From 2eb5f379784786870ef29460ba93ea2319b7ffd5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2024 06:15:55 -0400
Subject: add devrelcon talk

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>
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+---
+title: "Guerrilla event planning at larger conferences"
+date: 2024-07-20
+desc: "How to capitalism with care"
+image: talks/2024/consentual-marketing/001
+---
+
+This was a lightning talk at [DevRelCon NYC 2024](https://nyc24.devrelcon.dev/).
+
+## Video
+
+<Video path="video/2024/consentual-marketing" />
+
+## Transcript
+
+<Conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
+  This is spoken word. It is not written like I write blogposts. It is
+  reproduced here for your reading convenience. The primary output of my talks
+  are the words I speak and the slides are meant to accent them. As such, I have
+  pruned most of the slides from this transcript.
+</Conv>
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/001"
+  desc="The title slide of the talk. It shows the speaker name and the title."
+/>
+
+Hey, I'm Xe and I work for fly dot io. We put your apps into microVMs across the globe (or flat plane, we don't judge) and then let people access them from anywhere. We've recently started a DevRel team and in the process, we want to avoid this:
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/002"
+  desc="A sad table with a mild smattering of stickers."
+/>
+
+Conferences want you to have a booth, but this is what you get when you have a booth: sadness, burnout, exhaustion, and low conversion rates. So as a result, we've changed ideas:
+
+<Slide name="2024/consentual-marketing/003" desc="Make memories, not booths" />
+
+We want to make memories between people, not foster a sad booth full of people that look like they need to check out from the mortal plane for a week.
+
+Okay, okay, booths do work well in an ideal spherical world where you can have the booth staffed with like seven people so that people can rotate out in shifts. But money is expensive right now, and I work for a startup. There's gotta be a middle path between nothing and a sad booth of exhausted people, right?
+
+Today I'm gonna talk about what we've tried, what we've learned, and what we're gonna do next.
+
+### That one time we accidentally had a booth
+
+To begin, let's talk about the time we accidentally had a booth. We sponsored EpicWebConf and as a result, they gave us a booth. We wanted to support the EpicWeb community and gave them money for the sake of giving them money. Then we found out that our sponsorship gave us a booth space. Then we had one mission:
+
+Pull this off without going full capitalism.
+
+We needed to pull this off without affecting our ability to sleep at night. When you have a booth, people stop seeing your interactions as personal, everything becomes super transactional and we hate that. We want to talk to people like...people and you can't if you have the "$$$ paid shill $$$" badge around your neck.
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/008"
+  desc="A picture of our booth at EpicWebConf. It has cookies, flowers, and a lovely tablecloth."
+/>
+
+So we set up cookies and flowers, then just hung out and passed out some spare hoodies from another event. We wanted to just feed people, make them happy, give them a fit, and send them on their way to do whatever it is.
+
+We have three rules for this:
+
+1. Make people happy.
+2. Make people look nice.
+3. There is no rule three.
+
+### The speakeasy strat
+
+In the process we've come up with something we call the speakeasy strat. We did this at KubeCon EU. We didn't have a table, we had a party:
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/011"
+  desc="A bunch of nerds having conversations about the cloud in a speakeasy."
+/>
+
+We gave out fliers about the party at the event, talked about it with people when we saw them, and then also twate about it on whatever we're supposed to call Twitter now.
+
+We also gave out these lovely technicolor dreamcoats to everyone that showed up. As a company, we did a crazy thing and hired a human artist that does art for children's books. Annie's art is everywhere through our branding, and all over this hoodie. It's great. We also use these jackets as a carrot on a stick to get coworkers to give talks at conferences.
+
+In our testing, we found out that most of the people that showed up were from our online promotion instead of in-person evangelism. It was something like a 5:1 ratio. We also got a bunch of people from conferenceparties.com, so you may wanna post your details there when you're vibing around bigger conferences.
+
+This is a really hard balance to hit though, you wanna give people an after-party, but you don't want to disrupt the actual conference in the process. You're relying on the context and closeness to the event, but not trying to eclipse it. If you do this, you should probably sponsor the event out of respect to the organizers.
+
+### The Backpack
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/015"
+  desc="A backpack with a fly.io logo on it."
+/>
+
+My coworker Yvette also tried something recently to try and get people to talk with her about fly dot eye oh, she got one of those neat LED array backpacks.
+
+The really cool part about it is that it is programmable with whatever message we want. At the time we were trying to go hard into the GPU product, so there's a few animated looping messages about using GPUs in the cloud.
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/016"
+  desc="A Borat 'great success' meme with 'Developers relled' over it in dark souls text."
+/>
+
+This was amazingly successful. Yvette was walking around as a human billboard for the platform and had a lot of great conversations as a result. It may have been because the backpack had moving images, which probably was enough to make the developer squirrel brain go "oh, what's that? It's moving!"
+
+Not to mention, people didn't know that fully programmable backpacks existed (frankly, neither did I), so it made people want to talk a lot more than usual. As far as a $120 experiment went, that was probably one of our largest successes to date.
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/018"
+  desc="The sticker table at AI Tinkerers Ottawa."
+/>
+
+Oh, developers, they love stickers. Look at this:
+
+(Xe points to their macbook lid)
+
+I'm a developer (and I have the GitHub squars to prove it), my laptop is coated in stickers, many other high value developers love stickers too. Take advantage of this. If you have cool stickers, then people turn into free advertising. People also love exclusive stickers, so we have a fair bit of them.
+
+There's stickers per locale and we give them out for meetups and events. We give Annie (our in-house artist) inspiration and then we love the whimsical and cute stuff that ends up on the stickers. In the best case, we have a custom design for the event and people feel loved. It takes us time to make stickers for the event like that, but it pays the heck off.
+
+Not to mention, you can put custom QR codes on the back of stickers. Every sticker becomes a coupon for 50 capitalism dollars of credit. Try it! Maybe it'll work for you.
+
+### NYC Event
+
+Here's what we want to try for the future. We want to make our marketing consensual. We want people to come up to us and ask questions instead of people having to feel like we are coming to them to give them information. Yesterday we ran a solutions architecture and chill meetup in a bar.
+
+I'd love to have photos on how it went but I had to submit the slides before the event happened so I'm just gonna talk about it instead.
+
+It was pretty great! About two dozen people showed up and we all just nerded out about the cloud. I ended up meeting someone I only knew from the internet and overall a great time was had by all. We're gonna do more stuff like this in the future, but I don't know what the capitalism line impact of it was yet! It was a lot of fun though.
+
+### Conclusion
+
+TL;DR:
+
+- Your booth sucks.
+- Make memories, not booths.
+- Make people feel happy to attend by giving out exclusive stickers, use that fear of missing out to your advantage in a nontoxic way.
+- Let people come to you to find out more, don't go over to them to tell them things they don't already want to hear.
+- Developers love stickers, take advantage of that.
+
+<Slide
+  name="2024/consentual-marketing/027"
+  desc="A sad table with a mild smattering of stickers."
+/>
+
+And with that, I've been Xe Iaso, thanks for having me! I'll be around if you have questions or want stickers. Stay frosty y'all.
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