Great DevRel participation at a conference, as a sponsor

We were at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week in San Francisco. It was my first time in nearly four years to be back at a large developer conference as a sponsor. This was also my first major event representing MongoDB, and it happened just as I completed my first six months of being at the company. There was so much energy from the reported 28,000 attendees, all required to go through a vaccine checkpoint before getting badges. It was great to be there.

As with most developer conferences of that size, Developer Relations is usually one team in a larger collaboration. For GDC, it was our talented Events team who led planning, organizing, and overall logistics. Together, we made the most of our time in “The City,” taking every opportunity to meet developers with a sponsored presence at the GDC Summit and a booth at the Expo.?

On Tuesday and Thursday, we had additional engagements. Tuesday night, we hosted the San Francisco MongoDB User Group at our SF offices. On Thursday, we ran a developer quest event with our partners at AWS, who hosted us at their impressive AWS Startup Loft space. Both were just a few blocks from the Moscone Center where GDC is held.?

I was proud to be there with members of my team, representing our company and our global Advocacy and DevRel group. It was awesome knowing we were making the most of the opportunity. Planning for big events can start months in advance. Fueled by creativity and a focus to really engage developers and our community, our plans expanded to include the development of a new demo that invited developers to generate their own data (through gameplay) and observe the analytical and seamless integration capabilities of our platform.

For this month’s article, I’m reflecting on the incredible effort and want to put into words some of the guiding principles that enabled us to create such an engaging and focused presence at GDC.

1. Relate, don’t just repeat

Company messaging is important and we all know a lot of work goes into getting the right talking points together. There’s also a lot of care to ensure which companies/customers you can reference. Training participants ahead of an event is key to getting everyone on the same page and aware if there are announcements to be made, new features to highlight/preview, use cases to showcase, etc.

This helps towards informed engagement but usually doesn't shape the whole conversation. I prefer learning as much as I can about the developer I’m talking with first – what are they building, what interests them, and what needs they have. Most Advocates are usually in a great position to relate to where a developer is coming from. Perhaps we encountered similar challenges, and through our own experiences or stories we’ve heard from others in our community, can share a relatable approach to solutions.?

Relating is also a great way to learn and discover new challenges, and explore through discussion how your platform (or other techniques) might lead to a solution. Meeting so many people at a large event, the more I relate to someone, the more I remember their story. I imagine it’s the same on their end as it does help continue the conversation.

2. Captivate, don’t just capture

At GDC, as with many large events, there were many roaming the expo floor to collect cool swag, happy to have their badge scanned in return. We used the event app running on our own mobile devices to scan badges. For our team, it was a method to save contacts for following up and noting feedback.?

DevRel generally doesn’t have the objective to capture leads, though there is some great exploration on DevRel Qualified Leads (DRQL). Instead, we looked to have quality conversations, follow-up opportunities, provide relevant and deployable examples, and enable developers toward success with our platform.

With so many things to see and learn for a developer at a large event, doing something truly captivating is key. At the heart of our presence and participation was our demo. This was a result of several insightful discussions with our sales, product, and marketing teams, helping us arrive at something that featured a set of features and showcased the actual value many developers (in game development) already get from our platform. It was also a result of incredible ingenuity from Advocates in our team and the support of others to try something new.

The demo was designed to be captivating from start to finish; it started with an arcade joystick and an invitation to play a game. We generated further interest by saying that player movement data was being fed into our platform while the game was being played. After the game was over, the player could see their score matched up with others. Most captivating, however, was they could see how their movements and actions compared to an aggregate of other games played in a heatmap. This led to great conversations about not only the data but the possibilities — which, in turn, led to requests for follow-up discussions and interest in developers deploying the demo to share with their teams.

3. Call to context, don’t just call to action

GDC was our first major event using something new. We call them event landing pages. These are individual pages on our Developer Center where we can provide all details about our involvement in the event. Leading up to and during the event, the page summarizes what we’re doing and provides a full list, locations, and points of contact for all our activities. At some point following the event, we add references to slides, code and sample data for our demo, videos, and links to relevant resources.?Here's the one for our presence at GDC.

This innovation was based on developer feedback asking our Advocates for a better place to land following our talks and workshops. It’s been a great addition so far and brings developers right into the tools, tutorials, and resources that are contextual to the talk or event that interested them. Ultimately, fewer clicks to get what you need is the goal, and getting those interested further on their way to success with our platform.

There are many things you can do, as a sponsor, to make the most of your time and team’s investment at large events. My focus in these monthly articles is to share insights and aspects of what I love most about what I do. In this article, I’ve come the closest to talking about what my team and I are doing at MongoDB based on our recent experience at GDC. If you’re interested in more detail or have questions or ideas for future topics, please reach out.

In case you missed it, my first two posts in this series were about?Finding and Measuring Inspiration in Developer Relations and Five Tools of Developer Advocacy.