Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

One of my tasks since I first began working for Sun in 2007 has been to help and encourage others (mostly engineers) to communicate in various ways, including blogs.

There are many blogs at Sun (check the lower right corner of that link for today's numbers), but, as I quickly discovered when I began analyzing their traffic and statistics, many were effectively dead: no posts since an early push to get everybody blogging in late 2005.

Not everyone turns out to be a natural blogger (and we've all been awfully busy), but I suspected that some could be brought back online with just a little encouragement. So I've been taking steps.

My first step was to gather and publish (internally) monthly statistics on blogs related to the Solaris software engineering group I work for. At the time these fell into three broad categories, which I tracked separately: storage, high availability (cluster), and high performance computing.

To further engage their attention, I set up monthly Omniture reports to be emailed automatically to each of "my" bloggers, showing their traffic for the previous month, and, in rank order, their most popular posts from the previous six months. This latter was to encourage them to think about refreshing old blog posts.

I also published and circulated some blogging tips. And, whenever I happened to meet one of my bloggers at a conference, etc., I tried to have a conversation about blogging, to gently bring them back into the fold.

All of that worked - a little. A few moribund blogs came back to life, a few people posted more often than they otherwise might have (the real effect of this kind of "awareness campaign" is hard to quantify).

In October, 2008, I decided to try a new approach: a monthly contest. Here's how I described it to the (involuntary) participants: 

For each of the blogs I track, each month I check how many posts were made in that month, how many total page views the blog got, and the percentage increase/decrease in page views over the previous month. Whichever blog publishes at least one post in a given month AND shows the greatest percentage increase (among its blog category [storage, HPC, cluster]) that month will win a prize: a nifty t-shirt I had made up with help of Sun graphic artist Dwayne Wolff. Basing the contest on a percentage means that you don't have to be Jonathan or Jeff Bonwick to win [at the time, Jeff was the most popular storage blogger; these days, thanks in part to that video, it's Brendan]. Even if your blog doesn't (yet) get a lot of traffic, the goal is to improve over your own personal best.

It was hard to quantify results from this, as well - again, everyone's busy, and we've lost some key bloggers. But we had fun with it and people did like the shirts (in fact, a number of bloggers I wasn't tracking, who therefore weren't eligible, wished they could have them; in hindsight I should have made more).

Some of the shirts went on a contest to encourage people all over Sun to blog about the launch of Fishworks last November. This wasn't strictly necessary, as the Fishworks team had the matter well in hand themselves, but it did help raise awareness across the company about a hot new product line. The first 20 people to publish blog posts on/after the launch date got t-shirts. They were supplied with the standard marketing messaging, etc., but no one was lazy about it: each of the bloggers found something different and personal to say about this launch.

After a week, I ran some stats and gave OpenSolaris logo-engraved iPods to the writers of the three posts on the topic which had gotten the most page views to date.

Now I've requested photos of all the winners in their t-shirts. Predictably and amusingly, they're competing to be creative about it:

^ Josh Simons

^ Juergen Schleich

The shirts that remained by early June were given to the OpenSolaris User Group leaders who participated in our bootcamp in San Francisco (the photo at the top of the page shows me at that same bootcamp, taken by Jim Grisanzio):

^ Clay Baenziger of the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group

Vitório Sassi took his back to Brazil and used it for marketing at FISL: he had a guy running around wearing the t-shirt taking photos and videos - blogging this for Sun.

I'll add more photos as they come in - you know who you are and whether you have a shirt you need to send me a picture of!

^ Brendan Gregg geeks out

^ Katy Dickinson and friends (Photo Copyright 2009 John Plocher)

^ Nick Solter

ps the solution for those who don't blog? I stick 'em in front of a video camera.

I long ago posted a bunch of tips and how-tos for bloggers to Sun's blogs wikil, including:

• Tell Your Readers Who You Are
• Some Links Good, More Links Better
• Let Roller Do the Formatting
• Refreshing Old Blog Posts
• Use Your Signature to Increase Links and Traffic
• Spell It Right
• Build Blog Traffic by Serving Your Two Core Audiences

About a year ago, Dan Maslowski had a simple-but-brilliant idea to increase the reach of some of Sun's Open Solaris Storage blogs: translate them! Sun's globalization team was initially cautious: they already had their hands full translating interfaces and documentation, and weren't sure where this blogging thing fit into their scope of work. But they agreed to give it a shot. 

We started with Bob Porras' blog. Based on attendance at Sun Tech Days worldwide, he opted to have it translated into Chinese (first post July 9th), quickly followed by Spanish (first post August 17th) and Russian (August 20th). We've recently added Japanese (April 30th) and Brazilian Portugese (May 22nd).

The results were good, though not surprising: traffic increased.

What's more interesting than the simple increase in page views is the range of countries now represented in Bob's readership. Here's a breakdown of traffic by (roughly calculated) language areas:

New entrants Japanese and Brazilian Portugese are already making a noticeable contribution - clearly, there was demand for material in these languages. (Note that "all others" refers to all other countries that have sent traffic to Bob's blog - folks from these countries are obviously reading one of the six languages so far represented.)

Our geographic reach increased. For example, look at the number of Spanish-speaking countries from which people are reading Bob's blog each month:

Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May
3	6	8	8	9	13	8	10	10	12	11	11

The list varies a bit from month to month, altogether 15 Spanish-speaking countries are represented so far:

Andorra
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Peru
Puerto Rico
Saint Lucia
Spain
Venezuela

Some of these are tiny countries bringing us only one or two visitors a month - but that's one or two more people we're talking to that we weren't before.

Now let's look at Storage Stop, a very different kind of blog which we began translating into Chinese in November, but have neglected to since March. Umm, we'll just claim that was a web traffic experiment, not an oversight, right?

I wonder whether translating Storage Stop is useful, because it's primarily an aggregator, pointing at material on other blogs (so far mostly in English), and a venue for videos which are so far entirely in English. (We're looking into ways to translate videos.) For that or whatever reason, Storage Stop never got a lot of traction in Chinese, and I may abandon that experiment to spend translation resources more productively.

Since December we've also been translating Scott Tracy's blog and Lynn Rohrer's blogs into Chinese.

But it was clear from the overall trends of traffic to Sun storage blogs that our most-valued material is mostly highly technical. So over the last few months we've been translating selected posts into various languages. Examples include:

• SAMQFS
• Jeff Bonwick in multiple languages - use the language selector on the right
• Dan Maslowski
• Eric Kustarz
• Mark Carlson
• Tim Thomas in Chinese and Japanese
• Jeff Cheeney
  

These translations are mostly too recent to draw conclusions; I'll report back after we've got some numbers to analyze. 

We also translated one important post by Jim Grisanzio on Building OpenSolaris Communities, into multiple languages. Early returns show that this is having an effect on traffic and, more importantly, as Jim had hoped, it's opening up new conversations.

Sun's globalization team are now enthusiastically and ably taking over more of the blog translation process: all I have to do is identify the posts to translate, and they do the rest. With their help, more blogs are being translated all over Sun, in other technology areas such as Sun Cluster.

We're opening up to the global conversation, and the world is talking back. Sometimes the simplest ideas have the profoundest effects.