Social Media Round-Up

How many blogs do you read on a regular basis? How involved are you with your community? Do you get involved in conversations on topics of interest to you and possibly important for your enterprise? When it comes to the NonStop community, most everyone involved with NonStop has taken some time out to read one post, discussion or commentary at some point in time. Even if it is just to reassure oneself that yes, the NonStop community is still active and still engaging its members! Point is, things are moving so fast of late that simply thinking that all you need to do is to turn up at one event a year to remain informed about all that is happening is proving to be very short-sighted. Yes, you can get the news at one of the bigger events, but you may find that this turns out to be akin to drinking from a firehose.

If you happened to be present at this month’s SunTUG event and listened to the NonStop presentations on new systems, progress made on virtualized NonStop and then blockchain on NonStop while this was the first time you had heard about any of this then your competitors and fellow IT professionals were already at least a year ahead of you! It is not going to slow down anytime soon – HPE is making sure NonStop remains an integral part of the product portfolio it is transforming to better meet the needs of IT, the Edge and Cloud … that’s right, NonStop is no longer a technology island or a niche solution. We now have a very new NonStop! It is no longer the best-kept-secret and where are we hearing about all of this, about the new NonStop? On social media, of course!

There is a reason why HPE funds independent bloggers appearing at HPE Discover events worldwide. There is a reason too why HPE calls these independent bloggers “influencers” and works hard to keep them informed with each new step HPE takes. Formal marketing budgets and expansive web sites only tell part of the story – social media is dynamic, interactive and oh yes, all happening in real time.

Traditional marketing channels typically don’t respond this quickly and more often than not, require executive and even board level approval before anything intended for the general public is published. Independent bloggers have short attention spans and are quick on the trigger and yes, most important of all, are totally focused on communicating the latest and greatest while it is still fresh!

“But we don’t have time to read everything that is being published these days,” is the oft-heard refrain from the harried IT professional. Well, make time! Focus on just one or two sources of social media where you see high integrity and accurate reporting. For starters, Twitter is now getting a lot more attention from HPE executives – follow @AntonioNeri_HPE  and follow #HPE_NonStop as well as my own particular favorite, #NonStopRocks! Point is, you will come to appreciate where the events focused on NonStop are happening and what people are saying about them (along with what material is being covered). And you may want to check out @HPE_Discover as well!

For me, it is still about blogging and I have been blogging about NonStop since August 2007. Yes, more than ten years and there is a number of vendor and industry blogs I support. However, this month I have complemented my own blogs – Real Time View and Buckle-Up-Travel with two brand new, very important vendor blogs.

The first blog site was on behalf of NTI, DRNET – THE FABRIC FOR HYBRID IT, and you can check it out at:

https://nti-drnet.blogspot.com/

The second blog site was on behalf of OmniPayments, and simply called OmniPayments for now. You can check out this blog by visiting:
https://omnipayments.blogspot.com/

I am calling out these specific blogs as these are both blogs I will be very actively supporting even as I begin to entice others to join me. The significance is heightened by the fact that one is focused on middleware whereas the other is clearly solutions focused. Both will be bringing to you observations about NonStop from slightly different perspectives so check them out and yes, join the conversation.

Social media is different from traditional media. It is also much more than simply having a presence on the web. A lot more! What has attracted me over the years, spending a considerable amount of time each month following links, is the freshness and oftentimes, the passion as well as the genuine desire to explain something that is associated with NonStop for the benefit of the NonStop community. This is something HPE is leaving open to the independent bloggers, the influencers, for good reason – major vendors talking about their products sometimes comes across as being hollow and far from convincing but the words of the independent blogger can carry more weight.

And that is the real reason why I believe we should all find time to read as many blogs as we can and get involved in the conversations on topics of interest. And with that, I sure hope I see something from each of you in the near term as I just know you have something important to add to the blossoming conversations on the new NonStop!
@RichardKBuckle