Social Media Posts

I’ve been working at SoftLayer for almost ten months now, in my relatively short tenure, I’ve written hundreds (if not thousands) of tweets covering a broad range of topics and events … As a Social Media Coordinator, it’s an integral part of my job. Given what I’ve learned about hosting in the past year, I’m constantly surprised by how second-nature this intimidatingly technical industry has become. I guess that’s what happens when you’re immersed in a technology-focused company like SoftLayer.

Beyond sharing technical news and content about what’s happening in the world of cloud computing, I’m also responsible for keeping our customers in the loop about all of our trade shows, conferences and events. If you’ve been to a technology trade show in the past year, you probably saw SoftLayer. We sponsor, attend or exhibit at more than sixty events every year, and it feels like I have been to them all. I know the ins and outs of every event on our schedule well before it begins, regardless of whether that event’s down the street or in an exotic location like Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam or London (Interesting fact: In the past week, we had events in all of those locations).

Social media is one of the ways our customers and followers can keep a pulse on SoftLayer’s activity and growth. We travel the world to share how we help customers Build the Future, and as a part of the social media team, I get to help introduce that conversation. Let’s use Internet World as an example.

Last week, a group of SLayers traveled to London to attend Internet World. To prepare for Internet World, I tried to schedule and share as much relevant content about SoftLayer with the #iwexpo audience to generate awareness and drive traffic to our booth. At larger shows like Internet World, we typically have a conference session or speaking engagement, and on the expo hall floor, you’ll usually see a crowd like this one milling around our booth:

The Server Challenge generates its own social media — from word-of-mouth “you’ve gotta try this” conversations at the show to the typical “social media” channels like Twitter and Facebook. The gamifiction of rebuilding a miniature SoftLayer server rack is one of those interesting, entertaining and innovative ideas that seems to be unique to the mad scientists at SoftLayer. Invariably, the competition “ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings,” and at Internet World, we had the most dramatic competition conclusion ever … But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

From a social media perspective, the folks who stop by SoftLayer’s booth want to watch the leader board as the show progresses. The expo hall may be open for several days, so it might be tough to keep an eye on the Server Challenge leader board … Attendees then trust us to keep them informed via social media. Every day, we post the latest times to beat, and when we look at our analytics, it’s wild to see the number of people clicking through to see the current top ten times. It doesn’t seem like much, but a few hundred people at Internet World wanted to know what this table looked like throughout the whole show:

The top two times you see on the final leader board caused the late-show dramatics. Joseph Waite clocked a fantastic 1:03.68 to secure the top spot on the board in the middle of Day 3 at the show, and Rob McEwen stepped up to the challenge for his Day 3 attempts about 10 minutes prior to the scheduled close of the expo hall. With about 25 onlookers, Rob stopped the clock on his second attempt with a time of 1:02.14 … Good enough for first place.

The problem: One of the drive trays was not installed all the way.

Because we want to make sure the winner has everything installed correctly in the fastest time, we had to add 5 seconds to his time for the mistake, and we gave him one more chance to complete the challenge to be fair to him. Unfortunately, the final attempt didn’t beat Joseph’s 1:03.68, so the new iPad was destined for Joseph. While Rob was a little bummed, he understood the reasoning for the decision, and he committed to stopping by our booth next year to win his iPad outright.

I was a few thousand miles away from all of this activity, but I felt like a major part of it given my social media involvement in tracking and sharing the latest updates. The best part of my job is when I get to interact with our customers, whether it be face to face or virtually. I want the messages you see on @SoftLayer and facebook.com/SoftLayer to be entertaining, interesting and helpful. We want you to feel connected to what’s happening at SoftLayer and what we’re all about.

Speaking of giving you insight into “what we’re all about,” I can’t wrap up this blog about Internet World without sharing a little “insider” information about the SLayers at the booth: They’re pretty competitive. They ran their own internal Server Challenge:

And if anyone is curious about the fastest time we’ve ever had in the Server Challenge, you can see it right there at the top of the list. Though to be fair, Kevin’s probably done it a few thousand times.

-Rachel

SoftLayer has a unique culture. As SLayers, we get company-inspired tattoos, we outfit ourselves (and our families) in SoftLayer gear, we take part in goofy videos, and every now and then, someone gets a shower of 10,000 bouncy balls.

Our company culture is no accident; it has grown organically from the day SoftLayer was born, and the executive management team has been instrumental in showing that it’s okay to have fun when you’re at work … and the company’s phenomenal growth speaks to that philosophy’s success. The latest example of tomfoolery came in the form of customized bobbleheads of many of members on the SoftLayer management team:

Because we happened to have ten extra sets of these bobbleheads, we thought some of our customers might enjoy building a collection of their very own. If you places a new order in the next few months and you’re one of the first ten SoftLayer customers to email your order information to the social media team at twitter@softlayer.com, we’ll send you that month’s “Bobblehead Bonus”:

• February 2012 – Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer
• March 2012 – Tom Blair, Senior Vice President Global Sales
• April 2012 – Nathan Day, Chief Scientist
• May 2012 – Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer
• June 2012 – Sam Flietman, Chief Operating Officer
• July 2012 – George Karidis, Chief Strategy Offcier

To keep everyone on the same page, here are the “official rules”:

1. One Bobblehead Bonus per SoftLayer account per month.
2. Order must be placed in the same month the bobblehead is requested.
3. Bobblehead Bonus request email must be sent to twitter@softlayer.com and it must include your SoftLayer account number, order number and the shipping address you’d like us to use.
4. The bobbleheads will be awarded on a first-emailed, first served basis.
5. Only 10 bobbleheads are available each month.

If the set I have in my office window is any indication, having a complete SoftLayer bobblehead collection will make you the envy of all of your friends and coworkers. The idea behind this fun little giveaway is to reward you for being an engaged, loyal SoftLayer customer.

Let’s be honest … You’ve probably been on the fence about ordering a new cloud instance or dedicated server, so what more do you need to hear than “Free SoftLayer Bobblehead” to get you to pull the trigger?

-@khazard

P.S. We’ve also got a few bobbleheads earmarked for employees who contribute to the SoftLayer Blog. If you’re a SLayer and you want your own set of bobbleheads, you better start writing!

This is a guest blog from Spot Influence. Spot Influence provides businesses with detailed information on who’s influential in the world of social media and what those influencers actually care about. This data, accessed via an API, enables companies to react faster with more information and, more importantly, to be proactive and execute a strategic social media plan.

Discover the People Who Drive Your Business

If you’re involved in marketing, you understand the importance of monitoring your business’s community online. You also probably know that engaging with the “Influencers” who speak to your intended audience can be critical to understanding their needs and spreading your brand’s message. But existing tools are limited in their ability to find these individuals. They don’t allow you to sift through the noise and discover the people who are already impacting your business online.

Spot Influence is a data service that provides granular, actionable information to businesses about their online audience and the people who are influencing them. With this data, business can discover the key influencers they need to be paying attention to and gain valuable insight regarding their existing customers: their online profiles, where they publish and engage with content, and what they care about.

Solving this problem at scale is incredibly challenging. We deal with vast amounts of unstructured data, processing tens of millions of URLs and creating terabytes of data every day. That’s why we’re excited to be a SoftLayer customer and a part of the Technology Partners Marketplace. SoftLayer enables us to cost-effectively scale our machines to meet customer needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about Spot Influence, please check out the following links and sign up for the Beta on our website!

Website: http://spotinfluence.com/
Blog: http://blog.spotinfluence.com/
Twitter: @spotinfluence

-Dave Angulo and Rich Grote, Co-Founders, Spot Influence

For better or worse, one of the most engaging posts on the SoftLayer Blog is “We are a No-Spam Network,” written by Jacob Linscott in June 2007. When it was posted, it celebrated a completely clear Spamhaus listing page – quite an accomplishment for a large hosting provider (for reasons I’ll illustrate below). Since the post was published, it has become a hotbed of conversation about any and all abuse-related issues. Google “SoftLayer SPAM,” and you’ll see the post show up as the second result, so a lot of Internet passers-by will come across the post and use the comment section as a platform to share abuse-related concerns they have for us.

That engagement is a double-edge sword: It’s good because we hear the concerns people have. It’s bad because the post was meant to be a celebration of the continuous work that the abuse department does, and uninitiated visitors seem to consider it a unilateral claim that we’ve beaten spam once and for all. In the course of responding to comments on that post, I shared an analogy to convey what it’s like to run abuse for a large hosting provider:

Given that illustration, the abuse team deserves a LOT of credit for the work they do behind the scenes. They are constantly investigating reports and working with customers to get remove any and all content that violate SoftLayer’s MSA, and too often, that can be a thankless job. Fighting abuse is an ongoing process, and while the nature of the beast might suggest the overall war will never be won, we’re always getting faster and stronger, so the individual battles are easier and easier to win.

-@khazard

This is a guest blog from the PeopleBrowsr team about Kred. Kred is the first social scoring system to provide people with a comprehensive, contextual score for their Influence and Outreach within interest-based communities.

We All Have Influence Somewhere

The social networking revolution provides the unprecedented opportunity to observe, filter and analyze conversations in real time. For marketers and anyone interested in human behavior, it’s now possible to examine the collective consciousness for insights into consumer behavior and detection and engagement with the most influential people.

Increasingly, we find that the elements that determine “influence” in online networks are the same as they are in “real life” relationships: Trust and Generosity within small close networks of friends and subject matter experts. These in turn have become the foundations for Kred, a brand new way to understand anyone’s Influence and Outreach across social media and within Communities formed around interests and affinities.

‘We All Have Influence Somewhere,’ so Kred sifts through billions of social posts from over 110 million people in real time to uncover who is most influential on any subject, keyword or hashtag. This all summarized in Kredentials, which displays anyone’s history on Twitter over the last three years with a single click, including their top communities, most used words, most clicked links and much more.

Here are just a few of the other ways Kred is an evolution of influence measurement:

Dual Scores for Influence and Outreach
Influence – scored on a 1-1000 scale – shows the likelihood that your posts provoke actions from others. Outreach demonstrates your generosity in ReTweeting and replying to others.

Community
Real influence comes from expertise and passion. Kred is calculated for everyone in Communities that naturally form around interests and affinities.

Complete Transparency
Visitors to Kred.ly can see how all of their social actions count towards their scores – and how their connections’ actions affect them as well. Those who want a more thorough accounting of their score can take advantage of our Score Audit feature.

Offline Kred
Kred is the only influence measure to integrate offline achievements with online identity. Visitors can add their accomplishments – anything from academic honors to club memberships – by sending us a PDF from the ‘Get More Kred‘ menu tab inside the Kred site. We will then hand score it and manually add points.

Kred is free for everyone at http://kred.ly and deeply integrated into Playground, PeopleBrowsr’s social analytics platform. For those who wish to build custom applications off of our datamine of 1,000 days of social data, Kred can be accessed via our Playground API, Kredentials API and through a standalone API.

Many key unique features of Kred – including score audits, privacy controls and real-time activity statements – are based on feedback from our community of friends and colleagues. What would you like to see in its next evolution?

Give Kred a try and let us know what you think via email: kred@peoplebrowsr.com or on Twitter: @kred.

- Shawn Roberts, PeopleBrowsr

If you’ve visited SoftLayer at a large conference this year, you probably came face-to-rack with our Server Challenge. Your task: Reassemble our miniature rack of SuperMicro servers in the fastest time at the conference. To do this, you need to install twenty drive trays in five servers and connect network cables in the correct switches to mirror the server rack setup on our data centers. If you’re able to score the best time, you win an iPad 2!

In the sometimes-boring world of collateral and T-shirts at trade shows, the activity around this competition stands in stark contrast. It’s been huge hit everywhere we go, so if you haven’t had a chance to try your hand at the challenge, I’m sure we’ll bring it to several of our 2012 shows. As a way of rewarding those of you who loyally follow our blog, I thought I could give you an advantage by sharing some tips for when you’re in front of the Server Challenge rack … And to give you an idea of how important these tips can be, look at how close the top two times were at ad:tech NYC:

That’s right. 17 hundredths of a second between victory and defeat. Now are you ready to take some notes?

The Start
When you start the challenge, don’t look at the timer to see if your time started … If it doesn’t start, we’ll stop you. By focusing your attention on the network cables or drive trays (whichever you choose to start with), you can save yourself a half of a second.

Network Cables
You don’t have to connect the network cables first, but I have to choose something to complete first, so the network cables won the coin flip. When you’re connecting the network cables, it’s best to grab all three cables of the same color and try to snap them in together. Plugging in the cables one-by-one requires three times the work.

Hard Drives
When you’re tackling the hard drives, the key is to line up the drives and have them installed completely before moving on. My tip for installing the drives is to tilt them in on a sideways angle, not at an upwards angle. If you try and tilt the drives upwards, you’ll most likely get the drive tray stuck and have to remove it to try again. If you can do it precisely, picking up two drives at one time has worked well, and our all-time record of around 54 seconds took that approach.

One last pointer: Lock them in place immediately after installing them. If you leave the latch open, it makes it harder to get neighboring drives installed, and it’s such a small incremental effort to close the latch that even if you perfect a “close all the latches” technique at the end, you’d still end up spending more time.

The Finish
Don’t forget to put both hands back on the timer to stop your time.

Now that you’re equipped with some of the best Server Challenge tips and tricks, we want you to start training. In 2012, we expect to see someone complete it in under 50 seconds … And that person probably will carry the all-time record home – along with a new iPad 2!

Keep an eye on our Event Schedule for upcoming shows, and if there’s a conference where you really want to see the Server Challenge, let us know and we’ll see if we can set it up.

Good Luck!

-Summer

Inspired by Robert’s NFL rival blog, I thought I’d contribute my own football-related post. Before I go any further, I should probably say, “PONY UP!” As a proud alumna of Southern Methodist University (SMU), I’m always happy to share where I sent to college, but when the SMU Mustangs take down our biggest rivals in football, you can bet that I’ll talk about it. For the past century or so, SMU has battled the TCU Horned Frogs for “The Iron Skillet,” and this season, that skillet headed back to Dallas (where it belongs).

In a HUGE upset, the Mustangs beat the Horned Frogs 40-33 in overtime to break a four-year losing streak. The past four years have been “rebuilding” years under June Jones, so this win over a quality, ranked opponent was even more significant … Which is clear since I’m still talking about this game in particular a few weeks later. But this lingering buzz is nothing compared to the roar of attention to SoftLayer’s international expansion.

We’re not exactly the “underdog” anymore, but October marked a huge step in the growth of our company when our Singapore data center and network points of presence in Tokyo and Hong Kong went live. The SoftLayer passport is starting to fill its pages with stamps.

As we put the finishing touches on Amsterdam, we have Softlayer staff on three continents, so day-to-day operations get a little more complex in some areas of the business. As a member of the social media team, I’ve been watching the clock a lot more these days … And that’s not to suggest that I’m counting down every day until 5pm (which isn’t really a “stop time” for me anyway since social media doesn’t turn off at the end of our time zone’s business day). What I mean by “watching the clock” is that I’ve had to start thinking about reaching customers on the other side of the world with relevant SoftLayer messages. I feel like I need five clocks above my desk like what you usually see in newsrooms.

When engaging in the world of social media, timing is everything. Whether it’s a matter of coordinating with a press release, trying to reach people in a completely different time zone, or just responding to issues, being where you need to be when you need to be there is 90% of the battle. When you think about it, everything in life comes down to that!

Sometimes events can be planned like SoftLayer’s global domination. Others catch you by surprise … like the SMU Mustang victory. As I get close to my three-month mark as a SLayer, I’m glad I was in the right place at the right time to join the SoftLayer team. I’m excited to see how our business is going to grow, and I’m looking forward to having to invest in more time zone clocks to keep track of the local times in all of our new data center markets.

Oh, and GO MUSTANGS!!

-Rachel

So much of our life has been moved to digital devices these days. Smart phones are one of many devices that have made an impression on our lives. Smart phones these days have become a must for most, whether it is for business or personal use, almost everyone has one.

On the plus side, smart phones enable users to conduct business from just about anywhere in the world. Access to email accounts, VPNs and other tools that make business move on a daily basis have become accessible from the palm of your hand. You can even administer your web server from your smart phone with the right application setup.

You’re carrying a small computer around in your pocket. It’ll be interesting to see what new devices will emerge in the market in the next few years. Tablets are becoming wildly popular, and mainstream consumers are starting to keep an eye on the newest innovations, joining the “tech geeks” in the “early adopter” line.

There are several players in this market with Google, RIM and Apple leading the pack, and dedicated fans rally behind each. With smart phones becoming so increasingly common, I’ve started wondering if it’s really for the best. Do we really need to check our e-mail every 10 minutes? If we’re not on Twitter, Facebook or one of our other social networks, will they be there when we get to our computer?

Being digitally connected all the time give us a false sense of “socializing” in the old school face-to-face sense, and that pull us away from those IRL (in real life) encounters. Numerous crashes have been caused by people texting or updating their statuses while driving, and there have been cases of people walking into a busy street while being distracted by their phones.

When it comes to technology like smart phones, how do you keep those devices from becoming a dependency? How do you keep yourself from letting them take the place of direct human contact rather? It’s something to think about as technology continues to evolve and permeate our lives.

-James

SoftLayer loves startups. The culture, the energy, the potential … It’s all good stuff. As you may remember from my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview and our Teens in Tech profile, one of the ways we support startups is through an incubator program that provides a phenomenal hosting credit and a lot of technology know-how to participating organizations.

In San Francisco, one of the flagship programs we’re excited to be a part of is called PeopleBrowsr Labs, a startup accelerator geared toward technology companies in the area. As you sit in the PeopleBrowsr office, the brilliance in the air is almost palpable … Young companies doing innovative things with everything they need to be successful at their disposal. One of the fringe benefits for participants in PeopleBrowsr Labs is that they’re actually rubbing elbows with the PeopleBrowsr team as well … Which is almost worth the price of admission.

In addition to the Labs sponsorship, SoftLayer is also the infrastructure provider for PeopleBrowsr and its unbelievable data mine of information. They’ve got every tweet that’s been tweeted since early 2008, and they’ve been able to take that content and make sense of it in unique and interesting ways … And that’s why we stopped by for a visit this week. Last night, PeopleBrowsr officially launched Kred, a dynamic and innovative social influence measurement platform, to a LOT of fanfare (see: TechCrunch).

In the midst of the launch-day craziness, we grabbed Scott Milener, PeopleBrowsr SVP of business development, to have him explain a little about Kred, what differentiates it from the other social influence measurements and what it means for users interested in engaging more effectively with their social networks. Check it out:

With the clear success of the announcement, we want to send a shout out of congratulations to the PeopleBrowsr team. It looks like a phenomenal leap forward in understanding social engagement, and we know it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’ll see coming out of the PeopleBrowsr office in the near future.

If you feel a little jaded by the social influence measurements you’ve seen, Kred’s transparency and community-centricity should be refreshing: http://kred.ly

-@PaulFord

There are so many different types of Social Networks nowadays: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Channels, the faded MySpace and recently popular Google+. They all have different features but are essentially used for the same purpose. Facebook is the largest player in the market, and every time it makes a change, the world collectively gasps … And a lot of people start yelling.

When Facebook launched back in 2004, it was designed with college kids in mind. I remember when you HAD to have a college email address to set up a Facebook account – the good ole days. A year or two later, Facebook created a separate section for high school students, and not too long after that, anyone on the planet could get a Facebook account, and the growing/changing audience necessitated changes in the platform.

Facebook is a great way to find old friends and catch up, and it’s also an easier way to update everyone all at once what you are doing. I found out my best friend was engaged on Facebook … That’s right. I found out by Facebook before I got a phone call. Facebook is like a drug – it’s addictive. Some people live there all day.

If you work for an IT company, you know that technology is constantly changing. To keep up with evolutions in technology and perceived needs of the growing user base, Facebook will update its platform every few months. If you have a Facebook account, you’ve probably noticed that they released a new layout this week. You’ve probably also noticed all of your friends’ status changes complaining about how they hate the way it looks, how “It’s too hard to use.” Those friends hated the old “new Facebook,” and somewhere down the road, they’ve learned to love and/or depend on that “new Facebook” which is now in the “old Facebook” category. It’s pretty annoying right?

Here’s my advice for the change-averse:

1. If Facebook didn’t change, it would get stagnant and someone else would introduce something better … The same way Facebook supplanted MySpace. DEAL WITH IT.
2. If you don’t like the changes Facebook makes, DELETE your account and move to a new Social Network like Twitter or try out Google+.
3. Instead of complaining how hard the new Facebook is to use, take the time to READ the instructions they have provided for you … From a desktop you are able to mouse over a section and it will tell you what it means and how to use it.
4. Last but not least – whining is for babies and last time I checked you were in your 20′s, 30′s, 40′s, and up – so suck it up!

Whew! Now that felt good …

- Natalie