12

One of the 7 essential meta questions:

This is rapidly becoming a hot issue across the entire network: how to promote your site and how to reach out to the experts and pundits in your industry. We can come up with budgets and promotions but — more than any other issue raised here — the means and ideas about how to reach your target audience HAS TO come from you and your community. Has to. Has to, has to, has to! We simply are not experts in your field. We don’t have the the connections nor the experience you bring to the table. You are both our evangelist and our ambassador.

A good way to start is to search for questions tagged [promotion] on other metas.

6 Answers 6

3

I agree we should really start to evangelize the site. As noted below I've already gotten a couple coworkers to look into the site, and I've started pushing regulars on the chat.SE rooms to look around over here too. I know Jeff has been posting some of the stuff on twitter (including http://twitter.com/#!/StackDBAs).

My advice is to pump everyone you know that works with databases and get them on board here.

I've already evangelized to a couple of my coworkers. My advice is to evangelize yourself to people you think would make a good fit. Help them to understand the SE2 concept if they don't already, and then they'll evangelize once the site helps them, the same way you started evangelizing once SE2 helped you. I know that was the turning point for you, because it's the turning point for like 99.999% of the users that evangelize. How did you find the site? Was it because of someone evangelizing it?

I think I found it initially via a blog or TDWTF or /., and was immediately blown away by how awesome it was. I've now gotten people on bicycles.SE, cooking.SE, writing.SE, and photo.SE. And they had no clue how SE2 worked before I evangelized to them.

1
  • 1
    +1 Not just the turning point, but keeps them coming back. Jan 19, 2011 at 14:22
3

Keep reaching out to other DBAs and see if you can get some of the "heavy hitters" on board. I noticed @SQLRockstar is on here, what about @BrentO, @PaulRandal, @SQLSarg, @AaronBertrand? These people are all very well respected and active in the SQL community and it's through one of them tweeting that I found out about the site.

Personally, I like the site much more than the MS site(s) as it's faster and easier to navigate. The answers seems a little more on point too.

Is there any way you can redirect or link db related questions from SO to this site?

2
  • 2
    Are there any rules against trying to get traffic from SF or SO? It'd be a simple matter (although possibly time consuming and spammy) to go through the postgres/mysql/oracle tags, and for new questions that would be on-topic here, suggest they post here, or link to answers here if it's already been covered.
    – Joe
    Jan 20, 2011 at 11:50
  • @Joe, if you find some like that, start a thread here for them and we can see about moving them. If they're really good matches, we can move them over.
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Feb 23, 2011 at 14:58
3

We need to add more high quality questions and answers. As we do search will drive new users to the site. Of course any additional promotion is beneficial, particularly if they understand the benefits of the StackExchange engine, but a user finding a quality answer to a question goes a lot further than a promotion that does not benefit the user.

I put a plug on Oracle Mix, My Oracle Support Community, and OracleOverflow.com.

I sent a request to Steve Adams to post something about the site on the Oracle-L mailing list, but I haven't heard back from him yet. Hopefully he just hasn't gotten to it yet.

5
  • Nice. Good work ;)
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Jan 18, 2011 at 23:47
  • But what high quality questions and answers are we looking to add? What are the topics that are going to drive professional dba's here instead of [insert-other-site-name-here] ?
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Feb 2, 2011 at 16:54
  • @drachenstern Any questions on topic (meta.dba.stackexchange.com/questions/11/…) will serve this purpose. Feb 2, 2011 at 18:26
  • true enough. I just don't come across that many problems in my day-to-day :\ ... I've asked the ones that I know or that had troubled me in the past, that coworkers haven't already beaten all the bugs out of before me.
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Feb 2, 2011 at 18:27
  • 1
    @drachenstern Indeed, my candidate questions are often solved by a bit of reading and therefore usually don't merit being posted unless the information is particularly hard to find or difficult to understand. Feb 2, 2011 at 18:55
2

As soon as it goes public I'm planning to let my co-workers and past co-workers know about it. I also seeded a couple questions that I know they'll be interested in so I will send certain people direct links to those questions. I've also been encouraging my co-workers to post their questions that they bring up in our groups on P.SE and SO.

2
  • Have you done this yet?
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Jan 17, 2011 at 22:00
  • Yes I have sent it out to one group... will send it out to the other group this afternoon.
    – Beth Lang
    Jan 17, 2011 at 22:05
2

Before Oracle got their hands on MySQL, the list of Certified MySQL people around the world was available online. That list has since disappeared. Maybe we can try reaching out to MySQL DBAs and Developers via LinkedIn. There are at least 12 Groups dedicated to MySQL.

I know of at least one person who is excellent at MySQL and who was also on of my instructors, Morgan Tocker. He works at Percona. I'll reach out to him for any suggestions on how to get more MySQL people involved.

UPDATE 2011-08-11 10:48 EDT

I have been trying something recently as far as promotion.

Someone asked this question : Is there a way to edit the System Database Directory for DB2 to remove a database?

  • No one responded for three months (Went Tumbleweed)
  • Someone invested 100 bounty on the question recently
  • I asked a couple of viewpoint questions
  • Asker of the question responded with his solution as a comment
  • I suggested that his comment be resubmitted as an answer
  • I also suggested he get the word out to other DB2 gurus
  • He submitted, he accepted his own answer, bounty awarded
  • He commented back that he informed his DBAs

Someone asked this question : Creating partitions on a production database

From these two recent examples, I surmised that a little social engineering was possible while accepting and/or upvoting answers.

Give it a Try !!!

2
  • Not only to get more people involved, but to get him involved too ;)
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Apr 26, 2011 at 0:00
  • Nice. Good work.
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Aug 11, 2011 at 16:25
1

How do we get some MySQL experts to come on board?

Apparently there are an imbalanced few number of MySQL knowledgeable people around here compared to askers.

4
  • The ratio of unanswered questions to questions for Oracle* is about the same as for MySQL*, but they both have a worse unanswered ratio than SQL-Server*. In any case more MySQL experts would not be a bad thing. Feb 1, 2011 at 21:44
  • @Leigh Is that so? I had this gut feeling (notice unsubstantiated claims) that Oracle was pretty well represented around here. :\ ... Still. I would love some ideas on how we could draw in either group. I think it's gonna take some more corporate love, like RedGate for instance (they sponsor some tags on SO don't they, and they run OracleOverflow)
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Feb 1, 2011 at 21:57
  • 1
    I have a little good news. Baron Schwarz (dba.stackexchange.com/users/2793/baron-schwartz), who works at Percona and recently was enlisted as an Oracle ACE, is now in the DBA.SE as of August 10, 2011. Morgan Tocker (dba.stackexchange.com/users/1268/morgan-tocker), who was my instructor at a Percona Operations Day class, joined back in March. I know all Percona guys are incredibly busy men, but have deeper perspectives on MySQL than I have. If they make the time, they can add more quality to the mysql anwsers in the DBA.SE. Aug 16, 2011 at 15:54
  • Nice. Good heads up Rolando!
    – jcolebrand Mod
    Aug 16, 2011 at 16:25

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .