DEV Community: Nick Moore

Developer content can be too approachable

Nick Moore — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:39:43 +0000

Controversial take: Content (especially for developers and sysadmins) can be TOO approachable.

This might be an uncomfortable idea at first. For most marketers, approachability is a key value and one of the first things they’ll think about when writing a post.

Does it use language a middle school student uses?

Does it define and explain every term?

Does

have

enough

line breaks?

But this lens just doesn’t work for some readers. Or at least, you need to bend the lens a little bit.

I first learned this lesson at TechTarget. There, my role was part writer, part reporter, part content marketer. My target audience was narrow. And I mean narrow.

They weren’t “technical folks” nor “sysadmins” but “sysadmins specializing in the usage of virtual machines” (or even more narrow still, virtual machines from a particular company — VMware).

The content only worked when the information was as narrow as the target audience. The best example of this in practice was terminology. We had a whitelist of terms we should define and a blacklist of terms we shouldn’t define.

At the top of the blacklist, for my site, was “virtual machine.” I wrote tens of thousands of words about virtual machines at TechTarget and never used the term. Instead, I used the abbreviation our audience used: VM.

The lesson here, which you can apply beyond abbreviations, is that approachability can actually signal a lack of familiarity, and a lack of familiarity can signal bad content (or at least content that is too superficial or basic).

I understand the objection: Wouldn’t more approachable content be readable by more people?

Well, no. And also no.

No 1️⃣: If you want to create content for newbies, you’ll only succeed if you do that from the start. If you write content for advanced readers and then explain a bunch of stuff the advanced readers already know, you’ll drive the experts away and likely fail to capture the newbies too.

No 2️⃣: Like it or not, approachable content cues readers — especially already skeptical ones — to bounce. If your content is too approachable, readers won’t skim by the basics; they’ll actually close out the tab.

And we don’t have to rely on stereotypes of the weird alien developer with an exaggerated hatred for marketing to understand why.

If you’re a writer and you find an article about advanced writing tips, you are not going to continue reading if the article starts off by defining what an article introduction is.

If you’re a founder and you find an article about how best to seize on the emerging AI trend, you are not going to continue reading if the article explains what an MVP is.

If you’re a journalist and you find a guide to interviewing important politicians, you are not going to finish it if the article explains why interviews are important.

It will feel bad at first. Even wasteful. But I promise a shorter article that’s based on research you’ve done but not explained will connect better with an advanced, technical audience.

Developer marketers and dev rel pros need to get out of the tutorial rut

Nick Moore — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:40:30 +0000

Many developer marketers and dev rel pros I meet are trying to get out of what I call the tutorial rut.

This is when you know developers DON’T like traditional content and know they DO like tutorials but don’t know what else to create.

First: It’s a good problem to have! Many companies marketing to developers still produce fluffy content that drives developers away. Tutorials are a great way to build “developer love” (as Carly Brantz, CMO at Digital Ocean puts it) and often a very good way to capture organic traffic from SEO.

But second: Content can do more. The limit, really, is your imagination.

If you Google “types of content marketing,” you’ll find posts that describe over a dozen types, including blog posts, eBooks, case studies, and podcasts.

This is annoying, for sure, but it also indicates an opportunity: With no settled definition, you don’t have to limit yourself to the expectations you’re used to.

Step outside of “content marketing” and think about “content.”

Developers are a unique audience, after all, and we know traditional marketing doesn’t work on them, so maybe we should stop relying on traditional marketing types and definitions.

Instead, be creative and curious.

Creativity might lead you in novel directions, toward content that surprises you and surprises your skeptical audience. You could create something totally new or something new enough to skip past the “it’s just marketing” radar.

Curiosity might lead you in divergent directions, toward incorporating techniques and ideas from tech journalists or independent bloggers. You could report on a trend instead of merely speculating. You could write a thoughtful essay that challenges expectations instead of repeating what’s known.

Return to your goals and your problems and use that creativity and curiosity to figure out ways to meet and solve them — ways that satisfy YOUR needs and not the expectations of traditional marketers.

Do you want more developers signing up for demos? Maybe you need product-led content. But not the stuff that shoves the product in your face — your version, a transparent guide to what the product can and can’t do.

Do you want to rank on HackerNews? Maybe you need thought leadership. But not the cheesy trend predictions — your version, a thoughtful essay based on reflections from the founding team.

Do you have lots of developers signing up but few converting? Maybe you need case studies. But not the empty, hollow, manicured case studies — your version, a technical post about what a customer experienced, gained, and struggled with using your product.

Don’t underestimate the tutorial. But don’t limit yourself to tutorials either.

Why developer marketers and devrel pros should be (internal) reporters

Nick Moore — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:24:14 +0000

Here’s an interesting contraction: The work of software engineering produces a lot of interesting text — as a matter of procedure — but developer content marketing tends to be mediocre. 🤔

Think about all the text that emerges from widely accepted software development practices: PR reviews, retrospectives, stand-up meeting notes, hackathon presentation decks, RFCs. The list goes on.

The problem is that much of this content is internal and the people producing it either aren’t aware of how interesting it actually is or don’t know how to translate this work into appealing, approachable content for outsiders.

One solution is to bring on a writer who’s as interested in reporting as writing. I’ve incorporated reporting into my content work both as an employee and as a freelancer and the results always surprise me.

When I worked full-time for the dev tool company Sourcegraph, I was almost overwhelmed with possibilities.

Slack was bursting with channels I could snoop on; there were multiple internal newsletters that could keep me in the loop on new experiments and projects; there were endless sales call recordings to listen to; and, of course, there was GitHub, where I could find the traces and the results of enormous, fascinating efforts. 📚

I embraced my inner reporter (as well as my inner busybody) and read as much as I possibly could. And it really was like reporting because no single finding was sufficient for an article but plenty of findings formed leads that I could follow up on via Slack DMs or Zoom calls. 🕵️

As reporters well know, some of these leads went cold. Some leads were exciting but the work being done was still in progress; some leads looked interesting to me but not to an experienced developer; and some leads were only compelling seeds that needed more cultivation.

The trick is being confident good content will emerge but humble enough to know that you won’t always be able to guess where and when it comes from. 🌱

You can predict, however, that if the development work is interesting, then the results of reporting on it will be interesting to other developers.

But you can’t predict how or whether the stories you find will be easily recognizable. Here, it’s best to ditch inherited categories and familiar patterns like “thought leadership” and “blog post.”

Instead, embrace your inner reporter, immerse yourself in the work and the text that emerges from that work, develop a nose for interesting leads, and pursue those leads through more direct methods (or ask a freelance writer for help 😉).

The initial result won’t always be fully-fledged content but it will almost always lead to or inform content down the line. Most importantly, you will take one of the hardest problems in developer marketing — how can non-technical marketers come up with enough (good) ideas to fuel a developer-first content strategy? — and solve it in one fell swoop.

If you listen well enough, you’ll have more ideas than you can choose from. 👂

Knowledge is a curse and it makes it hard to write for devs

Nick Moore — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:06:40 +0000

Knowledge is a curse and it’s likely the top thing blocking you from making great developer content. 🧠🧙‍♀️

In 1990, Stanford researchers set out to study how knowledge makes us overconfident. In an experiment, they asked one group of people to tap the melody of a well-known song (such as “Happy Birthday”) on a table. They asked another group to listen and name the song.

After tapping 120 songs, only 2.5% of the songs were correctly named. But that’s not the surprising part.

The group tapping the songs? They predicted the listeners would guess the songs correctly 50% of the time. The gulf is huge: Tappers believed they would succeed in communicating one in two times; in reality, they only succeeded one in forty times.

And this is the curse of knowledge: The tappers knew the songs so well that they believed merely tapping the melodies would be enough to communicate them. And they were wrong.

So, how does this apply to developer content? Well, there’s a small twist. In the experiment, the participants had to tap and had to listen. When creating content, you’re always facing the question “Should I write this at all?” 😬

And that’s where the curse of knowledge is most deadly. It’s all too easy to assume that your audience either already knows what you’re talking about or knows the general topic well enough that a post about it won’t be interesting. But that’s the curse of knowledge speaking and just like the tappers in the experiment, you’re wrong.

Did your development team solve a challenging technical problem recently? Write about it. 📝

Did your founding team choose a framework that’s still shaping decisions today? Write about it. 📝

Did you see a big problem on the horizon that ended up having little to no consequence? Did you see or miss a small problem that ended up having big consequences? Write about it. 📝

Here’s the hack to shortcut your curse of knowledge: If it’s interesting to you, it’s interesting to someone else. Ultimately, you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know what your readers don’t know. 🧠

There will still be work to be done to make a post approachable to an outsider or work to make it maximally interesting or relevant but the seed of a good and worthwhile idea is your own interest.

And no matter how much you know, don’t let knowledge fool you into thinking you already know what your readers want.

The content quality thermocline: A framework for understanding why only some developer content works

Nick Moore — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 17:08:27 +0000

Everyone wants high-quality content but no one can agree on what “high-quality” means.

Quality is a contentious topic among content marketers but the question gets even hairier when you get into technical marketing and developer marketing.

First, the general problem: Quality is entirely subjective.

Let’s say you’ve written a good blog post. By what measure is it good?

Hard to say. And if you back up, the answer remains hard: I bet most CMOs and writers couldn’t name, much less agree on, a perfect blog post. (Whereas most novelists, as a counterexample, could at least agree The Great Gatsby is, well, great).

Instead, we tend to rely on vague heuristics: Does it feel “in-depth”? Does it feel “well-written”? Is the voice “conversational”? Who can say?

The worst thing you can do after realizing how subjective this all can be is to ditch the idea of quality and try to merely meet your reader’s (or Google’s or social media’s) minimum expectations.

No. Quality is important but we won’t be able to identify what quality means if we think in linear terms. Which is why I want to propose a concept: The content quality thermocline.

A thermocline — a concept I’m borrowing from oceanography — is a distinct layer within a large body of water where the temperature suddenly and dramatically shifts. If you were to sink into the ocean, you’d feel the water gradually get colder until, at a certain point, the water would suddenly get much much colder all at once.

The thermocline points out how related qualities can have a nonlinear relationship. As writers, we tend to think in linear terms: More input (effort) = greater output (quality + results). But this isn’t true.

Developer marketing is a perfect example.

I’ve read — and written! — great content that didn’t resonate with developers at all. That’s not a contradiction. Sometimes great content targeted at one audience doesn’t succeed as well as “worse” content targeted at another.

The thermocline explains it. Content can be decent, good, or great but until it reaches a certain threshold — the thermocline — it won’t resonate.

Maybe your post is well-researched but the research is from the past couple of years. Would your argument suddenly become convincing if you connected a trend prediction to a long-term technology cycle?

Maybe the voice in your post is conversational but it lacks the details that make it feel personable. Would your post suddenly feel relatable if you added anecdotes that made the voice feel grounded?

Maybe the explanations in your post are clear and accurate but your readers, themselves technical, already understand. Would your post suddenly have a better bounce rate if you cut out most of the explanation and focused on the new-to-your-audience information?

The content quality thermocline is a heuristic. You can’t quantify it or define it. Instead, every time you write something good, ask yourself “Is it good enough?”