How to attract more professionals?

Question

This topic has been discussed before but I do not believe it to be exhaustive. During the first chat beta, Jeff Atwood and I were discussing potential areas where SF could be marketed to professionals and he suggested a later meta topic.

I believe word of mouth to be very important and I have been evangelizing it within my network. However, StackExchange has a marketing budget and the key question is how to engage our market?

Jeff also detailed key areas where they are currently looking to focus:

• Sponsor the right kind of conferences to reach key influncers.
• Reach the right kind of publications and bloggers.
• Sponsor fun things attractive to our community.
• Enable opportunities for community evangelists to speak in expert groups.

At the time, I provided areas within the Columbus, OH metropolitan IT community that may not be obvious to an outsider. What are your ideas? How can we get the best of the best in IT as active participants on Server Fault?

Answer 1

When it comes to "Reach(ing) the right kind of publications and bloggers," one thing that strikes me about the lists of interesting IT blogs is that there's a huge variety. Everyone seems to have their own unique list, with some MS blogs being the only common ones.

I'm not sure exactly how to do it, but if the ServerFault blog was somehow made a must-read, it might get more people to come here. Kyle's articles are good, maybe the content could be built up with some guest posts.

In terms of presentation, I think you'd need a more conventional blog layout with titles of older posts at the side, plus some changes to the links at the top. (e.g. "What is SF? should go to an actual explanation, not just link to the site, "Archive" shouldn't go to blog.stackexchange and pull up all the server category posts)

Answer 2

Sponsoring the right kind of conferences is a good step forward. Some allow sponsors of the right size sponsorship a few breakout-sessions on the conference board, which could be very good for simple exposure. Get one of our top users who is a deep expert in some field up there and talking about stuff in a ServerFault shirt or something and it will increase visibility.

Retail evangelism also helps with this. At whatever *-Users-Group you belong to, point out the good stuff you've gotten here. It might incent people to drop by.

Answer 3

What about being able to link to your SF rep and badges from other sites?

I think it would be cool to display that on my blog and I suspect other people would like that on their facebook page, etc.

Does it directly market SF, not really. But it would be a good way for SF to build its brand.

Answer 4

I think the only way to do this properly is to keep moving towards growing the site's pool of good questions and good answers. You can tell someone "Come to Server Fault if you have an obscure network problem" or "Come to Stack Overflow if you have a terrible bug you need help with" but that only works if the answers appear when they ask questions.

I'm probably wording that poorly - what I'm trying to say is you can't artificially grow sites like this and expect them to last... and growing them organically simply takes time.

Didn't I read a blog post from someone, somewhere about amazon.com vs. ben & jerries? I don't think community sites can grow past a certain point using the quick push model, though it can be useful in reaching that point.

Answer 5

People have mentioned blogs, but the sysadmin crowd seems considerably more fractured that developers or other generic tech topics. So I don't see how you get a lot of coverage without getting write ups on a lot of blogs.

As for technical conferences, my guess is that a very, very small minority of admins associate with LOPSA or SAGE, and other conferences are primarily vendor focused.

What I really thing Server Fault needs is some ownership of the tags either by experienced individuals (like MS MVPs) or by vendors themselves. Obviously you aren't going to get Microsoft to move the Technet forums here, but it would nice to see something like msexchange.org integrate into the exchange tags here. The same could go for other communities (open source, vendor-specific or independent/third-party) "owning" tags.

The problem is, I don't think this fits in to the Stack Exchange model very well. I would think the community would want some sort of branding and link-backs on their tag pages possibly with some ownership in related chat rooms (i.e. not Redgate). Additionally, you really need someone from the SE team to reach out to these community owners and convince them that Server Fault is better than their current (forum) solution. Then, if you get that far it probably just make sense for that community to kick off its own SE site instead of utilizing Server Fault.

Some examples of companies or groups that could come in and own tags and provide a built-in community are -

Eset - http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15

IISFAQ - http://www.iisfaq.com/Default.aspx?tabid=2679

TechGenix - See msexchange.org, isaserver.org, windowssecurity.com, etc.

Juniper J-NET - http://forums.juniper.net/ or http://www.juniperforum.com/

Nagios - http://support.nagios.com/forum/ or http://forums.meulie.net/viewforum.php?f=60

Cisco VOIP - http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip

Answer 6

Since it is the end of the summer... do what the State and County fairs do... have a virtual event dedicated to a particular vendor or tool. Say "SQL Server Week" or "IBM Blade Server Day". Have vendors seed the system with questions.

Also, stop diluting the usefulness of the site. Its sort of absurd that there is a Stack Exchange site dedicated to Ubuntu.

Answer 7

Getting some MS MVPs on here would give a bigger pool of experts for the MS questions. I have the impression that there aren't a lot of MVPs, but the one time I tried to find out, the question was moved to meta.stackoverflow where there was no way it would get answered. I've told a few MVPs I know about SF, but they didn't seem very interested. My idea with asking how many SF'ers are MVPs was to find out if there's anything about SF that makes it less interesting/relevant for them to participate.

Answer 8

Seen the bent of some the answers -- what do you mean by "Professional"?

I do this for a living, have done so for 15 years now, and have been reasonably successful. However, I have no certs and no professional concentration (I'm a can-do-what-you-need-done type of guy).

Am I a "Professional"?

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