In RedHat Summit 2019, Tim Yeaton, Chief Marketing Officer of RedHat, unveiled the new RedHat logo. The logo itself was developed with the help of the open-source community. The team sourced feedback and suggestions over an year to make sure they literally live by the open source code. This rigor and commitment to support the open-source community also reflects in RedHat’s content strategy as well.
Before we deep dive into RedHat’s Content Strategy, it is essential to understand how the company came into existence and the tremendous contribution it has made to the open-source community.
The Open-Source Revolution & RedHat
RedHat, pioneered the original open-source business model. RedHat gives the open-source software for free but charges a support fee for maintenance, support, and installation. For a considerable part of the first two decades after the company started in 1993 it was written off industry experts. When analysts compared the market cap and revenue of RedHat in 2014 with brands like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and likes, the company started to look like a lukewarm success.
But that changed in the last decade, RedHat was acquired by IBM last year for $32 Billion (3x times its market cap from 2014). RedHat laid the foundation for the open-source community. The successful adoption of Linux and MySQL helped the second generation open-source companies to flourish. Today open-source companies see a massive adoption once the achieve a product-market fit.
A Look Inside RedHat’s Content Strategy
RedHat’s marketing team had a significant role to play in its success. We will leverage the Hub, Hero, Help model to understand RedHat’s content strategy.
RedHat’s marketing communications team is called RedHat Open Studios. Today RedHat Open Studios team has 180+ associates and operates more like an full-service internal agency with an agile approach and a laundry list of capabilities.
Besides creating marketing content, the team was also responsible for the new brand identity system developed. The team is responsible for always-on content which includes tactical content pieces like briefs, data sheets, infographics to customer success stories. The branded content that the brand develops ranks high on production quality and uses a story structure to deliver the message effectively.
OpenSource.Com
The company started its online publication Opensource.com in Jan 2010. The site was established to highlight open-source principals. RedHat originally produced the newsletter Under the Brim and Wide Open magazine. Both initiatives were later merged with OpenSource.com. Today the site averages more than 1.5 million page views and 90 articles published per month.
Creating ChRIS
RedHat collaborated with Boston Children’s Hospital on ChRIS Research Integration System and deployed it into Mass Open Cloud (MOC) on Red Hat OpenShift. The new system helps Boston Children’s Hospital to solve the challenge it had with medical image processing.
Creating ChRIS video series from RedHat highlights the story behind the collaboration and how the technology is helping the Hospital to improve patient care. The video series helps RedHat to highlight how open source platforms can help the medical industry. RedHat Open Studios believes that the series is aligned to its core theme of using open source to solve some of the global challenges.
Command Line Heroes
Command Line Heroes Podcast further grows and preserves the brand’s commitment to the open-source movement and benefits both communities and enterprises. The brand partnered with Saron Yitbarek to host the podcast. The podcast specifically targets the developer community with content that is valuable, informative and entertaining.
The podcast covers themes like the power of open source, containers, hybrid cloud computing and covers perspectives from RedHat developers across the globe. The podcast is in its second season and has already surpassed 500,000 downloads. In fact, the first season of Command Line Heroes saw a completion rate of 90% which also goes on to prove that the brand’s investment in long-form content is working. The RedHat Open Studios team is now preparing for the third season for Command Line Heroes podcast.
Open Source Stories
Open Source Stories is an original series from RedHat that showcases how open source can affect people’s daily lives. The series has already covered themes like farming of the future, healthcare and how data can help small businesses.
The project began as a documentary series to showcase exciting ways to apply open source thinking in 2015. But soon morphed into a platform that allows RedHat to share the stories of what people can accomplish when things are open. Open Patient, a video from the video series was also selected as an official entry into the Brand Film Festival, 2017.
Conclusion
RedHat content strategy reflects it’s commitment to the open source community and will continue to inspire other brands in the space. The brands continues to invest in building the open-source community with Its marketing and other related initiatives. The biggest takeaway for any brand looking to replicate RedHat’s success is to stay committed to a cause.
