Hi – I’ve moved all of my old blogs to my domain:

http://ginaminks.com/wordpress/

Please follow me there, I won’t be updating this blog anymore. Here is the RSS feed:

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During a meeting at the Dell Storage Forum in London Hans De Leenheer, one our invited bloggers, told me something to this effect:

You are Miss Social Media. You have to make it so we are able to keep connecting. You have to make it so we can grow this community. That is your job!

My first reaction was – hey wait I can’t single-handedly build a vibrant community. I may be able to architect an environment where people can connect. I may be able to find influencers who want to connect and create a community, and I may be able to create a space online where that can happen. But I rely on those influencers to invite other members to the community, and to create relevant content that can serve as the glue that binds individuals together in a common interest and communion (see this post for more on the technical definition of community).

Why will people join a community?

People initially come to a community to fill a need for information. If it is a business-based community, the business can create some of the content that will fill the information needs of their customers. But the danger in only relying on content created by the business is that the information tends to get stale very quickly. The information offered to the community will probably be subject to the same internal processes as press releases and website content. The content will be what the business wants to project, what it wants its customers to know and believe.

Many times, content created by community members is much more current. Community members aren’t bound by corporate policy on communication.They can say it how they see it.They may be fans of the products the business creates, but they can also call out all the warts and blemishes of the products. If the community is positive, community members will offer solutions to problems they encounter. This is the type of content that people look for when they are trying to fill an information need.

If the community is being managed well, the business will interact with the content created by the community. This forces the business to create current, up-to-date content. The kind of content that fills the information needs of their customers. The kind of content that moves people from visiting because they are interested in information about the company’s products to developing an attachment to the individuals creating the content about the products (employees and other customers). It is this kind of content that facilitates the creation of community.

The cost of content

Yesterday I saw Marcia Connor tweet this from the IBM Connect conference:

There is a real cost to storing content (after all, I do work for Dell Storage!). But I think the idea behind this tweet goes even deeper than the financial cost of storing the data. For me this brings up so many questions….

Is there a way to architect things so content is always fluid? There is only so much that can be done from a technical architectural standpoint to make the data – the 1′s and 0′s fluid. How do you make the content fluid? What organizational barriers (dams?) prevent content from being in motion? How can we architect communities so that the content flows and everyone is able to extract the value from that content?

Things I’ll be pondering….but would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Today is the first day of the Dell Storage Forum in London. Yesterday lots of people started to arrive, and I was amazed at how many people wrote pre-show blog posts:

• vInfrastructure: Italian | English
• IT from Planet Zorg

Let me know if I missed your post!

Someone asked me about pictures and videos. Check out this set on the Dell Flickr page, we’re working on the updates right now.

Keep the twitter questions coming! We’ll try to get to more during the keynotes tomorrow, and we are tracking all of them.

OK, here’s what’s up tonight. We have an official sponsored Dell event at the Anchor Bankside Pub. There are buses available to take you there. This event is from 6-8.

Immediately after, there is a #storagebeers scheduled at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub on Fleet Street. From 8 – whenever. We walked it last night, and its not that bad of a walk, maybe 10 minutes (we got lost so it took us about 20 minutes). Maybe we can all meet up and leave at the same time. Who knows, maybe we can commandeer a bus to drop us off right at #storagebeers.

The event officially starts today for partners. Keep an eye on the #DellSF12 hashtag on Twitter!

Watching this recap video of the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando made me a little nostalgic. So, Just like I did for the inaugural Dell Storage Forum in Orlando last year, I thought I’d write a post with helpful hints for those of you coming to the Dell Storage Forum in London next week (as well as some tips for those of you playing from home).

Social Media

Facebook

The fabulous @AlisonAtDell will be posting all of the blog posts, videos, pictures, etc she finds to the Dell Storage Facebook Page. But don’t be shy – if you write something or take an awesome video, please feel free to post it to the wall! Also – you have “liked” us haven’t you?

Storify

Alison will also be creating a Storify page for the event, in case you just want to see the highlights of each day.

Twitter

We’ll be tweeting from the @DellSF account. If you have questions, or need info, please give us a shout! The official hashtag is #DellSF. We have a list of blogger and podcasters who will be at the event, as well as a list of event attendees. Please tweet us if we need to add you to either list.

If you are following the event remotely, try using an application like Twazzup or Tweetchat. Just remember to log in to Twitter to interact.

Bloggers

In addition to Dell Storage bloggers (including myself, Jason Boche, and Lance Boley), we have invited some of the best known bloggers in the storage world to join us at the first European Dell Storage Forum. We’ll have Martin Glassborow, Chris Evans, Nigel Poulton, Bruno Sousa, Hans Deleenheer, Barry Coombs, Greg Knierieman, Ed Saipetch, and Stephen Foskett. This crew should make for some excellent storage conversations!

Flickr

We’ll be adding pictures from the event to this set on the official Dell Flickr page. If you upload pic to Flickr (or any place else), please tag them with DellSF12 so we can find them!

Mobile-enabled site

If you are coming to the show, the mobile enabled site can be accessed via your mobile phone via http://www.eventmobi.com/dsflondon . You’ll need to log in with the email address you used to register for the event.

If you are going over from the US, you probably want to turn OFF data roaming and access this site (and all your mobile apps) via WiFi at the conference site.

Day-by-Day plan

#storagebeers + NekkidTech live recording!

Martin Glassborrow called a #storagebeers during the time folks are in town for the Dell Storage Forum. It will be Tuesday 1/10 at ‘Ye Olde Chesire Cheese’ on Fleet Street in London. Things will get started around 8 pm, and lots of us are planning to head over to visit.

Greg Knierieman and Ed Saipetch will bring the NekkidTech podcast to #storagebeers – they will be recording live from the pub. It will be good to see these guys in action!

I probably should call out that this is NOT a Dell-sponsored event. So please treat it like any other #storagebeers. It should be a great time – hope you can come round if you are in town!

Live #SANChat

January’s #SANChat will be live from #Dellsf12. It will be Wednesday, 1/11 at 5pm GMT (12 PM EST, 11 AM CST). If you are in London, we’ll gather at the Fluid Data Lounge. We’ll continue the conversation we started with Mike Davis about dedupe and compression. Remember, #SANchat is all about the technology, so its vendor neutral. Please join us! We suggest using TweetChat to keep up the conversation.

Tower of London

The Fluid Foundation celebration is Wednesday evening right after #SANchat. I’ve never been to the Tower of London, looking forward to wrapping up the week at such a cool venue.

Ok, in full disclosure, the title of this blog post is misleading. If you know me, you know I protest vigorously any time someone calls me a marketer. Hell, I did it during my yearly review. If you really know me you know that the reason I protest goes much, much deeper than the age-old techies vs. marketers holy war.

What I do for a living is not marketing.

Marketing by definition

Here is the definition for marketing by the American Marketing Association (via wikipedia):

‘Marketing is the process which creates, communicates, delivers the value to the customer, and maintains the relationship with customers. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

Marketing in practice

In practice, I’ve mostly seen marketing process that create, communicate (message), and deliver content to customers. You know, tell customers about our beautiful babies. Talk at them. Social media provides so many easy to use platforms with which to message at people, and since its web based it super easy to grab numbers on how effective a tweet or a Facebook post has been at reaching an audience.

Customers really want to be involved with the brands they buy from. That’s why if you have the resources, it’s not that hard to get tens of thousands of followers on Facebook or Twitter. But if all you do is market at these new followers, you end up with thousands of followers who ignore you because you are not giving them what they wanted – a real relationship with you.

Followers want to interact with you. On a personal basis. They can read the content of your perfectly crafted and approved tweets and Facebook posts on your website, in the emails you send them, or in the letters they get in their mailboxes from you. They don’t want another vehicle to be messaged TO, they want to communicate WITH you.

The costs of real engagement

Providing this personal engagement isn’t fast, and it involves lots of planning.  To do this right, you have to allocate budget for actual humans to do the work. You need to let these “social workers” engage with your followers. They need to build friendships.

You need to architect a plan for when your new friends are comfortable enough to tell you what they *really* think about your stuff, when they ask you why your competitor’s new thing seems better and even less expensive than the new thing you just announced, or when they reach out to you when they have issues with the stuff they bought from you. This plan will involve tapping into existing support structures, and it will involve collaborating with other departments in your organization. It may also mean training the other department about social media tools and persuading them to take on additional tasks that they may not have budgeted for.

Its about building real relationships

If you do social media correctly, you are building real relationships. With people, not with metrics. That’s what I do. I  build relationships between the storage industry and the talented people that work at Dell in the Enterprise space. I collaborate internally to build a support structure that allows internal policies to bridge and accommodate the personal relationships that are being forged.

It’s not much different than the work I did as an instructional designer and technical trainer. I had to take the technical info from engineering, compare it to what was being messaged to customers by marketing, and mix the two into something helpful for customers. People pay for training because they want someone to give them the real deal about the products they bought. What I do now isn’t much different – except the content and relationships don’t need to be funneled through training any more.

Back to my identity crisis

I know I’m not a marketer, and I know the fact that I’m not a marketer is one of the strengths I bring to whatever we are going to call what I do. My experience as an enterprise educator has prepared me for the job I’m doing now. The fact that I’m a techie helps too – I speak the language of our audience fluently. My educational background has helped too – I learned the whys and hows of the ways people fill needs for information, and have a strong background in systems evaluation and management.

So, what am I? A community builder? An architect….a manager? A new world educator? Its frustrating not to have a word to describe what I do. Its frustrating to be grouped into a profession that doesn’t really represent my profession.

It doesn’t really matter I suppose, I really like what I do and I think I’m pretty good at it. So I’ll just keep working at it. I can’t be the only person that “does” social media for a living having this crises. Anyone else out there? Any advice on how you deal with it?

The Dell Storage crew was at VMworld Copenhagen last week. I would have done my normal live blogging and tweeting, but I had technical issues. So I did things the old-fashioned way….I used a pen and the notebook included in the VMworld backpacks.

Digital recap

Fortunately  Rafael Knuth of the Dell Tech Center in Germany was there, and captured the event. Check out his blog posts (Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3). Rafeal is also behind the Dell at VMworld Copenhagen site, which ties all of our activity together in one spot.

We’ve posted pictures of the event on the Dell Storage Facebook page (please tag yourself if you are in the pictures!), and there are more on the Dell Flickr site as well. And you can always browse our Twitter stream from the event to see what the community was talking about, and maybe even connect with folks who were there.

 Event recap

The European VMworld event is a much more intimate affair than the VMWare Vegas show was. About 19K people were in Las Vegas for VMworld, there were about 7K in Copenhagen. But no one does community like VMware – John Troyer does an amazing job of connecting people and making everyone feel welcome. Even though the event was small, the community spirit was palpable.Maybe part of that is due to the incredible success of the VMUGs - they said 65K people participate in those communities. I know I enjoy the NEVMUG events (the local VMUG to which I belong), and I’m hoping to visit a couple of other VMUG events that Dell will be attending in the next few weeks.

In addition to Rafael and myself, the Dell side of the Dell Storage community was represented by Jason Boche, David Glynn, Laz Vekiarides, Luke Mahon, Ganesh Padmanabhan, Charlotte Schmidt, Christian Hasner, and Nicolai Sandager. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, please let me know if I left you off the list! And I know, some of these folks are technically Dell Virtualization people, but our communities are so entwined that I consider them part of the storage community. It was great talking in the booth about the conference, and all of the technical intricacies of supporting our customers as they embark on their virtualiztion journeys.

The external Dell Storage community was there as well. Bruno Sousa was there asking some tough questions, and of course Fabio Rapposelli was there, I saw him in the blogger’s lounge holding court with the Italian #vMafia. It was great catching up with these guys, and meeting other members of our growing community.

It was also great connecting with folks from the greater storage community as well. I attended fantastic sessions by Scott Lowe and Duncan Epping, and got to reconnect with Bas Raaymon and Simon Seagrave when I did some hands-on labs. When you’re at these events connecting with so many like-minded people it’s easy to forget how small our storage community really is.

Where will be next?

We’re not done with conferences and event this year! We’ll be at SNW Europe,  VMUGs in Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kingston ON, and Kansas City; Dell Storage User Groups in St Louis, Seattle, Denver and Indianapolis, a European road show to talk about enterprise efficiency in Stockholm, Oslo, Warsaw, Brussels, Utrecht, Paris, Zurich, Milan, and Madrid; and a Dell Storage Briefing in New England.

Whew I’m tired just typing it out! If you need info about any of the events we’ll be at, just post a comment here and we’ll get you sorted out. We’d love to connect with you.

Of course our big conference will be in London in December – the Dell Storage Forum. We’re looking forward to connecting with our European community members January 9 – 12. Registration is open right now, and you can keep up with the most recent news about the event on Facebook and Twitter. The Orlando event was amazing, so we can’t wait to connect with everyone in London. Will you be there?

Someone asked me yesterday in a meeting: how many times a day should my people be tweeting?  He has been asked to provide his team’s plan for social media. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around what that meant as far as actual deliverables to expect from his reports, and what outcomes were actually expected of his team.

So he asked me: how many times a day should my reports tweet? How often should they blog?

He admitted that he didn’t get social media, but he knew he had to include an element of social media in his planning. In all fairness, he was looking out for his team. They are already oversubscribed on the content they need to produce – technical solutions marketing materials. In his mind, he’s trying to keep from adding another time consuming task to his team’s plate.

So we had a discussion, which I think was a little frustrating to someone who wanted to come out of the meeting with a simple checklist.

How do you “do” social media?

Is it possible to make a checklist? What activities should be on that checklist?

I think many times people equate social media with a set of tools. So they may have a checkbox on a marketing plan for social media, and to them that means they will send some tweets, add a post to Facebook and maybe a LinkedIn group, and write a blog. To me, this is not “doing” social media. This is using social media tools for corporate communication.

To me, doing social media is using all of the cool social media tools to build community. If you are using social media for marketing, the beauty of social media is that you can find your audiences and interact with directly with them. You audience is already engaged, perhaps even in a community about your product, on the social media tools we commonly think of using (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, etc). You can use these tools to find your audience, to deliver content, and to invite them to a different online meeting place, etc. You can get to know them as real people, and they will trust you enough to tell you what they really think about your services and products. The interaction part is what doing social media is all about.

What is the profile of the people on your team

This team is made up of customer facing SMEs. One of the goals is to make sure their expertise is known to our customers and partners. The individuals on this team really do need a social presence, but how can we get them there when their boss is already concerned about their available bandwidth?

This was easy to explain from a thought leadership perspective. I suggested that everyone on the team become Dell SMAC certified. Then they should follow a list of thought leaders on Twitter, and see how those folks engage and use social media tools to talk about storage topics. Spending a little time listening and interacting with the storage community with the goal of becoming part of that community is what should dictate how the individuals on the team use that tool.

I also suggested thinking of ways of integrating social media tasks into the normal work flow for his team. For instance, if a new solutions paper is released, that person also should tweet the link, write a blog post, work with my team to organize a Google Plus hangout or Twitter chat, etc. There should be a predictable pattern of events that happen with every project, so that the individuals can guarantee a slow drip-feed of good content to our external communities. This should be the bare minimum of involvement from his team members, the goal would be to find a few individuals who want to do even more.

So how many times a day should I tweet?

Even though the person I was meeting with is a solutions marketer, he still didn’t like it when I said “it depends”. Since he was making a list and metrics for his team, any number I gave to appease him would have been too high (you aren’t tweeting enough) or too low (why are you tweeting so much!!). He wanted to know to recognize tweeting success. Someone else on the call said “when they are having discussions with other well-known storage SMEs on Twitter”. I said, when other people tweet questions to your team members, you will know you they are successful.

I think in the end, he decided 2 tweets a week was a good number. Sigh. I guess #FF could count for one, right?

I offered my help to mentor and hand-hold the members of his team, and to introduce them online. I also reminded him that none of this is set in stone, and I’m looking forward to working with his team and seeing what ideas everyone else has.

How would you have answered this question – how many times a day should I tweet?

I don’t know if it was Bitnorth, spending the last couple of nights communing in Barcelona with other members of the internal Dell Storage community, or the tweets coming from my friend Ed Saipetch at Monktoberfest, but I have finally decided to write this post.

Beer |  [ wine | $someOtherBeverage ] is an essential ingredient for successfully building communities.

This may seem like a radical statement, but hear me out. A few months ago, I wrote a post about the definition of a community. In that post, I outlined the sociological requirements to call a group a community:

1. Place: Territorial or place community can be seen as where people have something in common
2. Interest: In interest or ‘elective’ communities people share a common characteristic other than place
3. Communion: a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea

Those elements happen after people open up, bond, and create their places, interests, and communions that make them a community. I’m saying communal drinking is one of the catalysts to get people to open up so that the place, interest, and communion can be firmly established. According to the Social Issues Research Group, in most cultures drinking is social. Their research showed that across cultures some things remained the same:

In all cultures, the drinking-place is a special environment, a separate social world with its own customs and values

A great example of this are the #storagebeers and #vbeers events that are usually held during enterprise storage and virtualization conferences. There are rules around organizing an event: only customers can organize an event. Vendors can come along, and can pay, but it can’t be a vendor-organized event.

The events are usually live-cast via tweets, solidifying the community with rituals and vocabulary that identify members who are part of the “club”. Most of the time, people have “met” each other on Twitter, or have been reading blogs of people who promise to attend. Maybe they feel a little silly about coming to an event to meet total strangers, but coming to a pub to share a beer after work is a commonly accepted social ritual. It breaks down the barriers of entry into the boisterous storage community.

By the way when and where is #vbeers for #VMworld in Copenhagen??

Drinking-places tend to be socially integrative, egalitarian environments

I can think of a couple of examples of that demonstrate how organized tweet-ups can be environments that neutralize power and title. Chuck Hollis was at the very first #cxiparty and he visited with all of the storage twitterati who were in attendance. Certainly not expected behavior for a high profile industry executive.

At the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando, all of the Dell Storage executives were present sharing stories and with customers, partners and employees of all levels. Michael Dell himself showed up and visited with everyone as well. Not everyone had an alcoholic beverage, but that didn’t matter. It was an egalitarian environment that transcended title or choice of beverage. Listen for yourself, you can actually hear the community coming together on this Infosmack podcast.

The primary function of drinking-places is the facilitation of social bonding

Social bonding leads to communion (a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea). If you share beers with another person, you don’t start off talking about business. You talk about sports, your family, the weather, sometimes politics. Heck you may even talk about beer. You start identifying things you have in common with the person with whom you are drinking beer.

I believe in a world where we work with people who live far from us, we don’t have lots of time or many opportunities to make real bonds that lead to communion and create community. Having a beer together, finding out how similar you are to a team mate on the other side of the world, helps you remember to reach out to them more often, to be more inclusive so that a broader point of view is included in the projects you share.

For marketers, sharing beers with the broader community is critical to success. You will disagree with a competitor at some point in the future, that is a given. I’ve found that having a personal connections makes these conflicts more productive. If you can share a beer with your partners and customers, really get to know them and build community, they are going to be more receptive when you want them to listen to a message you have for them. Actually having beers together builds community, so when you market you get beyond messaging to having a conversation.

What do you think? Are you part of any communities where the small world ties are made stronger by communing at your local watering hole? What do you think about the idea of beer being a critical component to community building?

Note: This is my (almost) live blog from yesterday’s session with Andrew Corcoran & Ed Casmer.

Traditional dcs are too rigid for evolving biz needs

IT has too spend most of the $$ supporting existing infrastructure, not expanding to new techs

virtualization + automation helps w costs, CapEx limits

1.2 Trillion spent annually just to “keep the lights on” (not reinvesting, getting better/more efficient)

Check out www.dell.com/powersolutions for lots of technical information.

Dell’s efficient IT strategy: Standardized, Simplified, automated plus using tech innovation that is open, capable, and affordable
that provides greater IT efficiency. Measure so TCO can be shown back to the biz.

30 – 70% of storage is typically underutilized

Rule of thumb: 1TB can add $1million to budget

Dell’s POV on storage:
Innovation through storage virtualization/automation
Eliminate fork-lift sw license renewals
Storage fabric no longer differentiates produccts
Tiered storage recoups up to 50% of your costs

Compellent Storage Center
EQL – iSCSI with DCB support

Audience question:
EQL – FS7500 Block & File level access? what access? Either CIFS or NFS
Integrates w others EQL if the software is at the latest level
Compellent – what is min block size? 512K

Symantec products that integrate with Dell Storage:
Data Protection: Backup Exec, NetBackup
Archive & Storage optimization: Enterprise Vault, backup exec dedule & archive option,
Storage management & availablity

Note: these are my (mostly) unedited session notes. The session focused on backup best practices for virtualization. Other live blogs from VISION can be found here and here.
70-90% of backups are not restorable
Backup windows are huge
Virtualization makes these problems worse
easy to make VMs, VM sprawl etc, portable, VDI (great target for deduplication)

Majority of restore requests (80%) are individual backup restores, not an entire VM

Guest level backup – (agent on every vm) <-traditional
Image level backup – (VMFS volume) <-better way

Top 5 pain points for data growth & backup administration
Tiered storage build out
no one wants chubby primary storage
tech refresh
backup redesign
consolidation
Virtualization adoption
(via The Info Pro 2010)

Best practice 1: online data protection using integrated tools (array-based snapshots, etc)

Best practice 2: Network efficient backup & recovery using advanced disk-based backup
PC DL B2D Appliance – preloaded with Symantec software
doesn’t negate backup to tape necessary
but customers are finding they don’t need tape at all
Can handle 32 TB of deduplication pool

Best practice 3: Deduplication is key to virtualization backup
Group vms in 2 groups – Backup group every other week, with 2 weeks of incremental backups.

Avg VM size is 30 – 45G

EqualLogic protection with offhost backups
App servers write to EQL
DL B2D creates snaoshots
Data is backed up from the snapshots & deduped

Dell AIM – giving personalities to servers. Assign a persona so server can be moved around, so VMs can be moved to different servers as needed