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Where in the World is Samsung Developers?

Eric Cloninger

Lead, Developer Relations

Thanks to our mobile devices, we have so many ways to keep in touch with our friends and co-workers. Unfortunately, many of these apps and services have barriers that prevent us from using them. The Samsung Developers team is aware that we need to meet our audience of developers wherever they may be, so we're always looking for better ways to communicate.

NOTESerious discussion went into the headline of this story regarding whether to use is or are. We're a rather pedantic bunch when it comes to usage, so to explain--our Developer Relations organization is called Samsung Developers so I felt the singular is would be correct. One of our writers said that there are many people making up the organization and most are indeed developers, so are may be more appropriate. Further, those of you reading may be developing for Samsung platforms, so you too may be a Samsung Developer. Regardless of whether it is is or are, we are glad you are here.

The recent turmoil at one of the biggest social networks has affected how companies interact with their audiences. Fortunately, we don't rely on any single channel to deliver our message and listen to your needs, so we have many options. However, it doesn't hurt to publicize those channels so everyone knows how to find us.

Social Media

Social media is the most popular way to reach a large audience, but for two-way communication, these networks lack the tools we need to assess a problem and make sure the right team can handle it. Given the breadth of Samsung consumer products, over 95% of our DMs on social networks could be handled by using the Samsung Members app or by visiting the Samsung Electronics Support page. As such, we rarely respond to DMs on social channels unless it is truly about something for developers.

We view social channels as a way to broadcast our message, especially on timely events, but social channels are not a mechanism for us to take feedback. If a developer asks a relevant question on social media, we will guide them to our official support channels and handle the task there.

Channel	Account
Twitter	@samsung_dev
Facebook	samsungdev
LinkedIn	samsungdeveloper
Instagram	@samsung_dev

YouTube

Our team operates the channel at youtube.com/samsungdevelopers. There is a lot of content there from many sources and many years, broken down into playlists. Similarly to social media accounts, we prefer to not use YouTube as a support channel. However, we occasionally get valuable feedback from the audience and we will have some engagement in the comments.

If you watched the premiere of the Best of Galaxy Store awards on YouTube earlier this week, you might've seen us interacting with the crowd and giving shout-outs to the winners. We enjoy this real-time experience and hope to incorporate live chat into our future efforts (although, not necessarily through YouTube).

Developer Forums

We updated our developer forums in 2019 to use the popular Discourse open-source system, hosted by Discourse. Ron, our community manager, is on the forums every work day (and the occasional Saturday), making sure your questions are answered and escalating issues back to the appropriate development teams. To post a question on the forums or respond to others, you must first sign up or log in with your Samsung Account.

Official Support Channel

If you have a problem with your Samsung Seller Portal account or you suspect a bug in our SDKs or APIs, there is an official support process. Again, you must first log in with your Samsung Account and then visit the support page at developer.samsung.com/dashboard/support.

Future Channels

We want to be here for our developer audience, so we're looking for other ways to interact. Our developer evangelists have experimented with using livestreaming tools like Twitch to show live coding exercises. These were great during COVID, when we were all confined to our homes. We're looking to continue these as the opportunity arises in the future.

With the turmoil around social media, several of our team members have started to hang out on Mastodon to try to understand the culture there. If it becomes a viable alternative, we'll add our voice. We have a handle reserved, but we haven't started submitting content there.

We've been using Discord internally the last year as a way to interact with some of our gaming partners. We enjoy the interactions there and think it would be a great resource for office hours. Samsung US has it's own official Discord, so it's not exactly new territory. We haven't created a public server yet, but that's definitely one of our better options for the future.

Then, there's Reddit. Several of us are active contributors there for our personal hobbies, but we're reluctant to use it as an official brand channel. It's a great resource for cat videos and stock tips, but it's not as useful for companies to get their message across.

You Tell Us

We want to meet our audience of developers, designers, gamers, and enthusiasts where it makes the most sense. Let us know your ideas by posting in the developer forums.