Social Media Round-Up

How much social media do we consume? How many blogs do we read on a regular basis? Who do we follow or, better still, what do we follow? Finally, as hands everywhere are being thrown up into the air, who has time to check out all that is being posted? These and many more questions concerning social media are legitimate, but all the same, in as fast an evolving landscape we find ourselves these days setting aside a portion of a week to go browse what is being said about our favorite topic (and in this case, I will assume it’s HPE NonStop), remains an important aspect for any IT professional looking to stay current.

It is therefore with reluctance that I have to say what I found on the HPE web site concerning NonStop left me just a little depressed. Have you been to the HPE Community site – https://community.hpe.com/  and searched just on NonStop? The index that is returned features old material as well as information not even relevant for the NonStop community. Dig a little deeper into the HPE web site, entering via the NonStop Servers pages – “NonStop Servers – have questions about NonStop servers installation, usage, maintenance and upgrades?” and again you are passed to the HPE Community site but this time to a different page – https://community.hpe.com/t5/NonStop-Servers/bd-p/nonstop#.XR5gmetKjIU In other words, no matter the approach taken it is difficult to find anything even closely related to the NonStop systems we discuss today. If you have better success and can point to me to pages on HPE web site featuring everything I need to know about NonStop X or virtualized NonStop, let me know!

Social media channels can only attract followers if the channel is supported and regularly updated. Many vendors have gone down this path with the best of intentions but after only a handful of posts quietly redirect followers’ attention to other pages on their web site. More often than not, when you search a site you will come across multiple attempts to launch social media channels with the understanding that in time they will become a direct conduit to their customers and as such, prove to be an important element in understanding future business needs as well as provide persuasive arguments about this or that feature being included in a future release of a product.

So what is working? Following HPE Discover 2019, it may surprise readers to know that even HPE’ CEO Antonio Neri has turned to twitter. The proliferation of hashtags can be seen almost immediately and determining which hashtag to follow will be a challenge. And yet, starting out by following a particular handle – say @HPE or perhaps even @RichardKBuckle soon alerts to which hashtags posts are being grouped under. You will have read in numerous places where at this year’s HPE Discover it was a case of following @HPE_Discover along with #HPEDiscover and #HPEinfluencer will highlight popular topics as well as identify those who are tweeting regularly.

At HPE Discover there were a number of large video screens that kept scrolling details about the last posts to social media channels – and yes, HPE was tracking twitter. As you can see, not only does this indicate how active the blogging community was but it fueled just a little more competitiveness among the bloggers. There were also photos being captured continuously and there was a team printing miniature snapshots and then arranging on a giant participation a picture depicting a lake – yes a Greenlake – superimposed behind the ubiquitous HPE green rectangle logo. Again, fueling just a little more competitiveness among the bloggers! Of course, close up, it just looked like a big photo scrap book but from a distance, it was far more impressive and proved to be a major drawcard pulling attendees onto the Greenlake stand.

However, it’s not all bad news when it comes to HPE and social media. There are lists of active blog sites with material on NonStop tucked away in a few of them. Should your tastes extend to bigger IT topics like cloud, edge, virtual machines, containers, consumption models, etc. there are a lot of active blog posts providing a lot of “pro vs con” arguments. Of course, LinkedIn remains one place where you can find information about HPE and NonStop but it has become more a place to promote what has been written elsewhere and for many people, LinkedIn remains the primary vehicle for them to hear news as it happens. Did you see all the responses generated when HPE CEO Antonio Neri told everyone at HPE Discover that the next big thing (from HPE) will be Cloudless?

To see all the topics being covered actively by blogs, take a look at this:

As for the ongoing debate over the significance of Cloudless, it was left to one HPE blogger to clear the air for many of us –

The cloud goes ‘cloudless’
Curt Hopkins
Staff writer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

And where did I see references to this article? On twitter of course … and don’t you like the explanation: “Serverless doesn’t dispense with servers but just makes the orchestration of them go away, Cloudless Computing doesn’t make clouds go away.”

My suggestion to those who just don’t have time to devote to social media pursuits select a handle or two to search on Twitter and see if you are able to keep up with the news related to just these handles. This may be your 5 minutes over coffee in the morning before you face mounting tasks of your day – you may get to like your 5 minutes of daily education. And just as importantly, you may catch something brewing other than coffee that could influence what you do for the rest of your day!

Thank you.

@RichardKBuckle
#HPEblogger
#NonStopRocks
#Fools4NonStop