Community outreach initiative proposal
This proposal is currently in rough-draft form and is being put together. Feel free to offer any input in the related Loom.io discussion.
The scope of this document is to propose several avenues for community outreach, with a unified message and approach. There are several unique groups of people that fit the scope of our audience, and we need to think about message we want to convey, and how we reach out to them.
Audience
As with any outreach initiative, we need to think about how Diaspora can appeal to different people. This section is about the kinds of appeal that these different groups of people might find in Diaspora.
End Users
Activists
Developers
Social Networks
Our project has a number of accounts on different services to help promote itself to people that may never have tried it before. As such, we can use these accounts to not only help promote the project and keep followers up to date on news and progress, but we can also
Twitter is mostly useful for short bursts of messages. It’s where hashtags and link-spam prevails. But at the same time, it’s useful for trending content. Good Twitter engagement involves following hashtags and directly responding to people. Not just responding to your mentions, either. Respond to all sorts of people with clear, concise messages. Talk about anything, be diverse, and most importantly, learn how to stuff witty phrases into 140 chars.
Identi.ca
Follow us on Identi.ca or join our group.
Identi.ca is similar in functionality to Twitter, but has a vastly different userbase. This includes:
- People already familiar with the concept of decentralization.
- Free Software users and advocates
- Developers / Hackers / Sysadmins
As such, Identi.ca has a unique community that is more personal to FOSS than what a site like Twitter offers. It's an opportunity to engage people that similarly support what we're already representing.
An additional feature of identi.ca (and other StatusNet instances) is their use of groups. You can mention an entire group by using the bang syntax; all you have to do is use an exclamation point to the group name in a status message. For example, "!diaspora" sends the message to everyone in the Diaspora group. As an aside, you can only mention a group that you're already a part of.
Facebook has a wide range of types of users that populate it. Rather than sum up all the different types of people that use it, we can narrow things down to the following of people already following the Diaspora Facebook page.
- Social Activists
- Occupy supporters
- Privacy advocates
- Average joes that checked in on the project a long time ago.
The approach for engagement here needs to be conversational. Country Time Lemonade, Oreo, and Name.com are all examples of really great brand engagement. The pages are full of posts that are fun, maybe a little quirky, but more importantly, they're interesting enough to cause a person to pause and actually pay attention to it.
Diaspora
Share with us on Diaspora(diasporahq@joindiaspora.com for other pods).
Diaspora has a mixed community brought together by our common interests in having "Something Else" as far as user privacy, data ownership, and decentralized social networking are concerned. As such, the users on Diaspora can be thought of as a combination of users from the above social network.
Social media on Diaspora requires a bit of a different approach to engaging users: we can posts simple and to-the-point like we do on Facebook, but we have the added bonus of being able to hashtag topic points. Users are encouraged to follow these tags as well:
- #diaspora
- #diaspora-packaging
- #community
- #dev