Lasso's Social Media Challenge
29 Jun 2012
As I look to gauge the popularity of Lasso versus other languages, I have realized one of the key performance measures of popularity (or "programming language fashionability") is how obvious or "out there" a given language might be in the New World Order. Lasso has traditionally been a closely guarded secret (even intentionally secretive, in fact, by the old guard and the Inline Curtain), and as a result, the popularity of Lasso out on the web is, well, not obvious.
It's a very big challenge, actually - compared to how prevalent the language is when it comes to actual usage in back-end web systems of the world. It's something we must change.
This is especially glaring when we go take a look at our presence in Social Media. Here are some examples...
(looking at how many people monitor the "core" language for updates - i.e. they are engaged)
@java 59,000 Twitter followers
@php_net - 42,000 Twitter followers
@rails - 29,000 Twitter followers
@ThePSF 15,000 Twitter followers
@aspnet 7500 Twitter followers
@coldfusion 7000 Twitter followers
@perlfoundation 2600 Twitter followers
@lassosoft 165 Twitter followers
(looking at how many people like the core language page, indicating their involvement)
php - 282,000 Facebook likes
python - 57,000 Facebook likes
java - 52,000 Facebook likes
rails - 11,000 Facebook likes
asp.net - 45,000 Facebook likes
coldfusion - 6500 Facebook likes
perl - 7500 Facebook likes
lasso - 178 Facebook likes
YOUTUBE
Looking for videos tagged with the language, and not just "about" them (e.g. any video about a "lasso" or a "ruby" or a "python" wouldn't be guaranteed to be about the language)
"java (programming language)" 7600 Videos Posted
"php (programming language)" 2300 Videos Posted
"python (programming language)" 2500 Videos Posted
"rails (programming language)" 400 Videos Posted
"coldfusion (programming language)" 14 Videos Posted
"lasso (programming language)" 37 Videos Posted
I'll spare you the details of other social media analysis I have done, as it is no less embarrassing to the Lasso development world.
However, this has lead to the obvious conclusion that in order for Lasso to achieve visibility in the world, we have to break out of the old methods of communication (e.g. practically-secret-club email exclusively) and ADD new methodologies of communication to our arsenal.
As a result, I have set some reasonable goals for the next 6 months for our organization, so that we might have internal measures for our success and spurn engagement with eventual Lasso users. In addition, we have come up with strategies for our energy and resources. I'll share a few of them.
Goals by January 1st, 2013 (the next 6 months);
Twitter - 3000 Followers
Facebook - 3000 Likes
YouTube - 1000 Videos
Twitter Strategy
I won't discuss all of our strategies, but I will discuss one here. We have decided to create a series of channels on Twitter which focus different aspects of Lasso life, with the key one being @LassoSoft - the core business communication channel. On this channel, we plan to do the following;
- Company Announcements
- New Product Announcements
- CEO blog posts (important blog posts only - like this one!)
- Release Announcements
- Full Announcements = "The Rhino charges forward! Lasso X released!
- Beta Announcements = "Another Rhino birth! New Lasso Build X.
- Developer conference announcements
- Signup for new conferences
- Awards
- Acknowledgement of significant community additions
- Code examples, example giveaways
- Acknowledgement of significant Lasso Projects going live
- Answers questions relating to Lasso Language or Lasso Community
- Engage others to answer questions
- Engage others to engage one another
- Community Support
- Respond Positively to Community Input
- Retweets of relevant community requests
- Whatever else would be super-relevant to the Lasso community and potential new developers
Now, our key initial strategy is to identify developers who are currently using multiple languages and follow them, to see how they are communicating and engage with them. We will be following about 1000 developers as a test from the main Lasso channel, monitoring them and their activities and input as a group. Hopefully those who are interested will follow, the rest we will eventually drop from following.
Using LassoLab and Lasso 9, I was able to identify the followers of key Twitter accounts in the web language world.
From here, I was able to identify the individuals who follow the most languages (or web development technologies similar or connected to Lasso) of this group. It breaks down as follows;
Following 12 of the above - 1 Twitter follower (me, *cough*)
Following 10 of the above - 1 Twitter follower
Following 9 of the above - 1 Twitter follower
Following 8 of the above - 14 Twitter followers
Following 7 of the above - 39 Twitter followers
…and so on...
Ergo, we will be looking at the individuals following these technologies and looking to see if we can engage them to look at Lasso as another option as a development platform over the next 6 months.
If you found this article as a result of a Twitter follow - consider yourself rewarded. You are one of the most active cross-language developers on the web. And thanks in advance for following LassoSoft as we get the word out again!
Hopefully we will learn good lessons of engagement over the next six months and learn how to better engage both existing and new developers through the Lasso world.
I'll let you know how we are doing in 6 months!
Sean Stephens
CEO, LassoSoft
Atom Feed
