My presentation at Web2Expo, NYC 2009 - on Building a Successful Developer Community. Included is tips on building your community, your site, SEO tips, free products to help, and more.

1. Building a Site for your Developer Community Lauren Cooney GPM, Web Platform & Standards Microsoft lcooney@microsoft.com www.twitter.com/lcooney

3. Apache Foundation

4. Eclipse

5. CodePlex Foundation

7. Cooney’s 5 Forces of Site Community

8. #1: Clarity

9. Why am I building this website? What are my Top Level Goals? Questions to ask: What need am I addressing? Does my company already have a site that addresses these needs? What results do I want to see? How am I going to achieve these goals? What does success look like?

10. #2: Customer

11. Who is my Target Audience? Address: Who is the target audience? Is there another community out there that fits these needs (competitor/partner?) Do I partner or do I create my own community? What is my differentiator & how do I create that (is there one of value)?

13. Figuring out your site customer involves segmenting the target audience

15. Data is available on lots of different websites for free or a fraction of the cost of analyst reports/DevTrackers

16. Scouring public blogs, wikis, research sites

17. Sometimes analysts offer up free reports

20. Good content is absolutely critical; poor content means you’ll lose customers (no repeat visitors)

21. Helps new users or current customers learn about news, new products & information critical

22. Important in helping customers build out their skill set

24. Developer websites need code

25. Interactive content is good (but keep it short & to the point)

26. Short Videos

27. Learning tutorials

28. Demos

29. Step by step articles/how to

30. Interviews with the experts

31. Blogs

33. Ensure you have company buy-in; ask engineers/product managers to contribute

34. Ask the community to contribute

35. Syndication deals

37. Rating ability

39. #4 Community

41. Allow for feedback & bi-directional conversations

42. Employees listen & react

43. Voting/commenting/rating abilities

44. Clean UI/easy to use

45. User Contribution is high

47. How do I Start to get Noticed? Real World Example (www.microsoft.com/web)

48. SEO SEOSEO Works on both Windows & Linux Sites! www.microsoft.com/web/downloads Microsoft SEO Toolkit

50. #5: Connect

52. Comments sections

53. Phone number

54. Email aliases

56. Audience Connection Methods Pick your methods of communication Ensure it scales Make it easy to remember/access/push method: user names, links, RSS, ATOM Commitment Be Patient

57. Provide Personalities Provide Interesting Facts/Tidbits/ Information What are you doing? Be polite and respectful Take time to respond Be relevant; be credible HAVE PASSION!

58. Core Takeaways

59. Questions?

60. Lauren Cooney Web Platform & Standards, MicrosoftFollow me on Twitter: @lcooneyEmail me: lcooney@microsoft.com Thank You!