I get a number of folks emailing me about their API and API-focused services. When I have the bandwidth I spend time in my inbox and respond to these emails. To help me do this a little more efficiently (I'm not always very quick about it), I'm formalizing some snippets I can use in my response(s). I want to thank them for reaching out, while also helping them understand my approach to successfully operating API Evangelist.
Here is one basic email I crafted today, in response to a pretty slick API provider that I will be writing about shortly:
Hi There,
I received your email. Thanks for the kind words. Appreciate you introducing me to your [API / API related service]. I'm going to have to pass on the posting of the [guest post, infographic, white paper, case study, etc] to apievangelist.com, but I'm happy to keep an eye on what you are up to as part of my regular work.
I visited your site and see that you have a blog (with feed), Twitter, and a Github account. These are the channels I’ll be keeping an eye on, and when you post a blog post or press release, Tweet something out, or I see a Github repo or commit of interest, I'll definitely include in my research, and craft a story for the blog.
I have also added your company, blog, feed, twitter, and Github accounts to my monitoring system. Keep on doing interesting things with APIs and I'll make sure it becomes part of my storytelling in the space.
So far, and reviewing your web site and developer, your API efforts [looked pretty polished / could use some work / is not very modern] I’ll keep digging around and publish anything interesting that I find.
Thanks!
Kin Lane
@kinlane
This is a basic template I will use moving forward. I'll tweak it some for each response, but ultimately I am trying to keep thing consistent with folks who are emailing with me. I'm not trying to be less personal with folks, but as I work to scale API Evangelist, and keep things operating as smoothly as they have been since I returned, I need to automate things a bit.
This approach also helps encourage API providers to standardize how they interface with the world and helps underline that having a blog, feed, Twitter, and Github accounts makes sense in 2016. I can pay attention to more companies this way, and companies should be able to more successfully communicate with their developers, the general public, and analysts like me with this approach
