Keith Townsend & Vittorio Viarengo: Content, B2B, RVs | Turn the Lens #16

>> Keith: All right. We have three content creators.  >> Jeff: That's right.

>> Keith: Take one, two, three.

>> Hey, welcome back to another episode of "Turn the Lens." I'm your host, Jeff Frick. And we did something a little bit different this episode, Keith Townsend, you know him as the CTO Advisor and his wife, Melissa, are on a run around the country trip this summer and pulling behind them the 27 foot Airstream Flying Cloud, the CTO Flying Cloud. And so on they're stopped in the Bay Area, I really wanted to go out and visit them and they're at the Flying Cloud, you know, Keith puts out a ton of great content, I'm a huge fan of what he does and the content that he delivers. And I wanted to bring out a special guest, Vittorio Viarengo joined us, he is the Vice President of Cloud Marketing at VMware. If you follow anything in the cloud space or the B2B space, hopefully, you know, Vittorio, and you've seen his content. If you don't, I advise you to go start following him right away on LinkedIn and learn from one of the best.

He's also a huge RV'er, and even before the lockdowns or the work from home, Vittorio was often out, you know, working from beautiful places via the magic of his RV. So I wanted to bring Vittorio, so he also accompanied me as we went out to go visit Keith and Melissa at the CTO Flying Cloud out in Pescadero California, a little bit north of Santa Cruz, a little bit south of Half Moon Bay. And this is our conversation, talking content with a couple of the best hope you enjoy it, I had a great time. So without further ado, we'll throw it out to Keith at the CTO Flying Cloud, Pescadero California, take it away, Keith.

>> We have three professional interviewers here, so who's going to take the lead?

>> Why, I think you've got to take the lead 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 wow, you know, I was looking down the truck the other day one, we bought the truck new and it has 15,000 miles on it. And about 9,000 or so of that is from the trip directly. So I expected the trip to take a total of 9,000 miles and we're not even down, we have another 20 days probably.

>> And how many days are you in?

>> We're 73, 74 days in, so, wow, man.

>> Still smiling and the place still looks nice.

>> You know what,

>> Melissa's still smiling up front so it seems like it's working pretty well.

>> 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 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, IT execs, costumers and just regular people. And now we're in Pescadero technically, close to Santa Cruz, just right outside of Silicon Valley, and we have with us, Jeff Frick. Jeff, what do you do with these days?

>> So a new company, Menlo Creek started at basically, the beginning of this year, 2021 and surprise, surprise doing executive interview coaching. 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 and 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 getting through 2021, but so far so good.

>> You said interview coaching and I was getting self-conscious, but then I say young, I just. (laughs)

>> (laughing)

>> Well, I mean, Vittorio I've met at that McAfee event are you not to back yet when you were at McAfee, but at the 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 'cause you're a big RV guy. And I think before worked from home and lockdowns, but now you've really taken advantage and I follow you on all your social and, you know, you got that thing all over these beautiful locations. So I thought these are the two communicators in the world of RV and tech, we got to get them together.

>> Yeah. I haven't done a trip like this, but it was a no brainer. Last year when the pandemic hit, 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, kind of a more of a van one that I use with the weekends with my wife, and that when the pandemic hit, that's a no brainer. It's just like install it 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, one of the only places where the 5G or 4G repeater, or if you can see in the background, we have, you can't see it, we have a MIMO antenna mounted and I've been pretty good 70 days in, this is the one area where it's been super stubborn. I think you'd go out and get a Verizon hot spot to get any kind of signal. And that's one of the things we could talk to at first, as we talk about content creation and getting messaging out, and you know, the same goals, the best camera is the one that you have in your pocket. Like so, you know, like when we get people advise us all that what's the best camera? Well, it's the one that you have to get started, like, what's the bare minimum as we start to collaborate at home with people and work from home, or work from anywhere 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 key to remote work?

>> I have such a great story about that because you see somebody who's ripped, right? And the first question that people ask, what exercise machine do you have? Let me tell you, it's not the machine.

>> (laughing)

>> It's how much you exercise, you don't need the machine. And the same thing is true with content. If you have an iPhone 10 and this stuff, the quality of this thing, you just put a little microphone just to make sure you don't get. And that, to me, it's about having a message to tell and having the willingness to tell, to tell that message.

>> And the authenticity, right? I mean, I think one of the big differences today, 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, is it experience, is it enthusiasm, is it some insight tip of knowledge, is it a way to apply this to some interesting problems? 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 anecdote around this. We did a huge production, it had about 20, 25 people on-set, they came to my house, we went on Lake Shore Drive, the crew followed me on Lake Shore Drive, we have police escort, it was like one of the biggest productions I've ever been a part of for a segment for one of my big customers. And when it was viewed by my audience, they were like, Keith the production value, obviously off the chain. But man, you sound like a Robotron and it wasn't like it wasn't you.

>> It 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 got what they wanted, but my audience didn't receive it as they received my regular content.

>> Right, 'cause they know Keith.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think, and especially technical audiences, but probably everybody, but especially technologies, which I'm more familiar with. They smell over produced 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 where 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. There's another people, they get too worked about the production. Did you say it the right way? You know, 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 he did a supposedly live demo where they call the restaurant to make a reservation, to show how smart the AI was in the voice recognition. And they purposely built-in um's and ah's and hiccups because that's how people speak. So don't get overly worked up about if you hum and you ha, or maybe you, you know, we all look someplace when we think, all of us have a spot that 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 shit? 'Cause if you don't give a shit, why should I give a shit? And I think that's the other thing. I bet you, your lines were probably written, like press releases and people give you press release, And I read it out, like, read this out loud and tell me, does anyone speak this way?

>> It was really funny because you know how technology companies are about the name of their products. It is the XYZ model, Gen 18, 78, 48 B. And when I'm more of a customer, I don't say the XYGZ and model 848B, I say the 48B is a really great thing. And this is an there's this like, Oh, you have to use our official naming. None of my videos, I do any of that. So when this product and this solution came out, everyone was like, just, it just did not feel natural. And I think that's one of the things that 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 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 natural, 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, who is this person I'm talking to?

>> And I think that the, because executive, they do these 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, if I had a dollar for every time a sales person said, oh, if I had the one perfect slide, no, it's not the one perfect slide, it's not, it's the volume of things that you sent out there that are digestible and some of them will hit. It's like, you know, we talk about the making a hit record, you don't, John Lennon and McCartney didn't sit down and say, okay, we're going to write that one song. They wrote 500 song. Now, they were outstanding, so they had a lot of hits. But it's about that. I think, as going said, these days, executive need anybody that has somebody to say, they just put a camera in front of you, record yourself and put it out there and getting into that rhythm. And then eventually, we'll develop your voice and people will start to latch onto that. That's the person that I'm going to buy from, I'm going to trust.

>> 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 hard.

>> Was it Steve Jobs that said, you know, if you can't present naturally from a falling deck of slides, then you know, you don't know your product or something to that effect. I don't want, 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 something to keep pacing the conversation like, Oh, I need to spend five minutes per slide. I'm on slide four, I'm running behind, then you speed it up. People can sense when you're not passionate about the thing. Well, either one, not passionate or two, not knowledgeable about theme that you're talking about, they sniff that out pretty quickly.

>> I have a slightly different take on slides in the Zoom world because I think that people can wing it when they're knowledgeable and are enthusiastic. Otherwise, most people are not very good presenter. And so sometimes having a good set of slides that get people engaged. You don't sit on a slide to your point for like 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, fantastic. Then they're not great presenters, and they put the one freaking slides with font eight.

>> (laughs)

>> And I'm like, trying to decipher what's on the screen and I'm not listening to them anymore, I'm done, with listening them 'cause I'm trying to read the slide. So I think the slides to your point, if you're a great presenter, you can, like watch a comedian, they don't need a slides, but they're awesome. I think comedians are the best. I mean, I watch a lot of comedians because I just love to see how they help hold the audience in their palm. And they craft their stories that would, and they get judged every 30 seconds, right? And when you're presenting, you get judged all the time. 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 kind of quantity and variety. You 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 'cause 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's a fail and I've published my manifesto, Jack Conte, 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 his answer to that is let the funnel be your friend to your point, Vittorio, just keep publishing. 'Cause you're not really sure which piece is going to hit and which isn't, 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, and you crank out, I just looked 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 and we should be respectful for people that are not speaking in their native language. You had a nice 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 by that, but you surely the authenticity process.

>> Don't worry to be judged in this world of media world that we live today, or you you're...

>> You're in trouble. (laughs)

>> Look, to me, I always try to, I always think about how do I get through to an audience, So the Italian funny thing that I did, it's part of the newsletter they were doing internally in VMware, which is confidential, but we get, I don't know, 15 newsletters a week from all the departments, who has time to read all this stuff. So I was thinking, 'cause I care about people paying attention for the better good of the team. I said, how about we make it a video? Okay, then it's just a video, you know, now we're seeing it, right? So that's how about, because I always watch other people doing and say, how about do it like Jimmy Fallon, and I have a green screen, so I put up and I do it as a show. Hey, Vittorio Viarengo, I'm your host tonight, and I have a great show for you tonight, what is this show? The newsletter for multicloud?

>> (laughs) And then I said, okay, these people have always have a corner a, recuring segment, right? And in the recurring segment that we're talking about what I says, how about, I'm Italian, so authenticity how about I de-mystify things about Italy and things that people do wrong in America about the Italian culture. And so I started Italian Culture Corner , and people give me feedback, right. And then now they're watching the multicloud newsletter.

>> Right, right. (crosstalk)

>> So it's a means to an end, right?

>> So I've struggled with this, but I believe not, I put out a good amount of content, but I struggle with kind of content envy. You ever look at some piece of content by someone like, man, that's a really great content. A great example is Corey Quinn, Corey does these brilliant pieces of content or that 'cause he's a comedian. And then he brings his skill as a comedian to his antagonist or protagonist, I don't know what to call his voice with AWS. And it really, but on the other end of the spectrum, I have my peers at like Constellation R, and everyone does this really great research and I look at it, oh man, I would love to 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, 'cause I wrote this piece 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. And I didn't publish the piece and I deleted the piece and now I look back and I really regret it, I'm like, I should've just put it out there, for the world to consume because to your point, you can't control what piece of content is going to go viral, no matter how much time, like some of the stuff that I put my heart and soul to hit like a iron and then like some random thing that's been 15 minutes when was the theme that goes viral and viral that I'm mostly known for.

>> But I think there are two things that impact, how a content is going to be successful or not. The first one is that appetite and the taste 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. So I optimize for five minutes. Now, if you do a five minutes video on Facebook, it doesn't get any views because Facebook wants people to stick to it, so you have to be at 15 point an hour. So that's 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 and somebody said to me, hopefully I will not probably get too politically incorrect, but somebody told me once about marketing. The marketing is like a freaking Mexican menu, is all the same crap, you just like, all the same ingredients.

>> It's all mixed up in different ways.

>> There's a quesadilla, here's a burrito, here's a tortillas, it's the same things inside. But you slice and dice it for the size and the type of format that media requires.

>> So I think one of the huge things that you're so right, people are missing, right? It's 2021, do you go to the restaurant or did they bring it to you? You know, do you go to Amazon or did they bring it to you? So you know, to take your content to the person, 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 a hundred pieces of content, a hundred. Each one of those have a title, a description and image, often a video, often there's audio associated with that. Hundred. 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 Joe Rogan. So I think there's this 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 bite right now.

>> Yeah. 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, you know, if we're honest, most people in our field are not going to watch a 15 minute video, they're not. They come to it on LinkedIn or Twitter, they discovered via social. They, you know, they're just on social to get their updates. So they want 30 seconds to two minutes chunks, take the meat part of the thing, the 20 minute video, chop it into five, 10 segments and targeted towards those audience that wants, if somebody wants to watch the whole 20 minutes and there's a subset of 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 10 to 20% of my audience sees a single piece of content at any one time. And if I keep sending it out to them and remixing it, there's this perception, there's like this infinite pool of content.

>> There's a small booklet from Gary Vaynerchuk called "Crushing It," that talks about how you start a blog or something like that. Now, 12 years ago, when I started my baking blog, I'd build built over the years of maybe 200 video recipes. Most of them are original from my family 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 unless people are true original fans, people think I'm still there for using stuff, I've done nothing for four years, but you know, my brother-in-law answered all the question. The other thing is, I think is important about content and in B2B is not as important because there's not a much as much interaction, but in B2C you have to produce content, decent quality on a regular basis, and then answer every question you'll ever get from the community, otherwise the community doesn't grow because they speaking about the this, they want to engage with you, so you have to answer the question. You have to engage with them, otherwise they did 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 out and find it. 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, it's Monday morning, no one's going to 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 what I would push back a little bit, Vittorio, I think you can't 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, pretty good. And you'll 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 4th of July. And you see, so feed the AI, do all your proper tagging, and it's going to 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?

>> Menlocreek.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, shouldn't be hard to find, but menlocreek.com I have a form.

>> And Vittorio, if people want to just learn out whether it's baking or multicloud, what platforms can they find you on.

>> I think LinkedIn is probably the best right now. Look for a Vittorio Viarengo and you'll find me there.

>> All right. If you want to find out more about the CTO visor, you can follow us on the web, thectoadvisor.com for slash rote dash trip, 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 @CTOadviser on Twitter. DM's are open if you're curious about what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Talk to you next, CTO dose from the road.

>> Adios.

>> That was great.

>> All right. Cool, man.

>> Thank you, thank you for hosting us.

‍