September 26, 2024
September 26, 2024
This Q&A is part of our Communications Turning Point series, which examines the biggest issues affecting communicators today. Amid accelerating shifts in technology, information sources and media, and new pressures on budgets, this series helps leaders navigate the fast-moving landscape with insights from some of the world’s top communicators.
I recently spoke with B2D communications veteran Michael Selvidge, director of communications at Sentry, an application monitoring tool used by more than 4 million developers globally. Drawing on two decades of experience in technology marketing and communications, Michael shared his views on the unique challenge of communicating authentically to developers, and how to break through the noise when so many companies now have developers in their sights.
Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
You have deep roots in developer communications. What's fundamentally changed about business-to-developer (B2D) communications over the past decade?
Developer comms has always been tricky in one sense and dead easy in another. It’s tricky because developers are a skeptical audience that claim they don’t like to be marketed to. There’s a good book by Adam DuVander called ‘Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.’ But actually, it does exist, it just shouldn’t look like marketing.
Developers live in a binary world of ones and zeros — if you type some code and your syntax is right, you get a certain result, and that’s what they want from communications. They see marketing as fancy words that try to convince you to buy something you don’t want, so that approach won’t work.
But it’s actually simple: you just need to use authentic, human language. And you have to get the details right. Should you talk about building something on Postgres or with Postgres? I’ll ask my developer relations team about things like that, because if you get the details wrong, you will lose your audience immediately. Inauthentic communication is like the ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ meme, and generally a fatal offense.
One more thing, and this is really important: I never try to present myself as being more technical than I am, because you’ll be exposed. And that’s not just my personal brand getting tarnished; by default, the brand you represent will lose its one chance with a skeptical-by-default audience.
<split-lines>"Developers live in a binary world of ones and zeros — if you type some code and your syntax is right, you get a certain result, and that’s what they want from communications."<split-lines>
How do you stand out in a sea of savvy companies that are all trying to communicate a similar message? What first principles of B2D communications are more important than ever?
You need to have a great product. It doesn’t need to be the best, most comprehensive widget in all categories and for every audience, but if your product doesn’t provide a specific outcome really well, you should be working on your product, not your marketing.
Assuming you have that, there are places where you need to be active: HackerNews is the number one meeting place for developers. If you get your company on the front page of HackerNews, that might result in the biggest web traffic of the quarter. I refresh it constantly. It’s a place to get the zeitgeist of the broader developer community.
Beyond HackerNews, influencers are important. ‘Influencer’ is a somewhat cringey term, and most associate it with vapid people taking selfies on Instagram, but there are legitimate influencers in every niche, including developers. There are developers live-coding on Twitch, and people watch them just as they watch people playing video games.
We’ve been saying ‘developers,’ but you can’t think of developers as a single community; you need to know what persona you’re going after and zoom in on that specific segment. Front-end? Back-end? Full-stack? Self-serve indies? In many ways these audiences are similar, but to draw a parallel they can also be as different as say the NBA, MLB, and the NFL. All of them are American professional sports leagues, sure, but they play different games, with different rules.
It comes back to fundamentals: who is your audience, what are your goals, and how much money do you have to achieve those goals? Because how much budget you have defines what your tactics are.
There's been a lot of chatter lately about the death of traditional PR and the rise of going direct. What do you make of this conversation?
I don’t like the term ‘going direct.’ You should have been doing that from day one. I don’t believe brands should suddenly decide to create their own news properties that compete against traditional outlets, that doesn’t work. And you can only subsidize a podcast for so long.
Go where the community is, whether it’s Twitter—I refuse to call it X—or Discord or a community Slack channel; you need to know customer pain points and what they’re asking for. Being in those communities gives you a competitive advantage over PR people who think their role is only to write press releases and pitch reporters.
How do you earn influence given the destruction of dev-focused trade media and the rise of Substack influencers?
It's about meeting people where they are. A lot of people live-code on Twitch. Jason Lengstorf has the ‘Learn with Jason’ channel, he’s fantastic. And podcasts are great. Sentry acquired a podcast called ‘SyntaxFM’ before I joined and that was a very smart move; I knew then that I wanted to work for this company because they understood the assignment.
But the point is, whether these are established media entities with a masthead or not, if this is where your target audience lives, you need to show up there, authentically.
<split-lines>"Whether these are established media entities with a masthead or not, if this is where your target audience lives, you need to show up there, authentically."<split-lines>
How are you thinking about paid and direct-to-developer strategies?
Paid is a huge part of it, but at Sentry that lives under developer relations. I work very closely with developer relations, we’re joined at the hip, but I'm not the one writing the checks to sponsor a podcast.
Having a credible story is crucial. Paid influencers won’t partner with companies if they don’t believe in them, because their credibility is on the line too.
We have great relationships with developer influencers, and mutual respect, beyond just what we sponsor. Influencers will tweet favorably about our product because it helped them to debug something really quickly, whether we are a current sponsor or not.
How are you personally using AI to work and communicate better?
I believe AI will be a big part of comms. It can already write great press releases, although Sentry as a company doesn’t do press releases — they’re not worth the time and they can put developers off.
I use AI when I have a ‘cursor on a blank page’ problem. I use it to initiate a generic idea that’s usually horrible at first, sometimes I iterate and make it better, but more often I use it as a counterexample for inspiration to break through any writer’s block. By its nature, AI is saying what everyone else is already saying, it’s not creative or original, so it's your job to say something different.
What's your career advice for someone just getting started in B2D communications?
Be where the developers are, whether it’s Discord, HackerNews, or some yet-to-be-invented platform. But don’t AstroTurf or pretend to be something you’re not; be present and be curious.
Twitter was instrumental in my early career. There was a period from about 2008-9 when every tech reporter was on Twitter, but not every PR person. I was able to build a rapport with journalists and actual IRL friendships with journalists and folks who went on to become influencers.
<split-lines>"Be where the developers are, whether it’s Discord, HackerNews, or some yet-to-be-invented platform."<split-lines>
And, best for last: Can you tell us about 'Callin’ Oates’?
It’s an emergency Hall & Oates hotline! It’s about 13 years old and it still gets a few thousand phone calls a day. It’s an employee project I built at Twilio and it took on a life of its own and gives a lot of people joy.
