Companies have often asked me for advice when presenting a Field Day. This is a collection of advice, feedback and suggestions that I would offer should you have asked. 

Please note that this is a collection of bullet points and ideas. Its not an essay or a comprehensive overview, just opinions collected over a privileged 8 years of participation, mostly in the Network Field Day event.

Understand Your Audience

There are four distinct audiences to reach during a Tech Field Day presentation. Consider ALL of these audiences. 

1. The people in the room who are influencers 
2. The people in the room who are decision makers and key influencers for their employers
3. The people on social media and the livestream. 
4. Published Youtube / Vimeo event video (long tail)

Some tips on this:

1. You may find it confusing to address multiple audiences at the same time. I suggest focussing your content decisions on social media/influencer and event video. A really good session can engage the remote audience and amplify your presentation beyond the room.
2. The people in the room can amplify during and after the event. Think about how to engage them so that excitement will result and generate post event results. Do something interesting to get your content at the top of mind. Give me a reason to write about you (boring is as boring does)
3. Video views and engagement will drive leads and calls for months and years after the event. Unlike a conference or webinar, video and podcasts have a lasting impact with customers if they can find them. Work on cool titles for each session so people can find them and watch them (SEO-fu needed)
4. Watching video watching requires full focus of the watcher - what are you doing to be interesting, engaging and exciting ? Honestly, most of you are boring, repetitive and ... well, obvious. 

Basics

Amplification: You want the audience in the room to go nuts on social media about you and company. Consider planning a ‘bug deal’ once every 30 mins. We can’t push social media repeatedly for fear of losing the audience so you need to have something exciting. 

You can’t accurately plan this but you can try to get a reaction “can’t believe what I just saw at  from VendorA…awesome!

Stay on track: Don’t let the people in the room take you off track. Stick with your time plan and get through the content. TFD editing can fix some of this in editing so don’t get bent out of shape about it. The post-event content is MORE important.

Cautionary Notes

Because social media experts measure the wrong things:

1. Understand that people with large social media presence will share less. Oversharing or pointless content will drive away active (& most valuable) followers. Consider this, ten shared tweets to 500 followers is 90% less effective than a single shared tweet to 5000 followers because of engagement. 
2. Do not overreact. Having fireworks and fancy presentations can result in negative outcomes. Don't force it, be natural and have good speaker/presenters on your team.

Storytelling

Tips on storytelling. My tips on planning your presentation.

1. Vision: In technology,  people often think in terms of vision and 10 year strategy. We don't buy IT products from Amazon, we are taught that your product will be complicated, hard to buy, hard to understand. Tell me why its great, obvious, simple and easier to get my attention. Be careful with corporate/company vision. Stick with product vision thats relevant to me. Save the corporate vision for the sales call. (Don't tell me that you will save networking, tell me HOW you can save networking. )
2. Tell me how it integrates with my existing assets How do they get from where they are to where you want. What the issues that prevent me from adopting your product. If you have are promoting a platform, prove that your value is greater than the negative effect of lock-in.
3. The magic sauce. Present high level understanding of how your technology works (the magic sauce). Don't get into the details, if we are interested in the details then that can happen in a sales call. That will drive the lead gen. Don't answer every question, create something for inbound queries. If you tech is unusual, different or advanced 
4. Don't talk about innovation, game-changing, market leading, and other cliches. Thats childish chatter used by mindless sales grunts, VCs, bankers & executives for self-motivation. Its not for you to judge your product, thats what customers do. Don't make the mistake of confusing retail/consumer sales methodology of selling soap powder (tell em, tell em, tell em) when talking to engineers and professionals. Make it serious, make it detailed, present on a single message.
5. Talk Use Cases Talk about practical scenarios that have worked. Explain why your product fits, where it works. Practical use cases let us imagine the product as part of our sustem (Mistake: Let a customer present who doesn't talk about the use case for their business)
6. Expose Weaknesses If you have a weakness, tell us. If your product doesn't do something, tell me why not. We expect to see some weakness in your product. We will be able to see a limited use case, or detect exaggerated performance/capacity claims. Showing weakness means you are confident that your product does fit somewhere. We tend to look for weakness until we find one. This isn't Saturday morning cartoons where everything has a nice ending after 30 mins.
7. Some people in the audience aren't going to get it. Thats ok. 

Story Mechanics

A good novel has multiple stories happening at once. A primary story arc is the engine for movement and motivation, the underlying message. Each chapter has a self-contained story. Several chapters may also have minor story arcs. 

A 2 hour presentation delivered in 15-20min chapters should do the same. 

A primary goal of TFD is the published video. NO ONE WATCHES YOUTUBE FOR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES. Do not present a single story for 2 hours. People get bored, distracted by social media or their colleagues interrupt them.

Give people a reason to keep watching your video. Make me want to watch the next one. 

Design your presentation with a primary story. Then decide on secondary story arcs (messages) . Then work out what to say in 15 minute intervals.  

1. The Main Story Map out a story line to cover the time, lock down the primary message and make sure that is repeated in every session. 
2. The goal to ask questions and answer most of them. Leaving questions unanswered means that customer can contact you and you can qualify the lead. 
3. Consider exposing the warts and gotchas– you get tons of credibility by talking about something that DOESN’T work as much as something that does. It lowers their defenses and makes them feel like this isn’t just a marketing pitch. 
4. Show the vision and then carry that vision throughout the presentations. Don’t just give a simple vision piece up front and then never come back to it. Use a recurring story point to reinforce the key 
   1. Recurring Story Point: Create a fictional character and tell their story and use case. 
   2. Reminder : remind me of the vision and purpose of the product regularly. 
   3. Re-solve Problem: Solve, and re-solve the problem as we learn more about your product. 
5. Cross Link Tell the audience about the other videos you are recording. Drive engagement. Think "video hyperlink" to drive more engagement with speciality area. 
6. 15 mins per section  Take the whole day, then break down the big components, then break it down again. This translates better to how things appear on video and how much people can consume
7. Titles Drive Views. Having cool titles will drive video views post-event. Think about SEO and keywords that people can search so that Google will present the videos on youtube. 

Mechanics No-Nos

1. Not Self Contained Don't boil the ocean in 15 minutes. Going deep means less topics. Deep drives engagement, shallow more likely leads to boredom.
2. Too Many Presenters: Too many presenters is confusing. Human cognition wants 'familiar' to reassure them its safe. Rotate presenters for freshness but don't have a different person every section. Another way to say this ‘don’t change storytellers in the middle of the story’. 
3. Death by Powerpoint : Powerpoint slides don’t communicate or provide context. They don’t talk or feel nice. Don’t kill your audience with Powerpoint slides. 
4. Heavy Sales Pitching : The audience is technical and do not value heavy marketing and sales content. Save that for face-to-face customer meetings. 

Narrative Methods.

Here are some narrative methods that come to mind when constructing your story arcs for the sessions. There is a wide array of choices to structure your story narrative.

Feature Slam 

Too many features, bright shiny technology, platform play ?  Then consider the Feature Slam. 

One product, hundreds of features, great technology, too much to talk about. 

Delivering a ‘feature slam’ story that shows great feature after feature is tough but works for certain types of technologies. 

The Day Zero to Two Experience

Style your presentation using a typical sales cycle – from the upfront pitch, to where you start after you buy, to what it looks like when you are using it, and ongoing operations. Take the audience on the customer as if they were there. 

Three part storyline : 1) Why am I buying it 2) How do I deploy it 3) Whats It Look Like When I Am Using It. 

The Story Teller

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Building narrative that tells a deep, insightful story about something that the company has. 

I do not recommend this. Slow start tends to lose attention, and takes a lot of time. Remember, video means telling stories in 15 minute intervals not ‘read me to sleep’. 

Why Does the Internet Need a Programmable Forwarding Plane with Nick McKeown - YouTube

Success: Arista EOS with Ken Duda - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdJZq4dRjf4] - 20 minutes on software quality. 

Mechanics and Machines

If your product / technology is major technology transition then you may want to talk about the deep mechanics that makes this technology possible. 

Example: A Deeper Dive Into Barefoot Networks Technology with Dan Lenoski - YouTube

Whiteboard and Demo

People in IT identify with whiteboards where designs and discussions can freely, dynamically happen. Its harks to lecture halls, teachers and education. 

This requires a presenter who can make this happen with drawing skills and able to use the method. 

Success: Understanding the Cisco ACI Policy Model - YouTube with 39000 views. 

Its difficult to video a whiteboard and this is not recommended. Use brand new pens so that the cameras can pick up the writing.

The Business Units. 

Big companies have multiple business units sharing the cost of the two hour session. This isn’t a problem provided THEY RUN ON TIME. Do not let the first session run overtime AT ALL. Be ruthless. 

The Founder

We often see new companies and the founder wants to talk about their product. Seme founders are not the right people to present. Think carefully about limiting their session time. Yes, company founders are usually dull speakers. 

Touch Turn Talk

Deliver the corporate deck. Touch the screen, turn the audience and talk to them - the 20 year old method of corporate presentations. Hold your hands like so, and never turn your back on the your the audience. 

This doesn’t work well for social media. Its does work for sales calls. Do not confuse these things. 

I do not recommend doing this. 

Presentation Mechanics

Some tips on delivering your presentations.

1. Say your name and role in the company. Thats it. Nothing else. No one wants to hear your resume (unless you were an Astronaut) or someone famous. You are not the purpose for session, focus on the story. The audience doesn't care about you, they care about the technology/product/solution. Personally, I don't care who you are I just want to hear about your product/solution. 
2. Company Brief: The people in the room don't care about your company. You might care but its boring. Do the company brief in the middle once the story is started. Engineers only care about the company details after you have a product that interests us. I don't care about your funding, investors, board members until you have my attention. 
3. Get a fresh projector bulb: The light coming from a projector makes it easier to see. Projector bulbs have a life of a few hundred hours before they degrade and emit less lumens. You are supposed to replace them regularly.
4. Avoid sitting down The audience in the room can't see you when sit down and make it easier to disengage. Its necessary to sit down to do a live demo but it would be better to have a lectern to lift the computer up.  Eye contact with the audience is desirable. 
5. Speak UP so that people in the room can hear you. People will tell you when you are too loud. They can and will ignore you if you are too quiet. The video team can fix the audio levels. 
6. Be Passionate put the right people in front of the camera. Many people lose their passion in front of a powerful audience. 
7. Live Demo Double if you feel that live demo is best, then have TWO people, one person to talk the demo and another person to press buttons. Get a repartee going between them to drive attention.  
8. Check the Background the background can distract, deflect or interrupt the person watching the post-event video. Study the next movie or show you watch and consider how the background reinforces your perception of the story. e.g. its common to stand in front of a whiteboard like a classroom - its that the right "movie set" for a strategy discussion. Your average corporate boardroom is poor background for video (nice vertical blinds!)
9. Don’t stand in the light of the projector.  You’ll only end up looking like a Smurf on video because the camera cannot see your face due to over-exposure.

Demo Opinions

Demos can be powerful, shocking and visually rich. Mostly they are boring and pointless. 

1. Visual Richness: Focus on the video stream and consider what you demonstrate in a visual context. Its rare to have a platform to show the physical product, the GUI, the slick interface, the simplicity of actions. 
2. Avoid Live Demos:  Its perfectly fine to record a video and stop talk start talk through it. Prepare ahead and execute clean on the day. Reduce your workload to prepare. Your ability to setup your product is assumed. Offer to provide the video after the event via Youtube or direct download (or on a landing page)
3. ZOOM IN/Embiggen - Your audience needs to SEE the screen. Just because you can see it on your computer doesn't mean that anyone else can.
4. A live demo with a great presenter can be mind blowing. The ability to dive down rabbit holes, answer odd questions and highlight an unexpected feature is hugely valuable. Hard to pull off unless you have presenter with real flair and technology strength (most don't). Know your weaknesses.
5. Don’t assume too much – something as simple as a pre-recorded demo (nothing live!) that shows setting up a network with full m-seg in a few clicks is something they may have never seen.

Post Events Activities

1. Embed Videos On Your Site : Write blog posts and embed the videos on your company blog. Drive views and engagements in the same way that you would a whitepaper or podcast. What do you want to tell people about your product ? 
2. Social Media Add the session video to posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc to drive engagement with your brand. Trickle it out over several weeks to pump the SEO algorithms on those sites. Link back and forward to other post to drive maximum engagement. 
3. Ad Buys Consider buying Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads to drive extra engagement with this content. A few hundred dollars can get hundreds of views, with some luck, they can go viral and reach a large audience. 
4. Track Attendees the people in the room are likely  publish podcasts and blog posts about your session. Find those articles and repeat them to your audience. Media & analysts follow influencers closely and will read them in addition to sales prospects.  It does and will change their perception and further magnify the impact of the event. 

The political events of the last week have been dramatic in the UK and USA. People have taken to social media to express their opinions and perspectives. I’m rather tired of it and have had enough. It making me sad and distracting from things I have to do.

I’ve turned it off, unfollowed, unsubscribed, hidden and muted.

I respect your right to say whatever you feel. I’m exercising my right not to listen.

I’m not going to tell you what to think or what I’m doing. I’m not arrogant or confident enough to think that my personal opinions matter to you.

I am keeping my views to myself. In broad terms, I might talk about my politics in person, face to face and in a small group. Thats roughly equivalent to power of my one vote in democratic / republic system of government. I may or may not be protesting, writing letters to my MP and participating in other ways. I’m getting my news from other sources, I don’t need social media to tell me where the news is happening.

I generally choose not talk about my private life in public.

Confused ? Occasionally I will talk about the professional benefits of working in countries that have government health service and social programs because they have me the freedom to pursue a career path that many people don’t have. Thats career planning in the available system not politics. I’m not sure why you would be confused about that.

I hope you understand. We can be “internet friends” again in the future but there is only so much unhappiness I can bear for now. Time to be positive and optimistic by focussing on the things I can achieve and change.

Thats’ why I unfollowed you on social media.

Everywhere I turn the INTERNET OF THINGS is headline news. Lightbulbs, activity monitoring, hours sleep, hours awake and hours spent “in the zone”.

The first tier is quasi-rabid neo-capitalists of silicon valley who are working on guaranteeing their privilege by controlling the message of the techno-utopians in silicon valley. The second tier is middle class software developers who have reached new levels of self-delusion that their technology startups will actually change the 7 Billion in the world who don’t give a flying fart about technology. If only they reach the “zone” for more hours a day, the software that will be deleted next year might change the world this year.

Connecting cars to the Internet means that we can deliver more content to people who have nothing to do. Its not enough to put billboards on the side of the highway, lets get an ad-tech algorithm INSIDE THE CAR so they can’t possibly ignore the money we are going to make.

The INTERNET OF THINGS is about the quantified self. Because the number of times you have sex matters. Or say burgers. Or cups of coffee. The selfless act of self-awareness is going to save people from their own ignorance.

Maybe we are so frightened of the uncertain world around is that a techno-fetish can make it less strange ? If only you could count everything and place it on a chart, then the world wouldn’t seem so strange. The random variable would be taken out.

Lets not forget the instant and instinctual vanity of messaging platforms. Any thought can be spat out for an audience to witness. Any experience can be reduced to filtered photograph with pouty lips. The sensual slick sense of DOING slides up your fingers and into your lizard brain with every photo, message and chat session. Your life is enhanced when messaged into an Internet where no one is actually listening.

Efficient lightbulbs, doors that know you are coming, and room temperature thats just right for you because you live alone in IOT-driven world.

We use tools like IFTTT in vain attempt to weld different brands into a useable solution.

As I sit in my car glaring at my SatNav which is taking the long way to my destination, I get the feeling that technology is making me stupid. I can feel my common sense sliding away from me. The jibber jabber of tweets and the mindless “happy stuff” on LinkedIn isn’t fulfilling, its just fart-smells turned into web content.

And I’m also reminded that I shouldn’t write blog posts after a bottle of wine. But the voice of good sense isn’t winning as I press publish

You can be guaranteed that nothing will happen if you publish nothing. I can guarantee that something will happen if you publish something.

After you are publishing something, people can find you. And you can improve. And you can work out what can be done better. And then iterate.

Nothing beats that feeling of people telling you that something you did helped them out.

I'm Not the Only One

I’m not a huge fan of Gary Vannerchuk because his personality grates against my introvert nature. This video is an extroverts view of how to be successful in social media which is

• to keep publishing when no one is listening.
• To keep it humble
• participate widely.
• don't count the numbers

Just start today.

www.youtube.com/watch

Quick post to publish some photos from the Viptela Night of Nerdery event on SD-WAN held at the Flatiron Bar in New York last night that I have collected from social media. (I hope people don’t mind, I wasnt able to track where I got them from)

If anyone else has some photos I would love to have them - email them to packetpushers@gmail.com.

This was a live event timed to start after the ONUG conference was finished for the day. We brought the portable recording deck, a lot of cables and recorded a show with a lot of audience engagement.

It was awesome. I’m glad its over. Can’t wait to do it again.

You should plan to give in social media until it hurts like a teenaged pop song.

The most successful social media programs are those that give before they take. Yet most marketing professionals have decades of using outreach methods that intend to take through demand and lead generation.

Lead and Sales Generation is About Taking

The last 20 years of technology marketing has been about finding customers and then refining content to a smaller subset that could use your product and then an even smaller subset that might buy your technology.

Sales methods focussed on cold-calling, hot-knocking, lead qualification and sales funnel. Concepts of “chasing the customer”, “getting in their face” and “taking the order” have limited application in an era where the customer has greater power.

Post-Scarcity Marketing and the Internet

The underlying shift that is impacting technology marketing is that Internet has changed the cost of marketing. Last decade, access to customer attention was through media or analyst interaction using PR teams dedicated to task. This is expensive and . The Internet has changed this dynamic and, like other industries, disrupted the “middle-man” in the transaction.

Social Media means reaching many (not all) customers directly. It disrupts the legacy sale process but communicating directly to your customers. It bypasses the complexity and cost of resellers. It reduces the need to sales people.

Enhance

Programs designed to enhance, strengthen and support existing relationships will have medium impact. These customers are already engaged with your products, support services and sales team. They remain valuable.

Programs that give away resources will succeed.

1. white papers
2. webinars
3. podcasts
4. commentary
5. feature-fetish blog posts
6. newsletters via email

Think of these as mix-tapes for your teenage love. That intensity that drove you to share something about yourself. Remember love notes, cheap jewellery, innocence and holding hands ?

Cost ?

Traditional marketing programs intend to “take”. Take leads, create demand and take purchase orders. Before the Internet, this type of sales was the only way, now we have options.

The cost of a social media program is vastly less than cost of a sales reps and their travel expenses. Much less than advertising in a magazine.

Pro Tip For Your Teenaged Love/Social Media Strategy

The best tips I have for social media success are:

1. sustained effort over a long period (give love till it hurts)
2. keep changing the medium and message (love always changes)
3. do not overdo the analytics and measurement (how much do you love me?)
4. it's not about your company, it is about the customer (it's not about you, it's about them)
5. give information and perspective (sweet love notes)
6. have webinars and meetups (setup your first date)
7. don't expect to close a deal immediately (hold hands before you kiss)

One thing that hasn’t changed about marketing in 20 years is persistence. Everything else ? Yeah, its like technology that changes every 3 years.

A campaign about marketing that I can get behind - stop the waste the world’s resources with pointless junk.

As Marketers, we are sometimes under a strange social pressure to create a lot of "stuff" — t-shirts, pens, hats, bags, stress balls, and countless other tchotchkes with our logos on them aka, promotional products, or "swag

The three dirty little secrets about promotional products:

1. Roughly 2/3 of the marketing materials you produce end up in a hotel trash can before your target customer even leaves the conference.

2. People will not, in fact, buy your product because you gave them a branded flashlight keychain.

3. People are more likely to remember positive experiences shared with other humans, rather than objects.

via Marketers Against Waste.

I’m biased by involvement with (Packet Pushers but I can confirm this article is correct from my side. Podcasts are popular and well supported.

Maybe it’s the intimacy of hearing soothing voices piped into your ears through a pair of headphones — or maybe it’s just how much time people need to kill listening to something. Americans spend more than three hours a day commuting, working out and doing household chores that can be accompanied by audio entertainment, according to census data studied by Matt Lieber, a former public radio producer who co-founded the podcast company with Blumberg.

via Podcasts are back — and making money - The Washington Post.

Gina Trapani has a some suggestions on Short Form Blogging that I like very much. Not every blog post needs to be a world changing epic with thousands of words:

Summary:

• If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post.
• Negotiate a comfort zone on two axes: personal and public, tech and everything else
• Traffic is irrelevant.
• Simplify, simplify.
• Ask for trusted collaborator feedback.
• Have fun.

Lots of good points that explain each of these elements.

Scribbling.net | Short-form blogging.

A while back I posted that I am scaling back my twitter engagement because I felt it was becoming less useful and less valuable. I had some time this evening to verify the perception with hard data that Twitter is no longer the valuable source of inbound traffic to my EtherealMind blog.

This graph shows the dramatic reduction in inbound traffic from the Twitter in the middle of the year while G+/LinkedIn remain inconsequential.

Twitter Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

LinkedIn Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

Google Plus Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

Important to note that during this time, the total page views has remained more or less constant. This leads me to conclude that the reduction from twitter is simply because Twitter is becoming less relevant to network engineers as an information source.

I will be spending less time on Twitter. Going forward, my primary focus is to publish more often on my blog here and at EtherealMind.com and PacketPushers.net. They will be my primary focus for sharing ideas, thoughts and commentary and just a little snark.

It has been a good seven year run and twitter has lasted longer than I thought but it is time to move back to blogging at the best source. Blogging is the only permanent social media and will survive twitter/facebook/google plus. In almost every way, my own content is more satisfying and pleasing.

twitter.com/etherealm…

I would like to suggest that you directly subscribe to my blogs using an RSS subscription and a suitable RSS app. EtherealMind RSS Greg Ferro RSS and Packet Pushers.

I will continue pushing a tweet when I publish blog posts, in the same way that I do so on Google Plus, Facebook and LinkedIn but I won’t be engaging on these sites either. It possible that I might do some testing in LinkedIn but I find LinkedIn too intrusive to an enjoyable experience.

What's Changed

Own My Content - it has become a personal goal to own more of my content. That which I write, record and share will be on sites that have my name associated. 140 characters on Twitter won’t achieve that goal.  Twitter wins most of the benefit from my content.

Distraction - Twitter has become a distraction for me that I need to control. The Noise-to-Signal ratio has increased over time. Attempts to change use patterns with less followers/different followers have made no discernible different. It is no longer useful as an information gathering tool or signal source.

Where once my time was well spent on twitter - fun, enjoyable and conversational,  I do not feel this is the case now.

Curated Feeds - This article from Wall Street Journal is the final motivation to make a change. Twitter is moving towards ‘curated’ feeds where an algorithm will make choices about what I see from the people I follow. This creates an incomplete view of what you say online and I will no longer reliably see what you have to say. In which case, what is the point ?

Equally, that which I publish to share with you will no longer reliably reach you.

Note that this is a primary reason for not using Facebook. If I post something there, less 10% of people who follow the account will see the post. Its not practical to follow me on Facebook since you won't see most

Valediction

Lets try this and see how it goes. I need to be productive in other places and reducing twitter is one part of a strategy. I may occasionally popup since I will have twitter apps on my iPhone only just to keep an eye on things. I have a quasi-regular tool that tweets some snark and I will be tweeting about appearances and commercial events. I’m not quitting twitter, just scaling back to the minimum.

If you would like to engage/contact me then send me an email at greg.ferro@packetpushers.net and I should have more time to respond to you.

Vale, Twitter, at least for a while.

My advice to companies who think they need a “social media strategy” is to tell them that they have it all wrong. What companies need is a marketing strategy that has social media as part of the mix.

For most companies, this means changing/disrupting the operations of marketing people. Instead of “demand generation”, focus on “social capital”.

I was involved in a meeting where a “demand generation” program was discussed and I was shocked by the prices being mentioned. Then I realised, the cost of capturing/managing the leads/names/addresses was enormous. The technology cost alone was staggering much less the people cost of managing the data.

“Social Capital” doesn’t need planning only managing. Every companies says it talks its customer but in reality talk to only a small percentage. Social Media creates conversation with many more customers.

Building social capital means that the day someone makes an error or mistake, your audience/customers will be more willing to forgive. You should be more important to them as a source than as someone to vilify or pillory.

Simple. Stop spending on demand generation and move those funds to social media. And be tolerant. Convincing customers to listen to you is hard, social media isn’t any different to the sales cycle.