Getting the Most Out of Open-Source Events With Brian Proffitt  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Business of Open Source]] - Full Title: Getting the Most Out of Open-Source Events With Brian Proffitt - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4e92f771-5921-4987-affa-e2591e0d0c8e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Lead Gen vs Community Events** - Lead generation events focus primarily on capturing leads from potential customers and partners. - Community events are about engagement and feedback, often with ROI harder to measure directly. Transcript: Speaker 2 You organize. Speaker 1 Are those the same two types that you are thinking of? They're similar, although, so we divide them up into what referred to in the industry as a lead gen event, which would include this one here at the open source summit in EU and the others. And then there are non-lead gen events, which are things like scale in Los Angeles and Pots Asia and Singapore and back stage in Berlin. Those events, when we say lead gen, we're trying or that's a very commercial label where you basically say, okay, they're going to be customers there. They're going to be people that we can do business with potential customers, existing customers, partners, whatever. And so we will find leads. We do the boot scanning and we follow up with these people and hopefully we develop a relationship with them. And the second kind of event you were talking about, where it's like something you host on your own, typically that's going to be a lead gen event by default, because the whole point of You doing a corporate event like that is to, you know, drum up business. But it's the second one, the non-lead gen events, that is a situation that we're trying to address at Red Hat because we never, ever say to ourselves, oh, why are we going to scale? Why are we going to Fos Asia and all the rest of those in Texas Linux Fest? We don't usually say that because we know inherently it's very important for the communities to feel involved. We connect with them. They connect with us. It's a given, but there's also a lot of companies that are not Red Hat who are sort of like, I want to engage with these communities, but I also want to see, is there something tangible I Can get out of this? And until recently, you know, our answer has always been, well, you are getting something tangible. You're communicating with your communities. You're getting feedback. You're helping people understand what your open source projects are all about. And those are very real and true values. But companies that are newer to open source are sort of like, yeah, but how do I justify the spend? I've got to pay for travel. I've got to pay for a booth and swag and all the other execution budget stuff that I'm going to do for any event. And I'm not going to get leads out of it necessarily. I should qualify this. It is not impossible. To get leads at a community event. It's just more rare. And the expectation is not there. ([Time 0:02:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b24f3a2b-8676-44a2-a53a-1aaab81a2b94)) - **Measure Lead Gen Event Quality** - Use traffic and interaction quality as key lead gen event metrics. - Gather feedback from conversations to improve product and support. Transcript: Speaker 1 I would say typically that's a primary measurement. And it's certainly the low hanging fruit. It's the easiest one to gather because you connect with people, you build a database of contacts, you reach out to those contacts. Most of them are probably going to be like, yeah, it's just stopping by. But some of them make their fruit and then you'll get a lead off of that and you might get to start a relationship. And then yes, boom, that's an easy metric. You built some kind of business off an event. So your investment has paid off with some kind of dividend. Ideally, in a business world, you want to get more business than you put into it. So there are other metrics that lead gen events, general traffic that is always both kinds of events. General traffic is an easy one because it's like, how many people were interested in coming by? What kinds of things were we talking about? If people are coming by and they have a lot of questions about your product, then that's a metric because it's like, oh, a lot of people, we noticed are having problems with project Y. Maybe we should go back to project Y's team, report that to them. And then that's a demonstratable benefit because now you've got live feedback. And if you're lucky, you've brought engineers from project Y with you. And then you can just have that live conversation. But either way, that's a real benefit out of a lead gen event too that does get measured. It's like, how are people interacting with the product? Are they having problems? Is there something in the glove about the product? What can we report back to our engineering team? What can we, you know, is support okay? Are we having problems with our support team? ([Time 0:05:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4265e9f-0d01-44c4-9c2a-e6dab606352c)) - **Improve Event Success With Iteration** - Collaborate closely with marketing and product teams to align event messaging. - Iterate event strategies by analyzing data and adapting message delivery. Transcript: Speaker 2 Leads because there's always the people who are like, you know, hey, can I have a t-shirt? Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And that's totally fine. And that's totally valid. So my colleague who I'm co doing this talk with Natalie Pizmino is actually on our events team. And she she's taught me a lot about how events work. And a lot of this dark. And then I've just tossed out at you is coming from her, you know, because I'm just an open source community person. So in our conversations, when we were prepping for this talk, there is a lot of like when events teams do these, they don't just pack up the booth and go home. They're looking at the data. They're trying to analyze it. They're combing it for notes and feedback and things like I just described. And they're trying to figure out on an iterative basis what is working and what is not working. And it is, it's a very iterative process. Okay, so what worked at the event? So at the next event, something that didn't work very well, maybe we're not going to try that. And then they'll try something new. There's a lot of experimentation. At the same time, our events team has to work closely with the product and project marketing people, the corporate marketing people, you know, like, I'll stick with Red Hat because That's obviously what I know the best. If we're running a new messaging campaign, like earlier this year, late last year, it was all about open hybrid cloud. ([Time 0:07:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e81a956-37a5-43a6-b01a-7b1938a06a03)) - **Events Reveal Messaging Effectiveness** - Events offer unmatched real-time feedback for testing messaging and positioning. - Immediate reactions, especially confusion, signal messaging opportunities to adapt and clarify. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, so I was actually thinking about this as you were talking because I work with companies on positioning and on messaging that events are really good opportunity to test your messaging. And probably I think actually the best opportunity to see what works and what doesn't because, like, if you send someone in email, you kind of like, it's you don't get that same immediate Feedback. And you it's really hard to find another situation where you'd get like people coming to you and coming to you and you get to see, you know, in person, how are they reacting when I say this. There's just no other there's no no other way to do it. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 1 And it's funny because for me, when I have conversations like that on like the event floor or in the hallway or wherever, I can see the reaction, as you just said live, the most beneficial Ones to me are when their faces go blank. And they clearly are not getting what I'm trying to communicate. ([Time 0:09:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a190296d-d2a9-444e-a09d-24271aab8738)) - **Open Source ROI Is Complex** - ROI is straightforward in lead gen events but tricky for community and open source engagements. - Open source interaction focuses more on long-term community health than short-term financial return. Transcript: Speaker 1 To like, how exactly the lead gen events do it? Because I don't go to a lot of lead gen events. Things like Open Source Summit here, yes, I will do because there's a lot of overlap with community. But things like Qibcon and other events like that, that's not necessarily where somebody like I am going to show up. So, you know, I'm sure, you know, speaking in generalities, a lot of that's going to be around, you know, is our messaging clicking? Are we keeping our existing customers and partners happy? Are they having good conversations with them? And then what are our new customers that are coming in? Well, you know, how many did we get? I'm pretty sure that's how that that's going to roll based on my conversations with Natalie and other events team members. ([Time 0:11:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7ab3ebc1-f1e3-4ddb-ad3e-f8a3bb5d8321)) - **Track Community Event Engagement** - Use digital tools like QR codes and landing pages to measure community event engagement. - Track metrics such as downloads and geographic origin without compromising privacy. Transcript: Speaker 1 What the talk is going to be about. So historically, it wasn't as easy to measure things coming out of a community event. So we were talking about things like traffic, because that's common all event feedback, positive or negative, who was coming by? What kinds of conversations were coming by? Were we talking to more engineers? Were we talking to managers? Were we talking to sea level managers? Were we talking to startups? So those are things that are common across all events and we retract those. But for the community side of the house, like in OZBO, we weren't necessarily, except for the feedback, we weren't really paying attention to a lot of those other traffic metrics. So now what we're doing is saying, okay, because things around the world, fiscally, we had whatever you want to call it, a financial contraction recession, whatever. I don't think anybody's really sure. But let's face it, a lot of people in the open source world had their budgets contracted. So now it's like, okay, we even us and we were like, okay, we have to play this smart. And while we would love to support every single community event, as well as we can, we also have to face a reality that we're going to have to kind of pick and choose a little bit here, which We hated. But okay, so now how do we do that in a smart way? And so now we're looking, this is where our ROI conversation came, coupled with the fact that our partners and customers, we're looking for information about that too, to directly Answer your question. So what we ended up figuring out was, and this is what Natalie and I are going to be talking about tomorrow, which is going to be like, okay, let's create some metrics. And let's build some systems into our event presence that encourage the community interaction that we're looking for. So the first thing that we did, and we started this at scale this spring, was like, okay, here's a QR code. And we've got a pretty little presentation that we made based on some of the training and ablement material I was talking to you about that my teammates that basically said, okay, if You're new to open source, how do you participate in an open source project? And it's aimed at users and also corporate entities, it's like, okay, how do you get involved? And you know, it's easy things like, okay, download, use the software, go find where the community is talking, did have a Slack channel, did have a mailing list, did have a Discord, whatever, Go find those things, and then participate. And you know, for us, it's always about listen, listen, listen, and then when you feel confident, you know, start talking and suggesting and then you slowly build your presence in a Community. And for those that open, open source land, that's pretty straightforward stuff. But surprisingly, there are a lot of people who still don't even know how that works. So we've given them some useful material. It's beginner level, it's entry level, but it's there. Meanwhile, we're at least tracking, okay, and we're not asking for registration information, we're just counting numbers. How many downloads did that get? And where did those downloads come from geographically? That's it. Not looking for domains and not looking for companies. I'm just looking for numbers and geography. And then it's like, okay, that is a metric that we can get. We've adjusted that now. So we learned some things from that one. We had the it was a PDF file. We had it set up on a GitHub repository, because that was the easiest thing for us to set up a download outside of our firewall. And we did that. And then we've kind of forgot the golden rule of use of privacy, which is don't surprise anybody with a download. Because it just started downloading the PDF right there. And then people were like, some people were like, whoa, no, no, what? I don't want to download what what? Yeah. So that was a mistake. So we're learning. So now what we've done, and this is better, we built a landing page that has other things about the event there, but then also prominently up top has this. Hey, if you want to learn more about how to participate in open source project, download this link here. So the language is very, you know, explicit now, and they do that. And at this point, we're still we're looking at like just count. ([Time 0:15:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/041f30a8-eb43-4a6c-b514-de374579c9e4)) - **Foster Ongoing Community Dialogue** - Build structured follow-up channels post-event to continue community conversations. - Simple landing pages should encourage interaction beyond just disseminating commercial messages. Transcript: Speaker 2 What extent do you see events as a long game? Like, can you usually make that direct connection? Or is it more like after having all of these continued interactions that you that sort of it's it all builds on each other? I think it's going to be after like historically it's been like after a lot of those community interactions. Speaker 1 Because there's really going to be two types of engineers that come to talk to us are going to be engineers who are very, they're very proficient in open source and development in general. And they know how it works. And it's basically like, I'm interested in this project that you're working on. And usually it's like, when are you going to put this feature in or I have a problem with that or whatever. So those developers, that's that's a very easy jump. We can say you should talk to so and so. And you know, we have a cheat sheet and in the red habit, it's like, okay, we can't have representatives with every project attend one of these events. So who do you want to talk to? Oh, you have a problem with, you know, Ansible. I we recommend you talk to so and so. And we'll give them the name. We give them the email. These people already know they're on the list. So it's like, and hopefully that that person will follow up. The second kind of developer that will come will be like somebody who is not proficient in open source at all. And they're, you know, they're just out of school, or they've been working in proprietary land forever. And they have a lot of questions. Those are the longer term conversations and they up until now, those have been really hard to kind of keep going without some kind of structure. So what we're recommending in our presentation tomorrow is build that structure, have something, don't just make it a quick and dirty landing page where you're just trying to get your Commercial message out. And maybe you've tossed in some laying, you know, some here are cool upstream projects. ([Time 0:23:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/36e8d293-06d2-4f38-a1a5-48a0a0b64eb5)) - **Message Flexibly and Onboard** - Prepare a clear message but be ready to adapt it through live conversations at events. - Support onboarding by including community participation opportunities in event messaging. Transcript: Speaker 1 A message. I mean, okay, yeah, they should have a message. But be ready to have conversations around that message and be ready to adapt. The whole point of open source, at least for me, is collaboration. You know, I put my code out there, you have a better idea. I look at it and I'm like, yeah, that is a better idea. I'll take it, you know, or, you know, sometimes like, no, not really a better idea because of this, you know, but it's a conversation, you're collaborating. That should be a part of the conversation when at events too, because we, your customers who are coming by your booth are potential customers rather, and they're grabbing swag. Those are going to be, yeah, maybe they're going to be your potential customer more likely in an event like, you know, like a community event. They're going to be a potential user, sure, and even better a potential contributor. So have messaging and that also have, you know, about like what you're trying to sell, but then also have messaging around about how do we get people into our communities? This is something that a lot of even big companies don't necessarily do very well. ([Time 0:25:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8042c3bf-1803-4629-abe5-ca4cfc88b912)) - **Balancing Open Source and Business** - Open source holds joy in freedom and collaboration but also requires pragmatic commercial strategy. - Balancing these perspectives improves open source success within business contexts. Transcript: Speaker 1 Now we're talking. No, I, so I think when I started out, I was very much a freeism freedom person, and I still feel this way, really. It's like the joy of having the freedom to collaborate and do all that around software or hardware, or whatever we're talking about these days is a real, it's just, it is. It's a joy for me. It still is, but having worked with Red Hat for almost 10 years, and before that, a little bit with Susan, before that, with the Linux Foundation, you know, plus being a technology journalist In between, you know, watching this community grow and really get serious about making this a part of a commercial enterprise has kind of, yeah, it's led to that sort of dichotomy that You're talking about where now it's like, okay, how do we make this work so people can benefit from it? Not just the user, but the business behind it and everything like that. And it's a weird thing for me to be in. I didn't actually think I'd be like this, and I don't think I've sold my soul to capitalism or anything like that, but it is. Yeah, I can see both sides of the argument pretty clearly. And for me, it's like, do what you do, just be smart about it. So that would be my advice to the startups and the newer companies. ([Time 0:27:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/28620c89-0206-4048-bbb6-ac7bf77de188)) - **Align Business Plans with Open Source** - Align your business plan with your open source policies to avoid conflicts. - Without alignment, event and marketing strategies will struggle to deliver results. Transcript: Speaker 1 That plus, you know, at least for events. And then in general, I would say, please get your business plan aligned to your open source policies, because we see that mistake over and over and over again. It's like, I'm going to open source this. And then if you don't have a business plan that matches your open source practice, because again, open source is not a business plan. It is a development structure. And so if you don't get those two don't line, you're going to have problems. And your event strategy won't really matter. ([Time 0:28:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b8e566c9-fde6-47e7-bea3-6facc67885cf))