My VMware blogs — Insights into Cloud Ops
Businesses and individuals alike have realized the power of blogging. From thought leadership to lead generation, blogging offers benefits aplenty to those creating the content.
Topics and styles of blogs vary widely. While some focus on personal thoughts and musings, others like the ones I kept up while at Cisco and VMWare focus more on a particular field or profession. There are news blogs, fashion blogs, sports blogs, work blogs and everything in between.
As I mentioned previously, the blogs that I wrote while at Cisco and VMWare were corporate blogs focusing on professional advice and experiences. At Cisco I learned how to develop a blogger voice and to focus on thought leadership, whereas at VMware I focused that voice on integration partner content announcements and VMware integrations.
In today’s post, I want to elaborate on the context of my VMWare articles and present some insights that stood out to me.
Cloud Operations and Correlation
The majority of the pieces of content I created while at VMware were announcements of partner integrations. When you are operating a cloud, the IT department needs to be aware of and manage any performance issues that arise. Key to this is the correlation of performance and availability of the virtualization layer and the physical infrastructure of computers, network and storage that is actually the physical world.
Additionally, you need to correlate the application performance to all of this. This analysis up and down the “stack” is key to determining reactive health and to provide proactive insights into how corporate applications are performing.
Most Popular Blogs — Why?
Providing visibility in the market to the VMware partners was a key drive to my articles on integrations. Interestingly enough, the most popular blogs were on integrations in the areas of storage and networking. Even more interesting, when I wrote about the up-and-coming nascent competitors and technologies, I saw increased social media traffic.
This was curious to me at first. I always expected the big players like HP, EMC and Netapp to have the most social media play, but what I found was that newer players or players challenging the big guys were getting the most play. This also showed, not surprisingly and perhaps out of necessity, that the up-and-comers used social media more extensively than the big guys.
Getting the word out on new technologies and players
In contemplating how to help a new player in a technology space build recognition, the VMware blogging experience made me aware of the value of social media and newer forms of communication. They are absolutely critical to companies.
New companies want to market their product through viral techniques, ultimately designing a user experience that does not require an enterprise sales representative. This is a challenge in a field where software is often procured through decades old evaluation processes in the corporate IT department. However, the advent of the developer and their increasing influence is changing this.
Modern marketing and sales campaigns need to take into account viral methods (how many likes/followers does my company or product need on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter?) and thought leadership assets such as white papers and blogs. Now that you can Google up any number of online reviews or recommendations of products, this is so important, even more so for new IT software products. Thought leadership, as well as providing a framework for your customers to relate to your product and value proposition can often define your success. Look at my last blog at VMware or my last blog at Cisco to get a feel for how to engage your customers and prospects.
Originally published at fromchemistrytoclouds.com on March 29, 2016.
