Life Lessons Learned from My Cat

I’ve been observing my cat for life lessons.

  • Sleep More.
  • Sleep wherever you are
  • Rubbing seductively against people's legs when I’m hungry will get me dinner
  • You can make people guilty by sitting on their lap and staring at them
  • When you walk away make sure that never, ever, ever look back. You own it, it will there when you need it.
  • Keep yourself clean
  • Be Chill. Things happen but you can keep your cool by staring casually at them
  • Never eat from plate that you are served on.
  • Keep moving
  • Don’t just sit in the same place all the time. Move around to look busy
  • Look the other way when confronted with a bad situation. Feign ignorance, deflect attention.

Advice To Tech Field Day Sponsors

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. 

how pouring a beer the wrong way can give you a stomach ache

www.youtube.com/watch

Legacy of War - A five-year photographic project exploring the long-term effects of conflict globally. Stories and images by Giles Duley. : Legacy of War

Heartbreaking. My own minor injuries are nothing compared to this.

A five-year photographic project exploring the long-term effects of conflict globally. Stories and images by Giles Duley.
Legacy of War - A five-year photographic project exploring the long-term effects of conflict globally. Stories and images by Giles Duley. : Legacy of War : http://legacyofwar.com/

Video: Gargoyles - YouTube

Good for a break on a Friday afternoon - nicely done.

Link: - www.youtube.com/watch

Tanzania orders all unregistered bloggers to take down their sites | Reuters

Do I take my freedom for granted ?

Tanzania ordered all unregistered bloggers and online forums on Monday to suspend their websites immediately or face criminal prosecution, as critics accuse the government of tightening control of internet content.

Tanzania orders all unregistered bloggers to take down their sites | Reuters : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tanzania-internet/tanzania-orders-all-unregistered-bloggers-to-take-down-their-sites-idUSKBN1J71W6

Video: Stop complaining about Back to School Shopping

Stop complaining about Back to School Shopping - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch

Video: Anti-Social

youtu.be/GEWnXmDfV…

Netflix competes with Sleep

As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained during the company’s Q1 earnings call in 2017, “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night […] we’re competing with sleep, on the margin.”

Rainmaker Digital Platform Is a Failure.

The Rainmaker Platform is failing and they are doing nothing about it. I do not recommend My New Rainmaker. I’m trapped and I can’t get out. Here is my negative review.


I’ve been a customer of the Studiopress group for many years now. I was fortunate to purchase a Genesis Theme subscription way back in 2009 and my blog has flourished over that time. About 3 years ago the Packet Pushers business needed to grow further and we committed to migrating from a self-hosted blog into the Rainmaker Platform. I’m sad to say that this has been poor decision that has negatively impacted our business.

In short, the Rainmaker project is a failure. Recently, the business pivoted to professional services business offering consulting and design services.

Based on our experiences, do not do this. The infrastructure is failure. Let me explain.

Lack of Features

Big promises were made about new features, functions and products. Many exciting changes and developments were coming in the months ahead they told us.

The membership system is basic (at beast) and barely functional, the podcast engine is mediocre and the attempt to reskin the Wordpress interface is, I have to say, just terrible. Look at this mess:

Screenshot of Safari 03 04 2018 11 44 21

The UX of navigating a Rainmaker site is disastrous. What does all that rubbish on the left mean ? Where is the Wordpress menus ?

The basic feature of email list integration took over 2 years to arrive and partnered with Feedblitz who is possibly the worst email provider available. Our personal experience with Feedblitz RSS has been worse than awful and there is no way I can trust their email platform. To make it worse, the integration with MailChimp is poor at best. They couldn’t have done any less.

 

Constant Errors

We are seeing almost constant errors and failures in delivering the most basic content. This is a total loss of all site traffic on Sunday:

Screenshot 2018 04 02 14 41 05 1024

Simple problems recur daily. This gif shows how slow the admin interface loads:

Slow loading rainmaker
We reset your services, flushed the caches and your site is back online. Customer Success Specialist

This happens regardless of clearing caches, logging support requests and asking for escalation. This morning I woke up to messages from Google with large number of 5xx server failures.

Screenshot of Safari 03 04 2018 10 20 27

I raised an site outage support request on Monday morning. 48 hours later the only response is :

This ticket has been escalated to me for review and I will be digging into this and follow up with a more detailed response at my earliest opportunity. - Cody, Director of Support

And thats the fourth time I’ve received that note in the last 3 weeks. So far “Cody” has done nothing. 

SSL Failure

Switching the site to SSL caused massive failures to our podcast feeds. The SSL certificate wasn’t signed by a recognised certificate provider and thus caused podcatchers to fail. This was followed by further operational problems when we asked to roll back the change. The roll back worked but two days later the SSL was reinstated and then hidden in a very difficult to find. It took two weeks to sort out this mess. We lost hundreds of thousands of downloads and thousands of subscribers.

The failure of SSL is partly a podcast problem but the lack of assistance from Rainmaker combined with operational failure and the poor interface.

Increased Spam

There was a time when we received just a few spam comments per month. Today I’m received multiples per day. Another sign of platform neglect.

Leaving

Yes, its probably time to leave but there is a problem. The Rainmaker platform is extensively customised / hacked up version of Wordpress,  moving will be very difficult and expensive. Yes, I am deep into buyers remorse and I can’t see a way out. At least when the platform worked reliably for the first two years I could pretend that things would get better.

But I’m losing page views, subscribers and my business is prevented from doing good things.The problems have been happening for some months now. Its not just today.

I do not recommend My New Rainmaker. I’m trapped and I can’t get out.

Video: Improvise a PowerPoint Presentation

As as good as any motivational speaker

 

youtu.be/1Z7xba0is…

BP Forecast: Shared, Autonomous EVs Will Help Drive to Peak Oil Before 2040 | Greentech Media

When a company like BP predicts peak oil in the near (-ish) future, you know that its real. I liked the balanced views in the this piece that point out the transition will take some time:

BP's latest Energy Outlook sees peak oil on the horizon for the first time -- driven by the rise of shared and autonomous electric vehicles.

Under the Evolving Transition (ET) scenario, which assumes that policies and technology continue to evolve at a speed similar to that seen in recent past, oil demand slows and eventually plateaus in the late 2030s.

BP Forecast: Shared, Autonomous EVs Will Help Drive to Peak Oil Before 2040 | Greentech Media : https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/bp-forecast-autonomous-electric-vehicles-peak-oil

Blogging isn’t about numbers

I’m often asked how to blog but the real question is WHY you blog. How you do it is a very personal, intimate experience on deciding content that is worth sharing. If I can reach a handful of people that is enough because at least I’ve shared my thoughts with someone. I don’t want to be read by large numbers of people who don’t know me and what I have to share.

“Small b blogging” tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/2…

Facebook’s Desperate Smoke Screen - Study Hacks - Cal Newport

The 61% ownership of Facebook by Zuckerburg is a problem. In my mind, he has poor personal qualities to be a leader. He repeatedly stole ownership of the business from co-founders, he has limited emotional capability and I’m reasonably sure that he has limited understanding of the real world. Where real = people, politics, society etc.

Soros began with the social problems, noting that social media companies “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide,” acting like casinos that “have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have.”

George Soros isn’t a model of social good, but the points are valid.

This move is not purely an effort to confront Facebook’s problems, it is, I suspect, in large part a desperate attempt to distract the media and public from the social issues that Facebook knows it cannot resolve without inflecting serious self-harm.

In view, the widespread disengagement from Facebook is systemic. The platform offers value for a while until people realise that better options exist elsewhere. In effect, you use Facebook for a while until you get bored with it.

I’m bored with it. I think many other people are too.

Facebook’s Desperate Smoke Screen - Study Hacks - Cal Newport : http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/02/09/facebooks-desperate-smoke-screen/

Neuroscientist Anil Seth Answers Neuroscience Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED - YouTube

Enjoyed this

Neuroscientist and public science communicator Anil Seth uses the power of Twitter to answer some common questions about neuroscience. How does memory work? Can we delete memories? Do blind people dream? Anil answers all these questions and more

Neuroscientist Anil Seth Answers Neuroscience Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED - YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EklA4lAkkoA

How to produce your own podcast — Quartz at Work

Not gonna argue, the numbers are about right. You can cut costs by doing audio editing yourself because it simple (but trade time for money).

Podcasting is harder than people think but anyone can do it. Look at me, I do.

The financial and time breakdown of producing your own podcast.

— Read on work.qz.com/1152960/podcasting-is-the-new-blogging-if-youre-rich/

Furby Organ

Crazy application. And the sound is horrendous, as you might expect.

www.youtube.com/watch

The Science of Sample Rates (When Higher Is Better — And When It Isn’t) - SonicScoop

The Science of Sample Rates (When Higher Is Better — And When It Isn’t) - SonicScoop — Read on sonicscoop.com/2016/02/19/the-science-of-sample-rates-when-higher-is-better-and-when-it-isnt/

Brilliant read on the science behind acoustic sample rates and, more importantly, the subjective experience of “listening”.

KANGAROO a Love Hate story - YouTube

A film that reveals an unlikely truth about Australia’s love-hate relationship with its beloved icon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oaeaqndd7g

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Culture Typography - YouTube

I love fonts so this tickled my whimsical font nerve.

Pop Culture Typography - YouTube

Pantagruelism

Pantagruelism, n. [‘The philosophy and practice ascribed to Pantagruel; extravagant and coarse humour with a satirical purpose. Also, more generally: coarseness, vulgarity.’]

There are some truly great words in the English language. Via Oxford Dictionary.

Video: Angel City Chorale

youtu.be/-c9-poC5H…

Video: The Freakishly Fast World of Robot Sumo

“The Freakishly Fast World of Robot Sumo - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS-L2fpV1Is&feature=share

I Know People Who Need This Advice

www.youtube.com/watch

Battle Angel Alita

youtu.be/aj8mN_7Ap…