lestrrat

Telling people in the Perl ecosystem that YAPC::Asia 2011 is happening is a good start to let the world know about our beloved conference. Obviously people in that community are eager to hear about when the festivities are going to begin.

If your entire intention is to have fun with old pals, this is probably enough of a marketing. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I have something else in mind: I want people who have never been to a YAPC before feel the energy of our community. Yeah, so nobody can deny that we have a relatively old codebase, but just see this thriving community! I want people who don't really care what language they use to see that what kept me with Perl for over a decade.

So, what do we do? Well, neither JPA nor I have that kind of reach to people who aren't in the regular meetups. There there's only one thing to do: Go get somebody else with that reach to promote

http://gihyo.jp is a publisher responsible for "Web+DB magazine" among others, and they certainly have the reach to potential engineers who otherwise may not have heard of YAPC before. Every year we've been lucky to have them run a few articles promoting what to expect in the next YAPC ( YAPC 2009 [1, 2, 3], YAPC2010 [1, 2, 3])

Every year when these articles gets published, we have a spike in the number of tickets being sold. I guess either it's reaching to people who haven't heard of the event, or it's reminding people who have forgotten to buy their tickets. Either way, we're reaching the right audience.

Also, O'Reilly Japan has been kind enough to roll an email to its mailing list subscribers. Anything that would reach to people who otherwise wouldn't have shown up to the venue is good!