Amy E. Hodler, director of graph analytics and AI programs at Neo4j and coauthor of Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark and Neo4j
Neo4j partners with O’Reilly for content marketing
Leena M. Bengani, senior director of corporate marketing at Neo4j
Graph data platform leader Neo4j has built a strong reputation in graph technologies but wanted to reach out to new adjacent audiences in the machine learning and data science spaces. The company wanted to create awareness and garner solid leads, of course, but also wanted to build a lasting category and reputation, as it has in the graph database category. Neo4j chose to work with O’Reilly because we help top tech brands drive growth through content sponsorship, engage and retain audiences through content collaborations, and build awareness by partnering for live virtual events.
Breaking into new markets
“When you think about reaching a new audience, you want to come with credibility. That’s one of the reasons why we looked at O’Reilly.”
Leena Bengani
We have an open core to our technology. We’re practitioner-centric. It’s really important to us that our technology is deployed for meaningful change. So we’re not big on grand gestures and instead prefer an approach with more substance that really provides our target audience with a valuable experience. What matters when you’re building a category and a lasting business are credibility, trust, a high-quality body of knowledge, and providing a platform for subject matter experts.
How Neo4j put O’Reilly to work
With O’Reilly, you can create new content or use our existing content. Neo4j chose to grow its market and build trust with new audiences by creating the book . Although it isn’t necessary for a sponsor to provide a coauthor, the company leveraged Amy’s experience and expertise to help cement its thought leadership in this space.
Amy Hodler
O’Reilly’s content is well thought out, well researched, and vetted. We saw that a book on algorithms [would give] us a powerful foundational piece in that space with new audiences that didn’t know us from years of working with us as a developer or as an end user. We have customers who use the book in our training courses, as a personal reference, and as an educational framework to get started.
An O’Reilly publication actually lets us combine awareness and education with building a lasting category. I don’t think there are many ways of doing that.
Because the O’Reilly platform is focused on being practical, we felt we could help a lot of people learn and actually do something useful for them. And so for us, having that platform that could reach as many people as possible while being practical and useful was important to providing the most value to our community.
How’d it do?
“An O’Reilly publication actually lets us combine awareness and education with building a lasting category. I don’t think there are many ways of doing that.”
Spoiler: Neo4j is working on a new book with O’Reilly.
Amy Hodler
We see new audiences. We see really good engagement. That’s shown us that it’s done exactly what we wanted, which is to provide the graph awareness out there into a group that maybe hadn’t been thinking about it, or thinking about a platform for it, or who didn’t know us.
Another thing that we’ve been happy about is the type of engagement we’re having. I love it when we hear from a data scientist who says, “This really helped me explain what I was trying to do to my boss or to my other business unit.” They actually use the book…to interpret the technical concepts in a way that a manager can understand to bridge that gap.
It’s so exciting to see not just a lot of clicks—I mean, that’s nice—but people actually getting high value and understanding graphs better, understanding what they can do with them, and putting them to use, and then sharing their knowledge. That whole lifecycle that they can use the book for, it’s not a one-and-done. It’s not just a data sheet that you click on and you forget about. It has life.
Interested in content sponsorship? Get in touch.