Measure the Unmeasurable -- feeling good after a talk is not enough

How do you measure a success of a conference talk? The number of attendees? The amount of applause? The tweets? Gut feeling?! In this session, I’ll introduce a working approach of converting a verbal face2face interaction into a measurable activity.

At DevRelCon London 2016 I presented a handful of insights from some of the world’s best DevRel gurus . One topic they all stumbled upon is how to measure a success of a conference talk. And it’s not an easy question. Obviously, face2face activities are critical for DevRel. Speaking at a conference establishes technical authority and creates critical connections. But saying that, speaking at a conference, especially in a remote location, has to make financial sense to the company. How do you decide, should you invest in going to JavaOne or Devoxx? DockerCon or DevOps Days? RubyConf or RailsConf? In this talk, we’ll discuss different approaches to measuring a conference talk and I’ll present an approach that actually works for me, by using which, I managed to convert the main face2face interaction of DevRel into something that is measurable and comparable.

As promised at the end of my talk last year, I am back with the results of my experiment of measuring conference talks :) I’ll review the answers I got from the DevRel leaders last year, I’ll criticize the “conventional” methods of measuring, and then I’ll introduce the effective way of conversion of conference talk to a measurable web resource.