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Karin Wolok
Senior DevRel Consultant / Project Elevate
Karin is the founder of Project Elevate, a DevRel consulting company. With a decade of experience in community programming, advocacy, and developer relations, Karin has built thriving communities that drive growth and engagement for companies across various industries. As Head of Developer Community at StarTree, Karin played a key role in bringing the company from 0-1 in developer engagement, marketing, community programs, recruiting, and culture development. She also led the community at Neo4j, where she built a thriving community that became one of the unique selling points of the product. Karin has also worked on campaigns for renowned organizations and individuals such as Eminem, Live Nation, Re/Max (real estate), Novartis (pharma), Data Council, and more. With her passion for elevating communities and driving growth, Karin is dedicated to helping companies achieve their DevRel goals through Project Elevate.
Presentations
Marketing is essential for effective Developer Relations programs, but many developers view it with skepticism and suspicion. They feel that it is manipulative and insincere. This talk is designed to help DevRel professionals understand how to approach marketing with integrity, emphasizing genuine connections and mutual respect. Karin will share practical strategies for building trust with developers, promoting products and services in an ethical way, and measuring the impact of marketing efforts in meaningful, transparent ways. Attendees will learn how to create strong, authentic DevRel programs that prioritize the values of their developer communities.
In the open source data space, having a friendly and engaged community behind your product is almost table stakes today. But encouraging those community members to advocate for the product is a challenge on its own. People arent going to promote something just because theyve been asked to do so, they need to feel a deep affinity for it. If the community becomes part of their identity and who they are, it will be hard to stop them spreading the word!
For the last decade, Karin has been building programs that turn the most engaged users into advocates, building healthy communities for companies like Neo4j, a graph database community, and then at StarTree, a real-time analytics platform.
In this talk, Karin will cover strategies and tactics on how to build a program to encourage your users to advocate and how to do it at scale. She draws on her time working with artists such as Eminem to share the things that have worked (and those that havent!) and offers key takeaways that you can use to build your own community of advocates.
Are you looking to build a community of passionate advocates who can help promote your brand, products, and services? If so, a community champion program could be the answer. But where do you start?
In this workshop, you'll learn how to create and manage a successful community champion program that can help you build a thriving and engaged community. We'll cover topics such as identifying the right candidates, setting program goals and incentives, providing training and support, measuring program success, and more.
By the end of this workshop, you'll have the tools and knowledge to start your own program and take your community to the next level.