jonathan nguyen

few posts ago i wrote about my experiences tweeting about drupal and then having the drupal redesign guys start to follow my tweets.

well, i was immensely impressed with the proactiveness of this approach and i reached out to the team to find out more about the project.

for those of you who don’t already know, drupal.org is an open source content management engine. in some respects it is in competition to wordpress but the feeling i get is that it really is in a slightly different market. drupal boasts some impressive community users including the people behind the internet, icann.

as an open-source project it is community driven and does not leverage funding in a commercial sense. so i was curious as to how they staffed this social media project.

i reached out to @drupalredesign on twitter and asked to interview them. i got a response the next day.

after a few emails i was able to get a clearer picture on how the they are running their communications efforts.

i have included the q & a below.

the interview

do you guys have commercial backing?
from twitter? no, we are simply using the search function to view all tweets that include the word ‘drupal’.

where did the idea come from to leverage twitter as an ideas feed?
this was leisa’s idea. leisa is a ux researcher and ia strategist who has joined us for the duration of the project. leisa also regularly speaks and writes on twitter and ambient intimacy

do you run scripts to monitor for keywords?
we haven’t automated the process at all (except for automatically adding people back who join our twitter group). we use search.twitter.com to monitor mentions of drupal

has the campaign been effective for you?

i suppose the answer to that depends on what context you monitor effectiveness. In terms of raising awareness of the redesign project, then yes, most definitely it has been effective … a good example is the fact that you asked us for an interview.

it also means that we can reach out to a large pool of drupal users all at once, pointing them to the blogs where they can leave detailed comments if they so wish.

how many hours a day does it take to monitor the feedback?

i keep the search window open all day in the background. then i dip in and out of it throughout the day and follow anyone who’s comment about drupal interests me. it’s a process that you could spend all day looking at, refreshing the tweets and following people etc … i chose to dip in and out so some days i hardly get chance to monitor the feedback and another day i may spend up to an hour or more sifting through it.

as well as the search window, i also log into twitter as the drupal redesign group, look at our followers and follow them back if we aren’t already.

do you approach people who have said negative things to get better information?
definitely! if we didn’t then the comments/feedback would be too one sided. there is no hard and fast rule for who to follow. sometimes it is comments that have interested me, sometimes it is a random choice. an example is a tweeter who said they couldn’t understand drupal and didnt like it, so i followed them as we may be able to get more detailed info off them further down the line regarding why they dont like drupal etc.

do people respond well?

absolutely! Many users have directly messaged us saying they were glad we were following them and they were looking forward to getting involved. clearly you were impressed with it too so it seems to be pleasing people rather than annoying them. We have 398 followers as i type this and that number is increasing daily . in order to ensure we don’t annoy/offend people, we have decided not to follow everyone who includes ‘drupal’ in their tweet. a bit of selection is needed. the people we follow have mentioned drupal in their tweets so its fair to assume that they are engaged with it somewhat and therefore would be interested in the redesign process.

how many people monitor the stream?

myself and leisa.

finally, what’s your role on the team?

i work for mark boulton design as a project manager, so my core duties are to oversee the project and do all that I can to ensure it comes in on time and on budget.

what are the learnings?

you’ll have to wait for the next post for that!