Event Sponsor Guidelines for Content on Linux.com

Transcription

1 Event Sponsor Guidelines for Content on Linux.com

2 Event Sponsor Articles Sponsored articles are written by Linux.com staff writers or contractors. They will focus on topics agreed upon by the sponsor, but the specific content of each article will be determined by the editor of Linux.com following established editorial guidelines. About Linux.com Sponsored Content Sponsored articles offer event sponsors access to the Linux.com audience by allowing their company to be associated with our quality editorial content. This program does not provide advertorial content (advertisements that look like standard articles). Instead, it provides the same journalistically independent content we produce as part of our normal editorial operations. Because it follows the same standards and practices as our regular content, sponsored content must be friendly, helpful, professional, respectful, interesting, informative and passionate/enthusiastic. We want the reader to walk away from it knowing that their time was well spent, and that they got value out of what they read. As such, event sponsors are encouraged to think about Linux.com as a platform you can leverage to provide early, top-of-the-funnel awareness-building of your brand and the event you are sponsoring, among a large audience of Linux and open source enthusiasts and practitioners. We provide examples below to help shape those conversations.

3 Sponsored Article Content Types Event sponsor articles fall into two categories: topical overviews and client interviews/q&as. Topical Overviews Topical overviews introduce the audience to a trend, idea, person or project. The goal of topical overviews is to help readers begin to understand a particular topic or problem set. Topical overviews are not written to introduce lists of specific products, nor are they written to describe a problem and off-handedly mention the sponsor s involvement in the space or the event. Instead, topical overviews are meant to help the reader begin to understand or describe a problem they re having, or understand the value or challenges of a particular technological trend. Some examples include: Understanding when it s time to migrate from on-premises infrastructure. Dealing with the cultural challenges of adopting DevOps practices. Security considerations for distributed organizations. Event Sponsor Q&As Sponsor Q&As provide an interview with someone from the sponsor s company. We strongly recommend the interviewee be someone a practitioner audience will identify with: CTO, CIO, technical founders Senior/principal engineers Developer/sysadmin evangelists Technical product managers. We do not recommend marketing executives or product marketing managers as interviewees. Sponsor Q&As will be held to the same standard as any other interviewee on Linux.com: We ll provide a written copy of your quotes as we plan to use them in the article, after we ve made any necessary changes for clarity and grammar. Interviewees are welcome to offer minor corrections that don t substantively change the meaning of the quote.

4 Visual Treatment of Sponsored Posts Sponsor Label Each sponsored article will have an editor s note close to the top of the article (above the lead paragraph) noting that the article is included in an event sponsorship with details on the event and a link to the event website. Example: Editor s Note: This article is paid for by Mesosphere as a Platinum-level sponsor of MesosCon, to be held Aug , 2015, and was written by Linux.com. Sponsor Footer Each sponsored article will have a block of footer text at the bottom that notes the article is sponsored by the client. Guidelines for the footer include: Brevity. The sponsor can write a description of their business. A single link. The sponsor can choose a link to include. If it s other than the client s own homepage, the link s destination must be described. Sponsors are encouraged to do more than simply link to your own site. Learn more at Boxly.com won t be compelling to readers. A link to a case study, live demo, or webinar might be. Example #1 (Simple Link to Homepage) This article was sponsored by TuxStor, which provides storage solutions to small and medium enterprises. Example #2 (Link to client-selected content) This article was sponsored by TuxStor, which provides storage solutions to small and medium enterprises. Download a demo of TuxStor s new StorPanel enterprise storage console. Example #3 (Link to client-selected content) This article was sponsored by TuxStor. Read about how TuxStor helped three small enterprises scale their storage operations and save on data migration costs.

5 Content Review Since content prepared for event sponsors follows Linux.com editorial standards and practices, we must politely decline sponsor requests to review final content outside the context of verifying quotes. During the planning phase of the event, after contracts are finalized, an editorial lead will meet with a sponsor representative to discuss a publication schedule, story topics, article format and other considerations. That meeting will provide a venue for the client to discuss areas of particular sensitivity that may require further discussion or investigation. Examples include: Terminology or framing outside of common usage. Companies are constantly trying to coin terms and phrases that will allow them to capture search in a saturated space. Sponsors may be reasonably concerned about sponsoring content that serves a competitor s SEM agenda. When sponsors raise concerns like this, we ll investigate and follow up, biasing in favor of common practice as we can discern them from other IT publications. Usages you don t want to be associated with. Companies will frequently use sponsored placement to associate themselves with communities that have particular sensitivities. A continuous integration vendor, for instance, may want to be seen around the DevOps space, and would be resistant to certain usages, e.g. devop as a noun for a job role.

6 Publication Schedule In order to maximize the value of event sponsorship articles for promoting an event and its sponsors, we recommend that articles publish at least two to three weeks in advance of the event date. In order to guarantee this, sponsors must settle on a topic and format for the article no later than five weeks in advance of the scheduled event. For a Q&A article, interviews with a sponsor company s chosen representative must be conducted no later than three weeks in advance of the scheduled event. After these milestones have passed, we will do our best to publish in advance but cannot guarantee it. All event sponsor articles will be published no later than one month after the event has concluded. Support Over Social Channels Linux.com maintains an automated Twitter feed for all our original content, including sponsored articles, which will go out over Twitter when published. In addition, we ll post two additional thanks to our sponsor tweets from the Linux Foundation s Event during the period the sponsor articles are running. Cross-promotion All content on Linux.com is published under a Creative Commons license. Event sponsors may alter or re-publish event sponsor articles on their own web properties with attribution to Linux.com and a link back to the original article and the license. We do, however, ask that sponsors wait 48 hours to publish it to give enough time for us to promote the article in social channels and to avoid duplicate content penalties in search engines. Example text to place at the end of an article on the sponsor s site: Mesos + DCOS: Mesosphere s Vision for the Open Cloud by Linux.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Contact sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org to secure your sponsorship today.