Sometimes Good Things Come to an End

Something you don’t think about it until you have to do it - when shutting down a business, or a group, or a product, marketing is the last person out the door to turn off the lights. I recently experienced this first hand as I was part of a team that was let go.

I joined this team to help build their online community, manage their online presence, manage their social media and engage with the community, and execute the event plans for a couple of large upcoming events. They were doing work in open source, containers, and storage. This gave me an opportunity to expand outside High Performance Computing (HPC) and big data where I have been focused for the majority of my career. Here come containers and open source! New technology! There is a lot of similarity between HPC and the open source and container ecosystem but I quickly learned that how you work and communicate in the open source community is quite different.

My role was to create the end-to-end and integrated communication plan to support the team’s activities for a highly visible presence in the community. This included all social media, email communications, newsletter, blogs, web, graphics, and branding compliance for outbound communications for global open source projects.

This team was great! We did 12 events together. Together we published over 60 blogs and sent out over 40 newsletters. I wrote over a thousand tweets that were a combination of sharing community content, engaging with the community, the team blogs, and tweeting at events. We did marketing strategy sessions were we worked hard looking at our strategy and comparing it with stats and results, then creating the plan for our upcoming half of the year. We built community around us and the ideas and excitement we generated was so much fun.

The Marketing team had to get out the final communications - a blog, newsletter, and tweet. For 4 days we worked on the content, refining it to deliver the message we felt was right.

It was time to publish. Load up the content, test, test again. Then, it’s time to hit the publish / send button. When you are a part of something that was so good, fun, innovative, and accomplished, you just don’t want to see it end. But here I am, pushing the buttons that basically say the team as I know it is no longer. Turn out the lights and move on.

Buttons pressed.

About Kim: I was outbound communications manager for {code}. In my (now) “free” time, I will be skiing, snowshoeing with the dogs, and working towards next steps. I writes frequently on marketing, life, the world, and how they sometimes all come together.