(bright music) >> Hi, this is Donald Klein with CUBEConversations, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. We're here doing a special series on CMOs and the challenges of digital marketing, and today we're here with Peter Smails, who is the former chief marketeer at DatosIO. Welcome, Peter. >> Thanks for having me, always fun to be here. >> Good, good. Well look, so, I wanted to set aside this time and have a discussion with you, because you're somebody who's had a long marketing career, you've been in big companies, you've been in small companies, most recently with Datos. >> Yup. >> You've been in companies where you've had established brands with proven product stories. You've also been in situations where you've got companies that were sort of unknown to the broader world, and you had to find a way to make them known and prove out that proposition-- >> Put 'em on the map. >> Put 'em on the map. So talk to us a little bit about how you've approached that challenge when you've been in some of the smaller companies. >> Sure. Sure, happy to do that. And yeah, my past has been an interesting mix of big companies and small, and the small companies present a bunch of unique challenges, but there's nothing more fun than having the opportunity of having a company that's got some great technology, some great people, and essentially the fun job of any marketeer is, how do you put them on the map? And we've been talking a lot about, what are the levers you can pull? What can you do? And one of the challenges with being a small company is you don't have any money. >> Mm. >> I mean, you might, but you don't have a ton of money. So, that's where social, right off the bat, if I sort of look at the levers I can pull initially, when you look at your strategy, OK, I need to put the company on the map so I've got to drive thought leadership, I've got to drive awareness. You know, I've also got to drive demand-gen. So what are the levers I can use, what are the vehicles that I can use to drive that? And I think that's where social has, a lot of people think of social as the new demand-gen vehicle. I don't necessarily see it that way, I think social has actually become an ideal complement to all the other traditional levers that you still want to use. And again, there's segmentation that comes into this as well, in terms of what organizations you're trying to target. Are you going after SNB, are you going after the enterprise, et cetera. In my case, it's primarily been going after the enterprise. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, when I look at that from a social standpoint, social media in general sort of the value of it is really as a complement to the other traditional levers that you have in your arsenal. Whether that be events, industry events, whether that be traditional demand-gen things, outcome type things, social becomes an ideal complement for promoting those things, and then social also becomes a very important pillar in the sense it removes sort of the barrier to entry in terms of being relevant if you will, because it's a very cost-effective way of creating a drum-beat of news. And again, we can get into more specifics, of the different aspects of that, whether it's traditional social, like the twitters, whether it's videos and that type of things, the different pieces you could use in there. >> OK. So, now, talk a little about the role of events. One of the challenges with the smaller companies, you don't have the big event budgets, you don't have the big booths, but still now, you say digital, you often hear some companies talk about how we're going to try to go all digital. Because that's a place where we can play, because even if we don't have the money. But digital is a crowded space, so did you strike a balance between events and digital? What was your thinking? >> That's a great question. And balance is exactly the right word. It's going to vary, there's no sort of exact science, but you have to be selective, again, going into an enterprise clientele, you have to be selective about the events that you're going to do, number one. Digital is a very good instrument, particularly as a small company, this is a point I didn't make before, the whole notion of inbound versus outbound as well. Where digital can play a very key role from an inbound standpoint, think simple things like SEO and SEM. Can people find you? Are you relevant? The early adopters are the people that know they have a problem, so they're going to look for something. So you can very cost-effectively make yourself relevant there if they know what they're looking for. And particularly, that's what's fun about creating a segment, is if you're doing something nobody else is doing, then you're playing in a potential blue ocean, where you're not competing at a very high cost, you're not bidding at a very high cost for some of the things you do, form say Google Ad Words or that type of stuff. So you've got your ability to be effective from an inbound standpoint, number one. To your point about the events, you absolutely need to do those events. Your core set of whatever segment you're in, whatever business you're in, you've got to be focused on those core events, because I still find that to be, that's where a lot of, enterprises, they still use events as one of the key places they go to learn, to educate themselves, to find out what's happening in the marketplace. The key is, how do you maximize your presence at those events? How do you leverage social to promote the fact that you're going to be there? >> Right. >> What do you do at the event? What can you do? And again, this is where we can come back and talk about things specifically like theCUBE, you know, where you can use vehicles like theCUBE very effectively, because, one, I can drive a lot of influence in-show, but then as well I can create a much longer tail, I can maximize my presence, I can maximize the IP that I bring to that show by capturing that in digital medium, like video, and then being able to use it post. Simply put, you go to a show these days, if you're not on theCUBE, then you're missing the boat. It's just sort of like a regular pillar of all the core industry shows. So that's great for driving influence, not only to customers, but within the industry, but then it also is a great way for creating assets that I can then use for longer tail. For thought leadership, or demand-gen, or whatever I may want to use. >> OK, understood, understood. So let's talk a little bit about this notion of complement. So what you're saying is that, you want to go to the events, that's where the belly-to-belly interaction is, that's where things are happening, right, and then you're using social to leverage up your presence at those events. >> Correct. Or to promote the fact that you're going to be there. Drive interest in people showing when you do a contest, or there's, you know, creative things you can do, but yeah, you're using social to basically drive awareness to the fact that you're going to be there. You're using social to promote you're in the session. You're on theCUBE, or whatever it is you might be doing. You're hosting an event that evening, an offsite event, use that as a way to complement the fact that you're at the event doing your belly-to-belly, great term, you're doing your traditional belly-to-belly get-together. >> Understood. Because we've heard people talk about it and say, social's great, digital is great, but it's also very crowded out there. And where you've got people's attention, where you've got people's mind chair is in and around events. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. I would agree with that. And it's, you know, social is a great way, it removes the barriers to entry, but the flip side of that, for good or for bad, is that it also creates a lot of noise. So how do you separate the noise? How do you rise above the noise? And that really is, leveraging social, leveraging digital overall, in the appropriate high-credibility, high-integrity ways, to drive influence within the industry, to drive relevance of what you're doing, and then also use that as a vehicle for helping other demand-gen sites. So it's the new normal kind of thing. It's not the ideal platform, social, per se, is not the ideal demand-gen platform, but it is a complementary piece, but also to your point, creates a tremendous amount of noise, so then the challenge becomes, how do you basically stand above the noise? And that comes down to influence, that comes down to credibility. >> OK. >> Are you telling your credible narrative, are you talking to credible people, are you in the appropriate forums, that type of thing. >> OK, and so let's talk about video and how that kind of fits into that digital strategy. Cause that's kind of the new realm in terms of everybody wanting to kind of create digital content, in video form, what's been your experience in terms of the challenges of creating that content, and then getting it out in digestible forms? >> A couple different aspects to that. The creation of content is getting, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. The creation of video content is getting easier, if you will, in the sense of the cost of, you know, you can put a studio and a small business together reasonably inexpensively, but then what content are you creating there? Well, what content I'm creating there is essentially I'm going to promote what we're doing as a company, we're going to create some short little blurb about the recent launch or something, or potentially have a customer, although typically you have a customer, and you go visit the customer and do it there. But that's the stuff where you're sort of the self-promotional stuff. You know, where I find the events, in particular what you guys are doing with theCUBE in Silicon Valley, what I like about that is that the content that I'm creating, it's by no means sort of a pre-canned, sort of has a black and white beginning and end. It's very topical, it's very sound bite-ish in a good way, not a bad way, if you will, and it's also very topical. Very topical, which is key, because again, back to the whole influence, it's not just about hammering away at the customer, hey look at me, look at me, look how great I am. It's basically, you have to build a community, you have to build an eco-system, you have to build a community of people that know you, that trust you, and we talked earlier about the whole earned media versus paid media, if you build that credibility, you build that influence, like hey, saw you on theCUBE. Get an email from Fortune or Forbes, like, oh yeah, I saw you on theCUBE, we'd be interested in doing this, that, and the other thing and it all comes down to building that arsenal, if you will, or that library of high-credibility, high-integrity, high-influence content. Which is all video-based, because video is the way people consume information. >> So I think we'd agree with you, right, having content which is based on authentic interactions between a vendor and his customers, between vendors and partners, between vendors and analysts, right, that's really the key to making good, engaging content. Now what about, in terms of, how do you find getting that content out to individuals in a way that is kind of consistent with the way people are consuming content now in social media? I think we're seeing, there's a whole debate out there, long-form versus short-form content, clips, et cetera, what's been your experience? >> I don't know the number, but I'm quite certain that the average attention span of people in general is dramatically down. There'd be an interesting metric on that. So the world leans absolutely heavily towards, as I said earlier, more sound bite-oriented. But not sound bite in a bad way, it's just sort of, just look at the landscape we live in now, it's like, until recently, we lived in a 140 character world kind of thing. And you can convey a lot more through spoken word than you can just typing, but people consume things in very short bursts of information. So one, you want to take advantage of that. Two, the other thing I would say to this, is that one of the things I like about short-form video is again, I'm a big meta-data guy. In one five-minute, just in the conversation we're having now, we've covered eight different topics. >> Right. >> So to me, as a marketeer, I'm like OK, great, that's eight different-- >> Donald: That's eight different clips. >> Kind of thing, great, and I can use that for any number of different things I want to. One of those pieces that maybe was the part about so what are you doing now? Maybe the plug part could be, we could promote that, that could actually be a demand-gen thing. Or if you're talking about a segment where you're just like well how are you guys uniquely differentiated? You could use that for consideration. You know, there's all different ways, but the notion of sort of highly granular video content has huge value. >> Donald: Interesting, OK. >> It just creates a lot of leverage. >> So this has kind of been a blocking and tackling for marketeers kind of conversation, so kind of sum up your main points here, so one you were saying, use social to complement your presence at events and other types of-- >> And not just events, use it as a way of supporting demand-gen, use it as a way of staying relevant, join all the appropriate communities you need to be joining. You have to stay relevant, you have to stay within the noise, sort of as the table stakes, then beyond that, you got to figure out how do you rise above the noise, how do you use it strategically, to actually rise above the noise of everybody else's banging away on social as well. >> OK, agree with that. Second point then, use authentic content. Try to mix in relevant-- >> People are tired of just talking heads. People are tired of, I don't need to see another video on how great you are, or whatever, so back to your point, that's my interpretation of authentic content. Do what you do. Share what you do. Put it in context and smart people will figure out, and then obviously share it in the appropriate communities so that people can find it, but they very naturally, I think there's a very low appetite now for BS, 'cause there's so much noise. People are so hungry for just getting to the relevance of the information that they want, which again is where the sound bite-level stuff, and the more you can index and be intelligent about that data, the faster you can help people find information they're looking for. >> OK, excellent, alright, well we're going to have to wrap it up on that point but I think that was exactly right, I think we're seeing that in some of the customers we work with as well. So, leverage to social, focus on authentic content, get it out there in forms that people are willing to digest. >> Peter: Absolutely correct. >> Alright, well thank you everyone, this has been Donald Klein here with Peter Smails, former chief marketeer at DatasIO, with CUBEConversations. (bright music)