October 1, 2013

Supporting #vBrownBag

If you are a community member and would like to contribute to vBrownBag by presenting a session we’d love to hear from you, we even have a web page for you to sign up.

If you are a company and would like to engage more with the community then we have a number of options for you.We love our sponsors because without them much less vBrownBag would be possible. There are three main way to support vBrownBag, sponsor an ad on the web site, have us create a sponsored podcast showcasing your product or support the vBrownBag TechTalks at a conference .

vBrownBag web site sponsorship

Down the right side of the vBrownBag site we have space for logo ads with links to your web site. Spaces here are sold on an annual basis, although the logo and link can be changed during the year. The web site receives around 15,000 unique visitors per month (as of September 2013), that’s a lot of exposure to people who are actively improving their IT infrastructure knowledge. The ads on the web site are a nice simple way to get your brand in front of lots of community engaged people.

vBrownBag sponsored podcast

A sponsored podcast is an opportunity to expose your product to the vBrownBag audience, it’s not so much a marketing platform as a review of your product by the vBrownBag team that is then broadcast to the vBrownBag audience.  We expect that the presentation would be technically oriented with the marketing side limited to the elevator pitch segment at the front. The Crew will ask questions to move discussion along but also to expose use cases and any issues they have with the product, i.e. to maintain our credibility we won’t hold back from the hard questions or praise.

The general structure we follow is:
  1. Introductions – 5 minutes
  2. Elevator pitch, what is the solution and what is it great for – 10 minutes
  3. Technical architecture, what is inside the product, how does it work– 20 minutes
  4. Implementation, What does it take to get the product into operation – 10 minutes
  5. Wrap up, where can people get more information, thank you – 5 minutes

To get the best understanding of the product the vBrownBag crew will want to go through this twice with you, once so they can understand the message and consider questions.  This also give you a chance to fine tune what you want to talk about.  The second time through will be the recording, which will then be published. Be aware that we hate post processing and don’t edit after the recording unless there is no way to avoid it. The podcast goes in the main vBrownBag feed which receives around 15,000 episode downloads per month with the most downloaded single episode having received over 11,000 downloads.

vBrownBag TechTalk sponsorship

Our TechTalks are ten-minute presentations by community members at an industry conference. They originated with our friends sessions not being accepted for the main conference catalog. We know we want to learn from the community so we arranged an alternative forum. TechTalks are limited to ten minutes; they deliver the very core of an idea. Keeping presentations short also means we can do a lot of sessions in a day. TechTalks are delivered to a small live audience at the conference and then posted to YouTube. We like to live stream the video from the conference, you know what conference Internet is like so there are no guarantees of streaming.

The sponsorship opportunity is twofold, branding on the videos and a double length session of your own. Each video has an introductory and closing graphic, this is branded with a sponsor logo as well as the event and presenter details. The double length session is an opportunity to address the community through the TechTalks. We combine two slots into a 25-minute presentation for the sponsor. While we don’t want any editorial control over your sponsor session we do recommend technical content rather than marketing. Send an engineer to talk about something they love, which is what makes the TechTalks special. Since your engineer’s time is in high demand at the conference you may want to pre-record a segment and let us have the video before the event.

To get started with any of these activities get in touch with alastair@vBrownBag.com

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