Where Should You Start Your Content Journey? - CTO Advisor Road Trip
Transcript
[Music] we're synced just take it away man we we have three professional interviewers here so who's gonna take the lead well i think you gotta think we're here for the cto road trip i'm so excited to have you come through town and you've been at this thing for weeks and weeks and weeks how many miles have you logged so while you know i was looking on the truck the other day one we bought the truck new and it has 15 000 miles on and about 9
000 or so of that is from the trip directly so it i i expected the trip to take a total of 9 000 miles and we're not even down we're you know we have another 20 days probably and how many days are you in uh we're 73 74 days in so wow man still smiling the place still looks nice you know what we melissa is still smiling up front so he's working pretty well we only killed her we only killed each other twice we only killed
each other twice so it's actually been a really great trip for those of you who don't know we're uh 70 plus days in a 90-day trip around the country where we're doing basically a lot of this talking to content creators analysts execs customers and just regular people and now we're in uh pasadena technically close to santa cruz uh just right outside of silicon valley and we have with us jeff frick jeff uh what do you do these days so uh a new company menlo creek started
at um basically the beginning of this year 2021 and surprise surprise doing executive interview coaching as you might as you might not be surprised so really working with a lot of young executives a lot of young ceos who just need still some practice in in in their online presence and you know between zoom and also just being a leader and as an executive you know your job is not to push keys anymore but to get people inspired to join your journey so it's been going pretty
well i'm pretty excited we're you know getting through 2021 but so far so good you said uh um interview coaching and i was getting self-conscious but then i said young well i mean vittorio i met at that mcafee event or not the back event when you were at mcafee but at the at xerox park which is such an iconic place and i was so excited to meet you but i wanted to bring you into this conversation because you're a big rv guy and i think before
work from home and and and lockdowns but now you've really taken advantage and i follow you on on all your social and you know you got that thing all over these beautiful locations so i thought these are the two uh communicators in the world of rv and tech we've got to get them together yeah i haven't done a trip like this but it was no brainer last year when the pandemic hit uh i i said before i don't i'm not into big cars and stuff but
i have two rvs i have a big one for the family trips and i have a kind of a more of a van one that i use with weekends with my wife and that when the pandemic hit that's a no-brainer just like stole a 5g repeater on top and just hit the road and work from beautiful places and made it more bearable you know yeah and this is the one of the only places where the 5 g or 4g repeater or uh if you can see
in the background we have a you can't see it we have a uh mevo antenna mounted and i've been pretty good 70 days in this is the one area where it's been super stubborn i think i could go out and get a verizon hot spot to get any kind of signal and that's one of the things we can talk to at first as as we talk about content creation and and getting messaging out and you know the the saying goes the best camera is the one
that you have in your pocket like so you know like when we get people who advise us all that what's the best camera well it's the one that you have to get started like what's the what's the bare minimum as we start to collaborate at home with people and work from home or work from anywhere but becomes like the thing what should executives and people who should be conscious about their presence what should they be most concerned about should it be the camera should it be
lighting should it be audio should it be all of the above should it be connectivity like what's the what's the key to to remote work i i i have such a great story about that because you see somebody who's ripped right and the first question that people ask what might what exercise machine do you have let me tell you it's not the machine it's how much you exercise you don't need the machine and the same i think it's true with content if you have an iphone
10 and the stuff the quality on this thing and just put a little microphone just to make sure you don't get and that to me is about having a message to to tell and having the willingness to tell to tell them and the authenticity right i mean i think one of the big differences today right is by the time most people read your content they've already investigated you they've already investigated your product they've had lots of information that they could peruse so what are you bringing
to the table when they want to come to your content what are you adding it is an experience is it enthusiasm is it some insight tip of knowledge is it a way to apply this to some interesting problem so you know i think authenticity is the most important thing be who you are be your best you so beyond so this isn't a question about equipment this is the equipment about this is a question about you just making the best of what you have equipment wise but
more importantly telling an authentic story i have an antidote around this we did a huge production after that about 20 25 people on set they came to my house uh we went on lakeshore drive uh the crew followed me on relational drive we had a police escort it was like one of the biggest productions i've ever been a part of for a segment for one of the one of my big customers and when it was viewed by my audience it might keep the production value obviously
off the chain but man you sound like a robotron and it wasn't like it wasn't you wasn't you it wasn't you you know there was me saying the same thing over and over and over again until the production company get what they wanted but my audience didn't receive it as they received my regular content right because they know keith yeah i mean i i think especially technical audiences but probably everybody but especially technologists which i'm more familiar with they smell overproduced stuff from a mile away
and they disconnect so i think you have to have a decent quality so that people don't screen their eyes and they have a hard time hearing you but after that it's all about what you want to you're willing to say you have something interesting to say right right and i think a lot of people just don't do that another people they get too worked about the production did you say it the right way no i always go back to an interesting there was a keynote at
google years ago where sundar got up and their new thing on voice was to call and make a restaurant reservation and so we did a supposedly live demo where they called the restaurant to make a reservation to show how smart the ai was in the voice recognition and they purposefully built in ums and ahs and hiccups because that's how people speak so don't get overly worked up about if you if you hum and you ha or maybe you you know you we all look someplace when
we think right all of us have a spot that we look to don't worry about that stuff you know what is the message what are you trying to say and demonstrate that you give a because if you don't give a why should i give a and i think that's the other thing i bet you're a lot of your lines were probably written like press releases and people people give you pressure and i read it out like read this out loud and tell me does anyone speak
this way yeah it was it's really funny because you know how technology companies are about the name of the of their products it is the x y z model gen 18 78 48 d and when i'm with a customer i don't say the x y g xen model 8 48 v i say the 48 b right is a really great thing and this is and there's this like oh you have to use our um our official naming not none of my videos i do any of
that so when this product and this uh solution came out everyone was like just it just did not feel natural and i think that's one of the things that uh there's always this debate i talked to a product marketer just the other day and she said oh i stopped the recording of this one production like 15 times as i was getting the executive to say the right things and uh she later on realized later in her career you know fast forward two years it's not about
saying the right things but being authentic in the way that you communicate and that you're coming off naturally because it will when you meet a customer in person they're going to say oh that's not the persona i saw on the video that who's this person i'm talking to right yeah and i think that the because executive they do this like highly rehearsed production once in a while then you know they don't practice being authentic on camera so that's why i always tell people you know if
i had a dollar for every time a salesperson said oh if i had the one perfect slice no it's not the one perfect slide it's not it's it's the volume of things that you send out there that are digestible and some of them will will hit it's like you know we talk about the the making a hit record you don't my john lennon and mccartney didn't sit down we're going to write that one song that's right right right they wrote 500 songs right now they were
outstanding so they had a lot of of of hits but it's about that i think it said these days executive need uh anybody that has something to say they just put a camera in front of you record yourself and put it out there and get into that rhythm and then eventually will develop your voice and people will start to latch on to that oh yeah and that's the person that i i i'm gonna buy from right right trust uh you know trust and authenticity what i
always tell keith is that they pay hollywood actors and actresses tens of millions of dollars to be able to read a script and make it sound like they're talking it's really really really hard and that's why they pay them that much but it's really easy as a knowledgeable person enthusiastic about a topic to tell someone about it so be that person don't try to be an actor and actress because it's so it's so hard was it steve jobs that said you know if you can't present
naturally without a deck of slides then you know you you don't know your product or something to that effect i don't one i don't like slides i don't like presenting from slides if i need slides to convey the idea then in my opinion you're not using the slides correctly the slides for me should just be uh something to keep pace in the conversation like oh i need to spend five minutes per slide i'm on slide four i'm running behind let me uh speed it up people
can sense when you're not passionate about the theme well one either one not passionate or too not knowledgeable about the theme that you're talking about they sniff that out pretty quickly i have a slight different take on slides in the zoom world okay because i think that people can wing it when they're knowledgeable and they're enthusiastic otherwise most people are not very good presenter and so sometimes having a good set of slides that get people okay engaged you know that you don't sit on the slide
to your point for like you know 10 minutes i think that it helps you know sometimes i see these people that say i'm not going to kill you with slides great uh fantastic that they're not great presenters and they put the one freaking slides with font trying eight decipher what's on the screen and i'm not listening to them anymore i'm done with listening to them because i'm trying to read the slide so i think this slides to your point if you're you're a great presenter you
know you can you know like you watch a comedian they don't need slides but they're awesome i mean comedians are the best i mean i watch a lot of comedians because i just love to see how they help hold the audience on their palm and they craft their stories that with and they get judged every 30 seconds right right and when you're presenting you get judged all the time right so but they cannot do it without slides but if you are not a great presenter i
say put together a few slides that help you stay on track i absolutely agree with that approach i wanted to follow up on on kind of quantity and variety we used to talk about big data right with variety and veracity and velocity of data you guys are doing that in the content side and i think it's so interesting because i think to your point a lot of people try to put too much emphasis on a single point of data on a single point of content and
it and it's a fail and and i've published my manifesto jack conti the founder of patreon has a lot of great talks on this concept where you know there's no relationship unfortunately between the effort what you think about a piece of content how expensive it was and how painful it was and the uptake in the audience and and his his answer to that is let the funnel be your friend to your point between just keep publishing because you're not really sure which piece is going to
hit and which piece is it and guess what you don't have to worry about it if you just keep publishing and it's a really different way to think about content and you crank i mean you crank out i just look at this morning you have like eight posts i think in the last three days but you had your you know italian things about how to properly drink cappuccino you had a post about a guy who's got an accent we should be respectful for people that are
not speaking in their native language you had a nice uh vmware clip from a 30 minute video you know a nice piece of marketing material you have such a variety and you just pump it out how do you think about your strategy and what do you tell people who are afraid to be authentic i mean your home stuff with your music is fantastic and i'm sure there's talented people that are so worried about being judged um by by that but you show the the offenders you
guys wanted to be judged in this world of media media what they believe today or you're you're in trouble i always try to i always think about how do i get through to an audience right so that italian funny thing that i did is part of the newsletter they were doing internally at vmware which is confidential but we got i don't know 15 newsletters a week from all the departments it was time to read all this stuff so i was i was thinking hi because i
care about people paying attention for for the better good of the team i said how about i we make another video okay then uh it's just a video just you know now we're seeing it right so how about i you know because i always watch all the other people doing and say how much where jimmy found something you know i have a green screen so i put and i do it as a show hey hi i'm your host and i have a great show for you
tonight what is the show the newsletter for multiplayer and then i said okay these these people have always have a corner right and i live in the recurring segment that we talked about i said how about i'm italian so authenticity oh well i i i demystified things about italy and uh things that people do wrong uh in america about the italian culture right and so i started that corner and people give me feedback right oh yes and then now they're watching the via the multi-cloud uh
newsletter right right so then sorry it's really a good part it means to an end right right so i've struggled with this believe not i put out a good amount of content but i struggle with uh kind of content envy you ever look at some piece of content by someone like man that's really great content a great example is cory quinn corey does these brilliant pieces of content or uh that cause he's a comedian and then he brings his uh skill as a comedian to his
uh antagonist or protagonist i don't know what to call him with like his voice with aws and it really but on the other end this spectrum i have my peers at like constellation r and everyone does this really great re uh research and i look at oh man i would love to uh create this long-form piece of content that's really great but as i tell other people who are looking to get into content your voice has value like if there's seven billion people in the world
and in our industry there's millions of people in our industry and if your voice isn't for a group there is a voice that your group is for you need to keep putting out the content that's authentic to you and your voice so this is a reminder to me because i i wrote this piece about uh about a topic that i was pretty passionate about i looked at it like ah i just need about three or four more weeks to do more research to get this point
across but i simply don't have the time right and i didn't publish the piece and i deleted the piece and now look back and i really regret it i'm like i should have just put it out there right for the world to consume because to your point you can't control what piece of content is going to go value no matter how much time like some of the stuff that i put my heart and soul to hit like a hit like a a iron and this then
like some random thing that i spent 15 minutes on that's the thing that goes value and about uh environment that i'm most known for but i think there are two things that um impact the the how the content is going to be successful or not the first one is that uh appetite and the taste of of audiences changes all the time like when i started doing my baking videos you know five minutes forget it beyond five minutes people will tune out right so i optimize for
five minutes now if you do a five minutes video on facebook it doesn't get any any views because facebook wants people to stick to it right so you have to be like 15 20 an hour right so that's that's the the the one thing and the other thing is and kind of related to it is that sometimes you have a great piece of content which is you know beefy and the way to get it out there is to chunk it right and somebody said to me
and hopefully i'm not probably get too politically incorrect but uh somebody told me once about marketing the marketing is like a freaking mexican menu it's all the same crap it's just like mixing it up there so it's all mixed up different ways is it burrito is it's the same things inside right but you're you you you slice and dice it for the size and the type of um format that that media requires so i think one of the huge things that you that you're so right
people are missing right it's 2021 do you go to the restaurant or do they bring it to you you know do you go to amazon or do they bring it to you so you know get to take your content to the person a versus expecting them to come to you so publish across all platforms to your point i can take a single video i can take a 20 minute video and create 100 pieces of content 100 each one of those has a title a description an
image often a video often there's there's audio associated with that 100 so don't worry about which of the pieces that your consumer wants to consume in the moment that they're ready to consume it they might want 30 seconds they might want two hours if it's elon musk sitting down with with joe rogan so i think this is also this kind of bifurcation do the long form for the people that really want to hear what you have to say and i'm interested and then chunk it up
for the people that aren't ready for the whole the whole uh bite right now yeah i'm i'm a big fan of this i try and get my customers my content customers to do exactly that remix the content take the content if we do a you know if we're honest most people in our field are not going to watch a 15 minute video they they're not they're if they come to it on linkedin or twitter if they discover it via social they you know they're just on
social to get their updates so they want 30 seconds to two minute chunks take the the meat part of the thing the the 20-minute video chop it into five ten segments and target it towards those audience that wants if somebody wants to watch the whole 20 minutes and there's a subset of the audience that does provide a link towards that but you want people to see your message one of the things that i get all the time is keith i love your content on linkedin you're
always creating there's always stuff there and the reason why there's always stuff there is i'm always remixing it to put it to the audience only on linkedin because maybe only five to ten to twenty percent of my audience sees a single piece of content any one time and if i keep sending it out to them and remixing it there's this perception there's there's like this infinite pool of content that is uh there's a small booklet from um gary vaynerchuk called crush it it talks about how
you you know start a blog stuff something like that 12 years ago when i started my baking blog i built over the years uh maybe 200 video recipes most of them original from my family and and then four or five years ago i had some other priorities so i stopped producing content now my daughter was in marketing picked it up and slice and dice and and and unless people are true original fans people think i'm still there for using stuff i've done nothing for four years
but right you know my brother-in-law answer all the questions the other thing is i think it's important about content and in b2b is not as important because there's not much as much interaction but in b2c you have to produce content decent quality on a regular basis and then answer every question you ever get from the community otherwise the community doesn't grow because they speaking of authenticity they want to engage with you so you have to answer the question you have to engage with them otherwise it
eventually right you need to engage with the community but the piece i want to follow up then is those recipes have absolutely there's no measure of time to the relevance of those recipes if i need to cook something tonight and if i go outside so here's the other thing i think is so important is most of the content we consume today is asynchronous and i keep pounding my thumb but i can't get this enough so the moment that you create a piece of it right now
right it's it's it's monday morning no one's gonna see this monday morning and it doesn't really matter unless we're talking about lunch in an hour or so so if you put out good content and you tag it what's going to happen increasingly is that the ai is going to serve it up to the people that matter and where i would push back a little bit uh victoria is i think you can create the direct connections with the people that matter in the right platforms because remember
we don't all see the same linkedin feed linkedin is choosing what to send each person based on what they think is going to have you hang out on the platform so if i can establish that we have a relationship and if i have enough hashtags to kind of match up with your hashtags the chances of linkedin putting my post on your feed are pretty good um and and you'll you really see it at holidays and stuff because it might be a two three four five six
day lag and they say something that's temporal because it's maybe labor day or fourth of july and you see so feed the ai do all your proper tagging and it's gonna get to the people that need to see it all right guys let's wrap up here we've talked this i've learned a lot i'm inspired to go out and create content if you're inspired to go out and create content and you're an executive and you need help jeff how can people get ahold of you menlocrete.com linkedin
twitter shouldn't be hard to find but menlo creek.com i have a forum in vitoria if people want to just learn out whether it's baking or multi-cloud what platforms can they find i think linkedin is probably the best right now you know look for victoria weiringel and you'll find me there all right if you want to find out more about the cto advisor you can follow us on the web the ctoadvisor.com forward slash road dash trip for to follow the road trip that which reminds me i
have to get the updates out about the road trip on the web page we do a great job getting them out on twitter which is at ctoadvisor on twitter dms are open if you're curious about what we do how we do it and why we do it talk to you next cto does from the road i use
