Leveraging Social Media with Community and Influencers

The Internet gave us broad access to an endless supply of information (even if it might distract us and prevent us from deeply understanding topics). Mobile technology increasingly allows us to be constantly connected to the Internet, plus communities and connections. Social media, formerly known as Web 2.0, rode on the waves of new Internet and mobile technology, promising to transform business and communication. At EMC World 2014, I hosted a lively segment on theCUBE with two friends – John Troyer and Amy Lewis (2/3 of the Geek Whisperers podcast) – about social media, community and influencers. John recently ended his 9 years of running communities at VMware to launch a new venture, TechReckoning, a new place for the IT community to figure things out together. Amy manages Influencer Marketing for Cisco. When asked if we are now in a “post-social” phase, both John and Amy agreed that social media is a toolkit that can help with broader efforts such as marketing and community building, rather than a discipline that should be managed separately. We discussed that contributing to the community can come in many forms including coding, blogging or participating in online or in-person events. John proposed that people should dial things back a bit – creating less content with higher value such as long-form posts. Amy also noted that it is also important to have people who can curate information, boiling down the volume of noise into a consumable signal. Check out the full conversation below for great insights on community:

 

 

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On a personal note, it was my 12^th year attending EMC World and it was by far the busiest. It’s been a busy season for theCUBE – in addition to EMC World, I was a primary host at the Open Networking Summit, Red Hat Summit and OpenStack Summit broadcasts. On the research side, Wikibon’s definition and market forecast of Server SAN (a scale-out compute+storage architecture including solutions such as Nutanix and VMware VSAN) has received a lot of attention. The week after having Geek Whisperers on theCUBE, I interviewed Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp of The Cloudcast at OpenStack Summit – summary is that blah blah cloud still has a lot of challenges. It’s been an exciting time talking with some top industry influencers, company founders and executives across enterprise IT. As always, feedback is always welcome and thanks to everyone who shares online and in person.

UPDATE: Below is the Engineers Unplugged session: How to Introduce New Tech Topics – hosted by Amy Lewis with John Troyer and me on the whiteboard and featuring the mystical Wookiecorn!

 

Stu Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com