Some of you may have heard about John Mark Troyer, he was a Director, Social Media Evangelist at VMware, then recently he established TechReckoning. What is it?
Quoting from John’s TechReckoning first newsletter:
What the heck is TechReckoning?
You may be wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into. Me too, but I’m comfortable with the ambiguity as we create this community together and figure out what’s going to work for us. TechReckoning is here to make the world a better place by making the IT industry smarter and by making IT marketing a little less bad, all while helping our careers in the process. It’s also going to be a cool place to hang out.
1. It’s about driving the IT industry forward through community.
The most valuable part of a conference is the hallway conversation; where can we get that online? There’s no single media site or forum that covers the parts of IT and tech that I’m interested in. Technology news sites are rarely written for technologists. Platforms like Twitter are broad but too ephemeral to have a serious conversation. Forums like VMTN or Spiceworks let us share knowledge, but rarely wisdom. As technologists, we tend to focus on the knobs in front of us, not on why we’re twisting them. But our careers increasingly depend on understanding the business drivers while still keeping up with the technological changes.The power of online community can keep us connected and informed, but too often we tend to silo ourselves into specialist- or vendor-based tribes. A cross-IT tribe is healthier for the industry and for us.
One aspect of TR will to be a place where we can look at news and trends in our industry and have intelligent conversations about them. Topics, submitted by members of the community, will range from the technical up through the big picture. You can think of it as using the collaborative power of the community to become our own analysts. You can also think of it as the 2014 version of Slashdot or Reddit, but for Enterprise IT, and with a John Troyer touch so that it won’t get mean and suck.
2. It’s about collaborating on cool things and our careers.
One of the ways we’ll ensure TR won’t suck is that we’re starting with an amazing group of people. Most of us are in the same enterprise tech industry. Many of us know each other offline. Many of us are exploring new ways to contribute to the larger community and to communicate about our interests — as bloggers, writers, speakers, organizers, and even as coders. There have always been paths from technologist to communicator and influencer, but the old roads have potholes and the new roads are about as easy to travel as the Oregon Trail. Nobody should die of dysentery while they try to figure out how to self-publish a book or organize an event. It’s time to build some highways.
TechReckoning will be a place where we can collaborate to do cool things. We’ll start simple with some listings of community projects to get involved in. As we grow, we’ll have user profiles, directories of speakers and writers, and the projects our community creates will get bigger and more influential. We can build things. We can meet offline. We are not limited to typing words into a web site.
3. It’s about a better commercial conversation.
Old marketing tactics aren’t working. Customers have gone through most of their purchasing decision before they talk to vendors. If companies want their products to be considered, they need to work with the community and the influencers who are writing and speaking and organizing. Companies can be and should be creating more useful experiences for their customers and prospects. And those customers and prospects will be more successful if they actually talk to each other as well. Crazy talk, I know; maybe even dangerous to some.
We’ll give vendors ways to establish respectful relationships with influencers and to create and amplify useful and interesting content. This is the way that TechReckoning makes money. It should be as easy for a marketing manager to work with some bloggers as it is to buy some Google ads. If we make it easy enough and companies experience success, influencer marketing budgets should grow and all reality-based, community-oriented projects, companies, media outlets, analysts, and consultants should flourish, and we’ll all live in the land of IT milk and honey. Or, again, at least we’ll have a cool place to hang out.
I’ve got the honored to be mentioned among several people in the 2nd Newsletter about my experience in community activities, particularly Linux and OpenSource.
You can join TechReckoning here: http://techreckoning.com/
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