The Khronos Group: Building an Industry Blog

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With a consistent flow of content for a variety of Khronos standards, activities, and initiatives, the readership of the blog has been steadily growing and has reached over 100,000 visitors.

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Campaign Highlights

  • With over a dozen active standards in development, Khronos wanted to leverage a developer blog to share updates, tools, beginner guides, clarifications, and information about its work and events.
  • The Khronos Group Developer Blog had become dormant due to challenges sourcing, writing, and moving content forward. The group wanted to breathe new life into the blog and relaunch it so that they could better communicate with their developer community.
  • Caster created a goal and plan for the blog, including an approval process, guest blogging guidelines, and promotion plan. Caster worked with guest writers and presented ideas for the blog and drafted technical content for posts.
  • The blog is still growing, with organic views, monthly posts, and readership increasing, in addition to a growing list of contributors from within Khronos and from outside companies. The most popular blog has had over 30,000 views.

The Challenge

The Khronos Group’s PR program includes media relations and proactive pitching for stories related to its active standards, as well as news announcements, trade shows, and contributed content. When Caster started working with Khronos, the Khronos Developer Blog was a former activity that the group wanted to rejuvenate. The goal was to relaunch the blog to increase community outreach, developer relations, and news consistency and to provide an outlet for quick response to trends and issues in the media and developer community.

But a blog for a technical developer audience covering over a dozen APIs isn’t fluff content that can be farmed out to any writers. The Khronos Developer Blog requires a mix of technical contributed content from Khronos Working Group members, in addition to guest posts from other partner companies and thought leaders who use or teach with Khronos standards. To relaunch their blog, Khronos needed a consistent voice who could draft technical content, ranging from tutorials to getting starting guides, from the Khronos perspective.

Khronos

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, and neural networks on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos is responsible for bringing open standards such as Vulkan, OpenGL, and WebGL to the world. The Khronos Group and its members have created over 25 standards to date, a list that continually grows as needs for new standards arise from growing industries. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications; they are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment; and they can quicken the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

The Strategy

To bring the blog back to life with a regular cadence of posts, Caster created approval-process documents and blog-authoring guidelines that would encourage new contributors to share posts. The team also created promotional guidelines for sharing posts with the community through forums and developer blogs and on social media. Initially, Caster wrote a post for the Khronos Developer Blog to announce the consortium’s call for contributors and to post the process and guidelines for submitting a post. Caster continues to manage the flow of ideas from Khronos participants and members, tracking ideas and writing and finalizing content for the blog.

After the first six months of blog development, the team got into a groove of running the blog, and new contributors started submitting ideas and blog posts. In total, in the first nine months, over 25 blogs posted with a combination of Khronos contributors, guest posts, and Caster contributions. As the blog became more popular and more contributors became involved after a year of activity, Caster had to create a more detailed blog guideline and process document for better clarification on post requirements to maintain a quicker and more streamlined approval process to manage posts.

As the blog grew with a variety of content about different standards and Khronos activities, Caster analyzed the kinds of posts that were most successful to adjust its recommendations. The team found that technical content discussing Khronos active standards and tools was the most popular. While the first year of the blog included content about Khronos events and activities, the second year included more technical content that Caster drafted using presentations and input from Khronos members working on the standards.

Caster created an approval process, guest blogging guideless, and promotion plan

Regularly draft technical content for posts and works with guest writers

Blog continues to grow in organic views, monthly posts, and readership

The Results

Caster’s blog schedule, idea proposals, and collaboration with contributors during the drafting process moved the Khronos Developer Blog forward as a platform on which the group could communicate with developers about standards and even address crises and industry questions about the standards.

Caster continues to provide blog content ideas and drafts, but as the blog has become more popular, more Khronos members and participating companies are proposing and moving forward posts on their own. While there had previously been no incoming, proactive content from Khronos members or contributors, the blog now maintains an even cadence of news throughout the month, and Caster must actively work to manage and schedule the surplus of content.

The Khronos Developer Blog has become a venue for the group to proactively discuss and respond to media, the developer community, and industry questions surrounding its active standards and respective industries, extending the voice of the group beyond social media commentary, forum responses, and formal press announcements. For example, when Adobe announced the “end-of-life” Flash Player, Khronos standard WebGL was named as a potential successor. The Caster team quickly wrote a blog post to address the news to its community and to communicate how WebGL could be used in the application.

Engagement with the developer community is crucial for the Khronos Group, who takes the community’s feedback into consideration for its announcements and development with standards; the open blog format provides the platform for the Khronos Group to lead these discussions.

With a consistent flow of content for a variety of Khronos standards, activities, and initiatives, the readership of the blog has been steadily growing and has reached over 100,000 visitors; in fact, there is a high rate of readers new to the Khronos website who enter for the first time through the blog. The content from the Khronos Developer Blog is also being used by the Caster team in its PR program; blog posts are pitched as contributed content from Khronos and its Working Group members. Several contributed pieces from blog content have posted in top publications, including VentureBeat and CMS Wire. The blog’s growth has been 100 percent organic via the Khronos network on social media and the media coverage garnered by Caster, with no paid advertising or sponsored promotion to support it.

50%+

of blog’s readership is new customers to the Khronos site

64%

of blog-readers click on links to other pages on the Khronos site

30,000+

views on most popular blog post