The many angles, reflections and points of interest coming from social media

The CUBE, just outside Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof

Let’s be honest. Miss hardcopy versions of your favorite HPE NonStop publication? Sad to see The Connection is now a digital only publication? So too is NonStop Insider? Remember the days when you looked forward to NonStop specific magazines arriving in the mail? And didn’t we all look forward to receiving the latest issue of the Tandem Journal? Followed latter by the Tandem Systems Review! If we are honest then I suspect most of us still have positive feelings about holding hard copy in our hands and using time otherwise wasted on an airline flight to pour through all the articles.

After spending almost the entirety of the day hunched over keyboards and peering into screens, perhaps taking time to read the latest news about NonStop when it appears online is not something as compelling as it otherwise might be if it arrived in the form of a real-world magazine. On the other hand, few publications are finding it profitable to print and then mail any magazine and I, for one, fear the days of retrieving any magazine from the mail box are dwindling rapidly. As with any endeavor, the move to a digital format is here to stay and there’s no possibility of magazines in printed form making a comeback.

Social media has its nay-sayers and is often put down on the basis of being all consuming and time-wasting. Misleading headings in bubbles that pop-up, overwriting the App title. However, with the right approach, there is an immediacy that is unmatched by any other medium. All it takes is a judicious approach to who and what we follow. Hopefully, we are all tracking whatever is written about NonStop and that we limit the number of rabbit holes we dive into.

Then again, the upside of the digital format is that it can be readily incorporated into online commentaries and posts and disseminated across many more channels that otherwise would have been possible. We may call it social media and the many avenues open to writers and bloggers to which we may reference as social media channels, but the end result is that whether intentionally or simply by accident, we will run across something topical no matter our channel preference.

I may not want to take out my laptop, tablet or smartphone and begin scanning channels while enjoying my first coffee of the day but I do it anyway. Curiosity? Did my “like” gain additional support from the community? How many impressions have there been for my latest post. Today? The past week or month? What signifies a post going viral among a community measured in only the low thousands – is it 100? 500? 1,000 or 2,000 plus? Am I adding to the knowledge of the community or simply providing a temporary distraction?

For the NonStop community there has been an ongoing desire to read positive commentaries about NonStop. With this in mind, it is a simple jump to where we realize that the only positive commentaries appear in social media channels some of which provide links back to other digital publications including The Connection, Connect Converge, NonStop Insider and more. There are numerous blogs being maintained by vendors that are likewise reference in social media channels. As someone who maintains two blogs, readership varies widely based on theme but all the same, it continues to surprise all bloggers focused on NonStop just how much interest there is in all forms of social media communication.

This past month, I elected to provide updates on the latest RUG events – covering both OzTUG events, Sydney and Melbourne, and more recently, the E-GTUG conference – solely on LinkedIn with a sprinkling of promotional tweets to X. The readership climbed almost geometrically the more I posted where numerous posts gained more than 1,000 impressions. The catalyst for wider readership came back to one simple item – include a photo of one or more members of the NonStop community who we recognize!

There will be occasions where readers ask us to slow down and to reduce the frequency of posts given the time that they can devote to reading them. Yes, there have been occasions where I was simply but politely informed that I was writing more than they could read. However, the point remains. The HPE NonStop team is hard pressed to get information about NonStop published in a timely manner and for two reasons.

Their resources to write posts are few and far between and the review cycles (something I know firsthand) can take months. Posts by the greater NonStop community may not always be right and that fear of the perfect being the enemy of the good is paid little heed, but simply having a steady stream of information focused on NonStop is the real end game for our collective presence on social media channels.

If as yet you or your company haven’t embarked on a program of simple communications via social media then let this be your note of encouragement to do so. Ultimately, we have no idea where our musings end up but the fact that there are many of them adds weight to the validity of NonStop. The media teams at NTI, IR, Striim, ETI, Gravic, Xypro, comforte and more are good examples of what a sustained presence on social media can achieve. At a minimum, we know with a certainty which RUG events these companies will sponsor or will be attending. But there is always room for more – and yes, cross referencing and liking each other’s posts only goes to widen the net with respect to readership and touchpoints that take place.

The choice of photo used to best illustrate this article is of the Cube, Berlin. To quote the promo the “Cube Berlin, an office complex that controls itself via artificial intelligence, opened in early 2020.”  However, for me as a writer, it is also an illustration that even the most mundane of structure (and in this case, there’s nothing mundane about the Cube), as you move your stance you will see something different. And isn’t this why we like to read as much as possible about NonStop?

Magazines we can carry with us are no longer, and for reasons already covered. And magazines in the traditional form will not be making a comeback any time soon.  Expensive options as they were meant that few of them existed. However, that has all changed with the advent of social media and isn’t that a good thing? Knowing that NonStop attracts many commentators, thinkers and influencers has to be a good thing, right? So, when next can we see something from you and when that first post, commentary or article is published, let us all know as your views will always be important to us.

Wishing you all the very best in this regard,

Richard Buckle
Chief Story Teller, Pyalla Technologies, LLC.
rkbuckle@gmail.com