Thread by @QuinnyPig

Is it safe to tweet about @newrelic? The last time I tried some shitheads staged an insurrection.

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1346907555130298368?s=20

So! New Relic sponsors my stuff. (Thanks! You help keep the Duckbill Group's Spite Budget topped up, and that's profoundly appreciated.)

"You say mean things about New Relic but take their money, isn't that disingenuous?"

It would be if I wasn't exceedingly clear about this up front with all of my sponsors. Specifically "if I only say nice things about you because you pay me, nobody will listen to me."

What I sell through sponsorships is "access to the audience to pass on your message."

It's not an explicit endorsement--*but* if I believe the product is crap I will not accept the sponsorship. I'm not sponsored by Herbalife here.

I do need to believe that the product in question needs to be right for some use cases--and New Relic very much is. I've been their customer multiple times and had grievances with a lot of what they do. To their direct credit, an awful lot of those things got fixed.

You'll note that a theme of the sponsorship messages is "their pricing model isn't horrible anymore?" That's what I mean.

When @newrelic One first was released it was a clown festival. Docs were incomplete, Support wasn't up to speed, and attempting to use it was hilariously awful.

A lot of things changed. They acquired @IOpipes and FOR SOME ODD REASON their serverless story got way better.

Their model of "users can upgrade themselves but it requires an admin to downgrade?" That's bad and @newrelic should absolutely fix that. But there never used to be a free tier and there is now--that's a big shift for a company like them.

Do I love everything the company does? Of course not, don't be daft. It might surprise you to hear that @awscloud, @IBM, @NetApp, @Cisco, @comcast, and many others have also sponsored the newsletter and I'm still critical of them at times.

It's not infrequent that a sponsorship also comes with an analyst engagement (yes, I do that too). "Here's what your product does. Here's how you talk about it. Here's how the people using it actually see it. And here's the opportunity you're missing" is a general summation.

I have a laundry list of things I'd change about @newrelic. That list is smaller and more pointed than it was in 2012 when I was their customer, and again in 2015.

But if I were building something that needed APM? They're still the first tool I'd reach for out of habit. The product itself was streets ahead for its time, and it hasn't gotten *worse*.

So in summary: yes, @newrelic sponsors me, no I don't implicitly approve of everything they do, yes I think they're the right answer sometimes, and of course I think they can do better. That's the truth.

My approach doesn't work for every company, but that's okay. I can't be any more than I am.

And for the record: my Tweets are not for sale nor have they ever been.

I will now take questions.

Great question! I've explicitly started turning down sponsorships from cloud billing folks. They're (usually) not competitors, but they're seen that way. More worryingly, it leads to a conflict when I invariably disagree with parts of their approach.

https://twitter.com/scottswigart/status/1347639215731851265?s=20

I also don't ever sell sponsored blog posts. "Podcast ads," "newsletter ads," "livestream interviews," "me as a speaker at your event" are generally what's for sale. I'll consider interesting one-off projects, but we turn down more than we accept.

Only in special cases! "Donate to the Georgia elections and send me a receipt, I'll roast a company of your choice" was a fun thread and one of those exceptions.

https://twitter.com/Tbjdotllc/status/1347639422611673089?s=20

We have seven "rules of marketing" here at the Duckbill Group (I should really do a thread on them) and the fifth is "Trust is earned over years and lost in a second."

No company is likely to offer up enough sponsorship dollars to basically eviscerate my entire business.

This is... actually interesting. I don't know how many companies would go for "you will pay me, and I will try out your product in public and give honest feedback on it in a Tweet thread, good or bad" without knowing how it was going to go in advance.

https://twitter.com/Tbjdotllc/status/1347640454850887680

The truth is that (for most criticisms!) nobody sensible is going to avoid a product because I make fun of it—but they might hear about it for the first time that way and realize it solves a problem they have.

https://twitter.com/lagodabrian/status/1347642373724110848

Not going to lie, this one would feel weird. And I highlight both the good and bad, so it would be… counterproductive in most cases.

https://twitter.com/nm_johnson/status/1347642560618000385