API Evangelism Strategy: Landscape Analysis

I’m working with the Cashtie API to pull together an API evangelism strategy for the payments API. As I pull together, it seems like a great opportunity to share with you. Who knows, maybe you can use some of the elements in your own API strategy.

Next up is what I call "landscape analysis", which is about monitoring the blogs, and other social network activity of the sector(s) you are evangelizing your API within:

  • Competition Monitoring - Evaluation of regular the activity of competitors, visiting their sites, and getting to know their customers.
  • Industry Monitoring - Evaluation of relevant topics and trends of overall industry, industries that you are evangelizing within.
  • Keywords - Established a list of keywords to use when searching for topics at search engines, QA, forums, social bookmarking and social networks—this should dovetail nicely into any SEO work your doing. You are doing SEO work?
  • City and Country Targeting - Target specific markets with your evangelism. Get to know where your existing developers and target developers reside, and get local--be on the ground.
  • Social Media Monitoring - Have a solid strategy and platform for pulling relevant data from Twitter accounts, #hashtag conversations, Github profiles, and other relevant platforms to use in your landscape analysis.

The "landscape", is the space you are looking at each and every day out your virtual window, as well as what your existing and target developers will see each day. It is your job as an evangelist or advocate to know this space well, understand all the elements of the landscape, key players, relationships, and be a contributing member to this landscape.

Lanscape analysis should be something you do every day, weaving it into your regular social media, and other online activities. Remember you aren’t targeting this landscape of companies and users, you are looking to participate in the conversation, while also bring your API resources to the table.