Content Marketing

Social

We use Sprout Social for most social posting and planning. Please try to do as many posts as possible from this tool for tracking and management purposes.

Social listening

coming soon

Social Channels

Channel Use

Twitter

• What do we use it for?
  • New, engagement, announcements, releases/ key feature announcements, company announcements, info gathering (polls)

LinkedIn

• What do we use it for?
  • Hiring, thought leadership, sharing media
• relevant topics?
  • trends, best practices, events, jobs, key features, investments, partners, culture topics, remote work stuff
• other considerations
• What content performs well
  • photos and text, suggest using tags (to expand reach) and hashtags, around 3 is optimal (use keywords you want to be associated with)
  • Provide a call to action

Note: LinkedIn’s API requires apps and integrations to re-authorize every 60 days. Sprout Social will ask us to re-authorize the LinkedIn connection before it expires. Check the “Warnings” tab on the right side menu to re-authorize.

Facebook

• What do we use it for?
  • Hiring, thought leadership, sharing media, events, news, community building
• relevant topics?
  • best practices, events, jobs, how tos, investments, partners, culture topics, remote work stuff
• other considerations
• What content performs well
  • photos, vidoes and text
  • Provide a call to action

Instagram

• coming soon

TikTok

Tips and Tricks:

• Putting a title card on videos makes them easy for folks to find later on
• TikTok has automated closed captioning but it regularly messes up. We should review CC before putting the video live (important for accessibility)
• TikTok is notorious for shadow banning people for vague community guidelines violations, so let’s make sure content has minimal swearing and nothing TikTok could consider dangerous
• You can stream to TikTok and Twitch at the same time with some work- this is an easy way to invite guests ans the community to collaborate. Live streams can also get temporarily blocked on TikTok for vague violations, so let’s make sure guests are aware of the rules too.

Slack

• What do we use it for?
  • Community engagement, announcements, support, releases (consider info gathering)
• target audience?
  • core community members, super fans, those getting started, trying to learn
• Suggested posting cadence?
  • TBD- don’t change until we update metrics
• relevant topics?
  • announcements, new releases, key features,
• other considerations
  • Use it to cross-promote partners and top community members

YouTube

• What do we use it for?
  • long-form content, training, informational/ deep learning
• target audience?
  • Anyone looking to learn about how we work, function and the product
• relevant topics?
  • thought leadership, product demos and deep dives, road map walkthroughs, office hours, demo days, pitch deck overviews
• other considerations
  • need to be careful and curate and tag appropriately.

Stack Overflow

• coming soon

Hacker news

• What do we use it for?
  • deep community and subject matter engagement
  • Product discussions, thought leadership
• target audience?
  • Developers, SREs/ops folks, and some data folks. Overall a pretty technical audience.
  • FOSS advocates
• Suggested posting cadence?
  • Post our jobs on the monthly “Who’s hiring?” thread as needed.
  • Don’t submit our own content to HN. Let our own community members post to HN organically.
• relevant topics?
  • We could participate in more data/dataops threads, but right now we only show up when someone is talking about us.
• other considerations
  • The HN community values transparency so you should disclose that you’re an employee of Meltano when responding to Meltano-related threads.

Meltano Newsletter

Meltano uses Substack to collect newsletter subscribers and send emails to communicate with our community. Email is opt-in, meaning that by default users can download and install Meltano without providing us any contact information.

Meltano Blog

Want to hear everything we are talking and thinking about internally and in the open source data would. Follow along, it’s easy!

Naming a Blog Post

Start with the title of the post, be as descriptive as possible but succinct. Do not begin with the date. Only include a date if the content will not be evergreen and it is critical to note the date for the timeliness of the post. Adding a date to the title will instantly date the post and generally when people are looking for content they are not looking for when it was published more what they can learn in the post.

Blog Publishing Process

Start and issue in the marketing project for all new log posts. Please provide a link to the blog draft in the issue as well as desired go live date. We try not to post two blogs on one day unless they are strategically related.

Please draft all blogs in google docs. We will move the blog to WP once we are in the final stages of editing and we are just putting final touches on it.

All blogs much meet a certain min umber of requirements to be published on the company blog. The topic needs to be relevant to the company narrative and product messages. Additionally, it must be substantive enough for posting. This means it must be long enough, relevant and educational enough to help readers learn about Meltano or the data space. Please review the SEO post guides for more info.

Note: we aim to post blogs Tues- Thurs if possible and during peak US ET business hours.

Blog Promotion

The marketing team will schedule content to go out on our social channels to promote the blog post. It will be up to the blog author to promote the blog in the appropriate slack channel on the same day as the main promotion is occurring. Promotion is generally best received from the author vs marketing.

Guest Blog Procedure

Upon receipt of a request to write a guest blog:

• Start an issue to brainstorm content ideas, tagging all relevant internal stakeholders, including social media focal and any internal reviewers who haven’t already been tagged.
• Include the potential guest’s name, title, company, and contact information.
• Come to an agreement with the guest about whether we will host a guest post or offer some assistance with drafts going to to other outlets, such as Medium.

Once the subject matter and format are agreed upon, send an email to the guest asking them to confirm their agreement. In the email, provide:

• A short review of the subject matter’s details and delivery vehicle (video, blog, etc.).
• The desired word-count range (or length, if video).
• Confirmation that the guest’s blog or video will include their name, company, and role.
• The format for delivering the draft (Google docs if possible).
• A proposed due date for the first draft of the blog. (Though timing will vary, a general guideline is two weeks, or 10 working days.)
• Instructions on who to send the draft to when it’s ready, with a copy to that person.
• If the guest will be doing a live (or Meltano-recorded) presentation, give them all relevant details (date, time, any sign-in info, etc.) and any other instructions they might need.

Upon receipt of the author’s agreement, update the issue with the draft due date. Add the WordPress focal to the issue if you haven’t already done so.

When the guest sends the first draft, send them a quick note acknowledging receipt of the draft, then:

• Update the issue (with a link to the document).
• If the draft is in a Word document, the internal copy editor will copy/paste it into a Google doc and be responsible for tracking changes to both the Word document and Google drafts.

The WordPress focal will email the guest and request permission to display their name, company, and title (and a photo, if applicable), and input that information into WordPress.

Internal reviewers (for both copy and content) have five business days to make comments for the guest’s consideration. (Internal copy editor will make changes based on Meltano Style Guidelines. All reviewers will update the issue after they’ve completed their reviews.

Return the draft to the guest and request they review and return it within five business days.

Upon receipt of the final draft:

• Update the issue, asking all internal stakeholders to take a final look within two business days.
• Notify the guest of the anticipated publishing date.

Upon final approval from all internal stakeholders, the WordPress focal will publish the blog.

Email the guest that the blog has been published (or that the video is live) and provide a link to it.

Send a follow-up thank-you note to the guest.

YouTube

Meltano posts numerous videos to YouTube each week, covering everything from product releases to engineering discussions. Meltano videos posted to YouTube should follow a standard template when naming a video and adding a video description. Common naming conventions make it simple to find the latest version of our weekly videos, and an expanded description with information about Meltano and how to contact the team make it easy for individuals who discover a video to get up to speed quickly.

Creating content for YouTube

If you choose to show your face / use your voice

• Lighting: You can get good natural lighting by recording during the day (preferably) and standing in front of a window in hours where the sun will not hit your face directly (as soft light is preferred over a hard light).
• Sound: Find a quiet place where you can record, making sure your microphone works properly and there’s not too much background noise.
• Background: Use a clean light background instead of a wall with too much visual noise. If you want, you can add some elements on purpose like a Melty or a professional award!

Recommended reading

For the actual content you’ll be showing

Thumbnail

• We have several thumbnail templates in the Marketing drive (Meltano team > Marketing > YouTube). Choose one to copy and edit according to the category of your video.

How to start

• A) You can start your video with an opening slide, which can be the same as your Thumbnail design, with you briefly explaining what you’ll be doing.
• B) Or if your camera quality is good enough and you’re not feeling too shy, you’re more than welcome to start the video with your face explaining the matter yourself! (from the chest up, front angle).

Screen recording

• Use a new desktop to avoid showing a messy one or stuff you don’t want seen
• Turn your notifications off to avoid any pop-ups

Sensitive information

• Avoid showing sensitive content at all costs, such as: client emails, transactions details, etc.

Recommended video for more tips

Naming a YouTube Video

Videos uploaded to YouTube should have names that try and follow the same format wherever possible.

• They always start with “Meltano”
• They then describe the type of recording (Meeting, Speedrun, Release, Discussion, etc)
• If there’s a specific version of Meltano being referenced, (in a speedrun or release), reference it with a lower-case v followed by the release number (v1.3.0)
• Finish with the date in YYYY-MM-DD (2019-11-01)
• Separate all names with dashes

Examples of great YouTube video names include:

• Meltano Release - v1.3.0 - 2019-10-31
• Meltano Meeting - Marketing Planning - 2019-10-31
• Meltano Discussion - Singer Tap Brainstorming - 2019-10-31

Writing a YouTube Video Description

Video descriptions should have a short (can be one sentence or phrase) blurb at the beginning, followed by evergreen information about Meltano that can simply be copied and pasted.

Things to consider when writing a great, short, video description:

• Descriptions are short and to the point, explaining what the video is covering and optionally the teams participating (engineering, marketing, leadership, security, etc)
• Don’t worry about “how” something is being worked on, discussed, solved - that’s what the video is for! Description should cover “what, who, why”
• Great descriptions highlight key words/phrases, especially when discussing specific integrations (“we’re discussing how to fix a bug with our Google Analytics data tap”) or an external component (“our data source for XYZ has a new feature”)
• Timestamps can be linked to just by writing the timestamp: 1:33.

Examples of a great YouTube video description include:

Meltano v1.3.0 is publicly released, adding the ability to distill rocket fuel and manufacture widgets, with numerous bug fixes and improvements, including:

- bug fix #1
- improvement #1
- improvement #2

The Meltano Engineering team discusses the importance of tabs vs spaces in minified CSS comments when optimizing for compiled code readability.

This full example of a Meltano YouTube video description includes evergreen content that should always be included:

Meltano v1.3.0 is publicly released, adding the ability to distill rocket fuel and manufacture widgets, with numerous bug fixes and improvements, including:

- bug fix #1 (link)
- improvement #1 (link)
- improvement #2 (link)

## Podcasts
* use the podcast template in the internal marketing repo when a podcast opportunity arises.

1:55​ Meltano team - who we are...
3:15​ Discussion of bug fix #1