Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools

I've been sitting on this mind map for quite some time now but never got around to properly documenting my thoughts. Chances are that it will never happen so I'll put it up for grabs. The mind map is huge. In an ideal world, a new release would be supported by a whole team pushing buttons on all sorts of social networks. The world is unfortunately rarely ideal, so the team will have to prioritize depending on its size, audience and preference. The good news is that it will work just fine. This is a humongous amount of work that will pay off nicely if done right but you certainly don't want to plan with all of this for a patch release. [caption id="attachment_353" align="aligncenter" width="440" caption="Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools (click for full size)"]

[/caption] The social networking sites mentioned can of course be exchanged with sites that best meet your needs and your audience. An important part of every release is obviously the announcement itself. Preparing and writing a release announcement - depending on the size of the project and the number of people involved - warrants a mind map of its own. However, some of the tasks outlined here overlap with preparations for the announcement. Coordination does make sense, as usual. You can download the original XMind file here. If you're looking for some best practices, check out this document written for the KDE 4.2 release.