Content Strategy

Mission

Our mission is to produce valuable resources that are useful for developers, elevating the name of Sourcegraph as a company that supports the community, the open source ecosystem, and the individual developers within it. Using our own personal reputation and visibility within the community, we endorse the brand and create opportunities for engagement.

It is not the job of the DevRel team to produce branded content, product documentation, or marketing pieces, although we can collaborate with other teams that are responsible for that. Instead, we create technical guides and career-improvement articles that may or may not include the use of Sourcegraph tools, focused on helping developers at different career stages.

Content Format

The Community Relations team produces content in various formats, including but not limited to technical tutorials, career-growing pieces, and conceptual articles. Although our content is created primarily in written form, we also work with live streams, talks, and videos, as appropriate.

Target platforms

To increase brand awareness, we target external content platforms such as DEV, Hashnode, Twitch, and Youtube. We use both official channels and our own personal network and visibility to establish Sourcegraph as an industry leader and community supporter.

Topic selection

Developer advocates are expected to use their own judgement to choose topics that are aligned with our goals and mission as a team. As a close touch point with the community, the DevRel team uses a dynamic approach to select topics that have good potential for success in terms of reach and/or engagement. Topics are selected using criteria such as trending technologies and projects, upcoming events and releases, and alignment with each advocate’s own skill set.

The goal is to provide the best educational resources in short and long form that developers from all levels across the world will find useful in their daily work, demos, startups, and projects.

Some good ideas for content are:

• Find interesting use cases of Sourcegraph for things that hit the front page of Hacker News, showcasing features like code search, batch changes, insights, and search notebooks to walk through source code for cool new OSS projects or help with things like CVE impact analysis/remediations
• Technical deep dives into our technical philosophy (why we chose to use the architecture/algos/data structures we’re using for code search, code intel, batch changes, code insights)

When selecting a topic, you can also take advantage of our keyword research (internal only) insights to select a topic with high impact.

Collaboration with other teams

The Community Relations team often collaborates with other teams to support programs, initiatives, and events. Content requests should be made with at least 2 weeks anticipation notice.

Content requests

We can prioritize certain topics in order to support initiatives and events led by other teams. Please reach out on #community-relations or use the @community handle on any channel on Slack to discuss your request with the team, and we will be happy to help.

Cross posting content

Although our main publication channels are external to Sourcegraph, we can strategize with other teams to cross post our content internally. In some cases, it is more beneficial for our long term marketing goals to post the content originally on the Sourcegraph page (either the Learn platform or the Blog) and then syndicate the content to external platforms. This should be discussed with enough leading time since each content team has different processes and workflows, and we would need to adapt our writing style to match the brand tone, making content less personal.

Planning and tracking content

The Community Relations team uses an Asana board to plan and track content production. The board has a few automations set up in order to surface the content to the Marketing content calendar and to send notifications on Slack when new content is ready for review and also when new content is published.

Sharing content

The Community Relations team leverages each author’s individual reach and network for sharing content produced by the team. In addition to that, we collaborate with the Social Media team to share our content through official channels.