 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back to The Cube. This is SiliconANGLE TV's live wall-to-wall coverage of EMC World 2014 here in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. We've got three days, two stages, over 80 guests, lots of practitioners, executives, business leaders. Got a special segment I'm bringing you today, bringing on the two thirds of the Geek Whispers podcast. Those in the storage, virtualization in cloud communities know how to do two guests well. Let me introduce, it's John Troyer who's making his debut as the founder of Tech Reckoning. Thanks for having me, Sue. And we've got Amy Lewis, influence marketing from Cisco. Amy's your first time on The Cube, so welcome to the program. Thank you, Sue, for having me on. All right, so guys, we've been to a lot of conferences. We've hung out with the various influencers, the bloggers, it's changed a lot. This is my 12th year coming to EMC World. If you had told me 12 years ago some of the things I'd be doing at this show, I wouldn't have believed you. I mean, I was one of the guys in a polo that only got out of the office once a year to be able to give a presentation and talk to some people about some cool tech. And social media is one of those things that turned my career to 11. So let's have a conversation about what's going on in the industry with kind of the community influencers and everything. John, maybe you can start us off since maybe it leads into your new gig, so. Sure, sure. On one hand, things have changed. On the other hand, the same dynamics are playing out. The buying cycle has changed. The buying process has changed. Customers are looking much more to their peers and not to traditional media and analysts, marketing folks, they can't buy more ads. You can't send out more emails. So what do you do? You need to get part of the conversation. We've been saying that for five or 10 years. But it's actually happened now. The folks that were early on into the blogging space kind of turned themselves into communicators as well as technologists. Their careers have gone in all sorts of interesting places. For instance, you. But I think now that even what we can talk about is blogging dead. But I think now we're seeing social media not as a trade or a practice, but simply a tool set that we all use. So I'm seeing it's spread throughout our organization, not so much in one tiny niche right now. John, I love that point. I've been preaching for a bunch of years that this is an important skill set that you have to have. They're wonderful tools. But you've been doing community for a lot longer than social media has been around. And so it's peace. Amy, your influence marketing, what would please weigh on this? Yeah, no, I chose the title actually myself on purpose to say it's not just social media. I think social media is very important. But like John was saying, that to me is a set of tools. They're important platforms. They're important communications channels. But influencers, the people who, I've coined the term citizen analysts, they are unpaid analysts, but people are very passionate about technology and they want to write and blog and share, really engage their community. That's an important group of people. It's really a buying center and we have to find new ways to address them. So community is more important than ever. Wow, well, citizen analysts, let's poke at that first. Because some of the people, I'd say some people go to an event and they get wind and dined and they get to write about a bunch of stuff. And like, you know, you're better than journalists. You know, you do some really good stuff and sometimes it's a little bit too friendly to the people that are doing it. So, you know, where do you see the role of kind of the press, you know, the analysts and the influencer? That's a great question. I've been joking, we need to abstract the org chart. It is a complicated question, but I think the traditional press is really trained and rightfully so in giving us that neutrality. So that is still a very important role. I think the analysts are paid to analyze particular sets, et cetera. They have niche and specialty. I think the citizen analyst is interesting because they are, you don't know about the neutrality, but you do know that they are people who roll up their sleeves and really touch the technology. So that becomes a very interesting set because they really care about the technology because that could become their problem if they don't, you know, raise their voice and sort of engage with the technology and let the community know what the new trends are, what they need and what the business needs are, et cetera. It gives us a really applied version of both the PR and the AR side. Doug, do you want to comment on that or? No, I just, I mean, these are the folks that they lose their jobs if they pick the wrong technology. So they have much more, their discussions have it, they have some more skin in the game, why don't we say that? Yeah, that's right. If you've got the practitioner, you know, whether it be the end user or sometimes it's the, you know, channel guy that do that, that's good. You know, what about the people inside the corporations that are, you know, also using these tools? I'm super bullish about the use of employees as advocates and evangelists in our community, both for technical education and for the commercial part of our conversation. In the enterprise space, we don't sell solutions with a brochure. Here, here's a brochure, a very nice call, you know, give me a call. We sell it with relationships and with people. I've been working on the social media since it existed, I suppose. And what we've seen over and over again is the social channels are really great for getting the word out, but without that personal component, it's like just handing out brochures. So you need your employees out there, you need your employees talking to folks, you need your employees out there representing your brand, just like they would at an event. And I've seen that at some time, on one hand, it's something that's so trivial that we all agree it's true, but on the other hand, I think a lot of people are just realizing that now. Yeah, so John, you know, there's some of the big companies, you know, create certification programs to do some of this. There's some companies that just, you know, sign everybody up and, you know, it can be kind of an echo chamber or things like that. You know, what do you see in these days to kind of help out, you know, the community? Well, there's a lot of software and a lot of programmatic things you can do. Those may be useful in terms of organizing you. It comes down to the people and the culture of the company and how much you trust your people to go out. I think the best thing we can do is set up a platform for folks to be able to communicate. I think that's actually what Amy does really well at Cisco. Thanks. It's, I always talk about influence marketing as being people, platforms and content. And so I agree. I think that we sorted out some of the platform issues as we learned about social media and grew up with it. I think that we are still working out the people and the content side. And what's appropriate, how we can join together and do that and how we can create some new platforms, maybe using the tools of social to drive the conversation forward. All right, so Amy, I got one for you. You know, how do we balance the kind of creation of information and kind of the community and fun? I mean, you do a lot of fun events. You've got, you know, Waffle Club this week. You've got, you know, Bacon Stack and V Bacon and Bacon IT. I mean, I can't keep track. I mean, you know, Unicorns Bacon and everything. And, you know, there'd be some executives here that would be like, oh, that's that social stuff and they're playing games and things like that. So how do we balance kind of adding business value and creating, you know, value to the community and, you know, having fun and building community? No, it's a great question. A couple of years ago, I got a text in the middle of the night that said, please explain to me how V Bacon is a marketing play. Please explain this. And, you know, I need a PowerPoint slide. So if you've never had to explain V Bacon on a PowerPoint slide, I throw that challenge out to everyone. But I think in the last couple of years, people started to see it more and more as we're similar to the sales role and that's how we've sort of changed the language. So I perform a sales-like function except I don't carry a quota. So it is about building the relationship like John was saying and it is about balancing fun with your intent. So I think that if you create a fun environment, if you create an openness and a willingness to listen, then the good things will follow. So you form the relationships with people. You open up their ability to create content with you because they don't feel under attack. They're ready to share. And again, it's kind of a magical formula of be nice and create opportunity. Yeah, so go ahead. I think part of it's a generational shift. I think part of it's a generational shift and part of it is a temperamental shift. So traditionally, again, going back to sales, traditional enterprise sales, you might go out and play golf with somebody because that's what you enjoy doing. For our kind of geeks, our golf is eating bacon and talking about deduplication strategies, right? That's where we're having the most fun. So it's just a same sort of thing, just a shift in generation maybe. Yeah, I wonder what role does community help in kind of careers? I think we've talked so much of these shows about if you're a storage admin, or if you're a networking admin and you're down there configuring LUNs or setting up VLANs, you're going to be out of a job in a couple of years because automation's going to change. How much does the community help in kind of those career paths in education? So John, I think we should interview Stu on this one. Should we have the Geek Whispers takeover? So I think this is, you're a great example. You've talked about, you were on a career path and we hear this a lot and when you raise your hand to volunteer, we sort of jokingly call these folks unicorns who both really enjoy the technology and like to communicate about it. When you raise your hand and make yourself known to the community, to your employers, to the world at large, it gives you different opportunities and I think, I don't think you go into technology really without wanting to have an evolving, exciting career. So I think that becoming proficient on these tools, joining your community is an opportunity to learn from your peers, to get back to your peers and to raise your profile and open yourself up to the possibility of a new opportunity or a new idea or a different engagement, a new way to learn. In today's business environment, communication is a key part of whatever you do, even if you're the guy sitting there configuring the LUNs because if you're not communicating with your teams and the application teams and the storage and network and virtualization team, you're not going to succeed. So I think that's an important part of it, right? Being a communicator, absolutely critical in our environment today. All right, so either one of you feel free to answer, but I think back to my early days. In 2008, I was so excited when I got invited to a couple of conferences as a blogger, you could kind of get a pass and I would, 10 might take my own vacation time and usually spend my own expenses because my employer at the time didn't get it. It was this innovation conference in like New York City with 400 people and it was like kind of amazing. And I've seen people go to VMworld on their own dime where they can get a pass. I mean, it's great to see when you've got the passion. So I guess the question I wanted to ask is, with companies today, who should they be inviting? How do they do it? You know, is it the blogger or is it the EMC Alexis? Go expert, VMware be expert. How's that changing or is it changing? Well, I think what you've seen happen over the years is something that was a little more unstructured, which was a kind of blogger relations program working with both customers, partners, employees in your ecosystem has turned into something a little more formal. We created the Vexpert program in 2009 to conformalize what we were already doing. It's an analogy to the analyst relations, press relations, investor relations sorts of programs. So I mean, it's a little more buttoned up. It's a little more of a membership thing, but we, I know both at EMC and VMware and at Cisco with Cisco Champions too, they try to embrace all the folks that are out there blogging. I think, you know, if you're a marketer, you need to make sure that you keep your eyes open and you don't just talk to the people that you've gathered in your living room. But, you know, it's pretty easy if you're enthusiastic about a technology, if you're engaged with the technology, if you put some effort into it, it's actually pretty easy to get involved with one of these programs. And they're there for the people in them, right? They're not there to say the glory of EMC and the glory of Cisco and the glory of VMware. They're there to help you with your career. They're there to give you tools, to give you networking, and to, you know, hopefully get you to places like this. So I encourage everybody that's interested in starting. Go ahead and get started. It's easier than you think to get involved. No, I totally agree with that. And I think that we want to be almost like an airline program that you'd actually want to participate in. It's sort of my joke. This is a customer service activity. And I often talk about, if you talk about the large pool of influencers, maybe they haven't identified yet, or maybe they prefer to stay independent, or maybe they do have interest in a lot of different technologies. So it wouldn't be for them to engage in one of these programs. Then that's still an important set of people that you have to deal with as a marketing class, you know? And again, set up these blogger days, have blogger briefings. But like John was saying, when you have the group of people that you name and give out a program name, and this is a little bit of an inside baseball like we'd like to talk about, give a program a name and funding can follow. So if you're working in a corporate marketing environment, it's really important to explain to people the marketing structure behind what you're doing. And when you treat them as a class, it gives you some advantages. You can scale out a little easier. You can provide more assets to those individuals and it frees you up to do what I love to do, which is to really engage with those individuals and create content with them, so. Yeah, so how is engagement these days? I think back, 10 years ago you talked, 1% of the community would be doing almost all the contribution. 10% might be a little active in everybody else's lurker. When we founded Wikibon, Dave Vellante actually has on his business card that he's a 1%er, which goes back to, it's the 1% that causes all the trouble. It's the 1% that causes all of the commotion. So this wave, we were founded off of economics and crowdsourcing and everything else. And theCUBE is all about sharing information. We put it all out there. We want everybody to contribute and give that feedback. How are we along that journey to get more people involved? I actually think the opportunity is there more than ever. I think you're right. There's always going to be a percentage of people who want to raise their hand in the class, that want to give up their PTO to go to a conference that have this other life. They just can't help themselves. And so in some ways it's finding the most impassioned and giving them the opportunities. But I think that with the platforms and the scale, there is a greater opportunity for people. If they don't want to start their own blog, for instance, one of the things we do at Cisco Champions is allow people to guest blog or allow them to co-host a podcast. So I think there are more and more ways to, and that's one example. There's lots of other groups that provide people, again, a little bit, a dose of it. So they might not want to run a full media company on their own. They don't want to build the queue, but they want to participate. And I think that we have so many more opportunities for them to do that, that we're seeing growth. We are seeing platform shifts over the years. I think we, as technologists and human beings, have a tendency to forget our past relatively quickly. And as people have moved from the MySpace world to the Facebook, Twitter world, I think actually we're headed for, I don't want to call it post-Facebook, but it certainly is a multi-platform world, maybe. Just like it's a multi-device world. We're not a post-PC world. In that, I think you're seeing the rise of more specialized communities. They come back again from our origins, back 10 or 20 years ago. I think we're seeing that people want more deeper engagement, a lot of the rapport building and kind of conversation and hey, how are you, it goes on on Twitter. But I think people are really looking for a place where they can have a better conversation, more interaction, more lasting depth. That might not be on their own blog, in their own kind of indie web sort of style, roll your own blog, but there are more and more platforms that people are making available for this kind of connection. Again, what was once niche, eventually permeates the whole fabric. Yes, so the concern I have is it's tough because it is so dispersed right now. I love Twitter, hi, I'm Stu, I'm Twitter, and I know you guys are big on it too, and I love the multi-platform discussion. Always loving to drop that kind of information on the community, but how do we get that depth? It's one of the things I always worry about is, people will read the headline and just react at it and they might even share it a bunch, but they haven't read it. So how do we get that deeper engagement, deeper understanding? I always say, I'm too busy is a poor excuse because Michelangelo and Einstein had as many hours in the day as we did, and sure, they didn't have their phone buzzing all over the place, but... I actually think we should do less, not more. I think too much information, too many channels, too many corporate channels, too many personal channels, too much bad content. The world does not need more crappy content. So, whether you're a individual blogger or a marketer, I'd say just turn the dial back a little bit. It's, you know, it worked on better, longer pieces that add more value. I think that's the only way that we can shift the conversation. Yeah, long form, love it, you know, absolutely. You know, I still read, so... Well, it's a curatorial function as well, that we have to be responsible, and that's yet one more way people can participate. We see people rise in the community because they're really great curators, because they syndicate the content in ways they're interesting to others, because time is of a value, so that becomes a real asset and a skill as well. Yeah, that's a great, great point, because, you know, so many times I'm like, oh, I really like to do a thousand-word post on this, but, you know, sometimes I'll come out of this show and take, you know, I did a year ago, I did an article on the EMC Federation. You know, EMCVM, we're pivotal, and coming out of the show, I've got a lot of new data, and I can really quickly take some photos I've done, take some of the notes I've taken, some of the tweets, and, you know, put together an article that won't take me as long. I mean, I'll probably do it on the plane right home. So, what I want to ask next is, you know, you guys see a lot of things out there. You know, what's the coolest thing you're seeing, either at a conference or event, or, you know, what's catching your eye? What's interesting? Hmm. John? There's a cool new site out there called TechRex. I don't know, what's cool out there? Again, I'm seeing multi-channel, multi, a lot of experiments. There's some cool stuff going on with the IndieWeb. There's, I mean, everything's mobile. I don't know, there's a lot of places in there. It sounds like you, let's give the plug on TechRec. How does TechRec.com going to help us, you know, find the cool things, and, you know, solve some of these challenges with multi-platform? TechRec.com is a site that's going to bring, it's an independent site. It's not associated with any vendor. It's going to bring some of the IT community and enterprise community together. So, talk about some of these things about where's IT going as a whole? Where's technology going? Where are our careers going? To try to help us get to whatever this, you know, IT is a service, third platform, whatever you want to call it, whatever the heck we're going. It looks pretty interesting, and it looks like IT isn't going to be quite the same thing. So, we're trying to bring together a set of people, and to tackle some of those problems, and also work together and collaborate. It's so much easier with open source, with cloud, with all the tools we have available. It's so cheap and easy to build new pieces of technology, not just to type in each other words online, but to actually build stuff that I'm very excited about the power of taking, I mean, borrowing this from open source, right? Taking the power of people to come together and build cool new stuff. That's what I would like to do. And, Stu, I'm just angry that you scooped Matt and I on getting to interview John first about tech reckoning. That's right. So, Amy, you do some cool things at some of the events we talked about, the waffle and bacon. What have you seen out there that's kind of interesting or, you know, how do you find some of the cool new ideas? Yeah, I think you always, I'm working with a really talented events team right now. And I think one of the things I've seen them sort of transform is that social is not other, you know? And we're seeing the social and this concept of community permeate and really think about our audience to really engage that core base, those tech enthusiasts, and to see what you can do to engage them. So I'm seeing it in real life and in these community platforms. So I think that's been one of the other great trends is watching people band together and various kinds of consortiums. I won't name names, but there's a few folks out in the community we're seeing a lot of this happen where they're sort of grouping together and they're seeing if they pull their resources, what happens? They might be able to gather enough money to go to a conference or to fund a buddy or to get a hotel room that they've got extra space so somebody can crash. So I'm seeing it's very cool sort of stitching together opportunity and working together to learn more. So again, that combination of the platforms using the technology and then in real life connection. All right, so I've been asking all the questions here. So before we wrap up, Amy, anything you want to watch, John, you want to ask me, John, same, we throw it open. Whenever you first signed up for your Twitter account, did you think it would lead you here? Because you have the best Twitter account ever. No, actually a friend of mine from EMC, Steve Todd, who was blogging before I was, and he said, you know, there's that trepidation when you're going to hit publish and you never know where it lead. And we were talking about this after he and I were on the stage at Radio City Music Hall right after Bill Clinton had been on because they brought the bloggers down when we were there. And it's like, come on, you know, I'm an engineer by training, you know, I've done some sales, I've done engineering, I've done operations and technologists at heart. So, you know, some of the places I've, the people I've met, I mean, if you just reach out to people, it's still, even though there's so many people on Twitter, you know, the people that write and are authors and bloggers, if you comment or you reach out to them, a lot of them will reach back. I mean, and you know, I'm still amazed at some of the people I've met and get to rub elbows with and, you know, just have how to blast with it, so. Nice. I've got another one. So, do you think unicorns can be trained? Do you think people have to be born with a skill set? Or do you think you can be a unicorn rancher? No, I think they can be trained, you know, absolutely, it's a tough skill set. I mean, you know, doing video is not easy. It's the first couple of times you do it, it's different. There's all these muscles, you know, writing was one of those things that, you know, I thought I was an okay writer, but hadn't done a lot of it, there are things you do. So, try it out and the thing I'd say is you got to stick with it for a while. I thought Twitter was pretty stupid when I first got on it. But, you know, I stuck on it for another six months and had some fun with it and, you know, here we are six years later and, you know, it's done a lot and, you know, writing and blogging and everything else, you know, all over, so. I like the muscle memory idea, but... It's hard, we're on camera. I have to remember not to scratch my face and stand up straight and all that sort of stuff. It is a skill set. I actually am seeing a lot of interest in short form video. I know the kids are all doing it. I mean, obviously we're doing it here. You do it as part of your practice, but in talking with people about our new activities, it's just so easy to take and share. I think that's actually, even though it's been coming up for years, I think that's an interesting thing. Yeah, and all right, I'll give one of those insight tips. Right, video is great. Some people don't like to watch video. Yeah, it's true. Contests are great. Some people don't like to listen to them. You know, writing is great. Some people won't read. So, you know, one of the early lessons I had is when I was, you know, being a, you know, active member on standards and evangelizing the solution, I did it everywhere. It's, you know, you give presentations at shows, you put it up on slide share, you do YouTube videos, you blog about it. You talk to everybody that you can everywhere. And, you know, it just permeates out there. So, it can be a bunch of works. And there's tools that are out there to help. Yeah, and you connect it to offline events, right? I've discovered recently, and I can't believe I just realized this, but it was with a conversation with Amy on our Geek Whispers podcast, that even though I've been part of an online group for years, I'm part of digital marketing for VMware, for years, actually most of my work, half of my work is offline. Half of my work is meeting people in person, getting to meet them and connecting that online and offline, and the synergy there is just, is immense. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, other than the keynotes, my phone stays in my pocket for the most time unless I'm going between events. It's the in real life and we're really getting to know things. I was joking. I said, you know, if Twitter went away tomorrow, I'd be a little sad, but I can connect to most of all those people. I got them on LinkedIn and Facebook and, you know, email, I still use some, so, you know. Depth to email. Oh, absolutely. So, you know, to wrap, I guess if you want to just, you know, where do people find more, find your podcast, find your website, you know, Amy, I'll let you start. Well, our geek whispers is, of course, geek-whispers.com and we publish every week, so give us a listen, see what you think. And Matthew Brender, sorry you couldn't join this time, but how odd is it? We're at EMC World and you two are here and Matthew's not, so. It's hard, but we're gonna shout out to him. It's true, we're gonna record with him, like as a max-headroom figure on a yes tomorrow, so. And also, I'm on Twitter as comms-ninja and I blog under that same comms-ninja.com, so. And you also have engineers unplugged. That's true, I have engineers-unplugged.com as well and now 60-second tech, the short version, the popcorn version. And I'm at Jay Troyer on Twitter and tech-reckoning.com. That's my new site. All right, well hey, Amy and John, thanks so much, we love taking the podcast and inception style inside the queue. Look forward to seeing you at lots of events connecting with the commuter and everybody. Definitely check out their stuff. I'm at Stu on Twitter, wikibon.org is where most of my articles go and of course siliconangle.tv is where you can find all the video. Thanks for joining us, we will be back with the rest of the EMC World coverage.