• Users
• Online community
• Community is happy
• And winners will be super happy
• They also wrote blog posts referring our content (more traffic + SEO)
• Partners are happy
• They also built content referring our content (more traffic + SEO)

32. Thank you!
• Any questions?
• Ping us to chat more about Community, Marketing and Growth
Hacking:
• julien@docker.com - victor@docker.com
• @julienbarbier42 - @vcoisne
#dockertour