Perhaps the most surprising, never-saw-it-coming event of my career was the decision to start a public-facing blog.
It all started when EMC blogger Chuck Hollis showed up at an internal EMC innovation contest trying to recruit corporate bloggers.
I wrote about this experience over fifteen years ago. After the laughter died down, all of the technology nerds began drilling Chuck with questions. Most of them went like this:
US: “Do you really think my manager is going to let me spend time blogging?”
Chuck: “What your manager tells you is only one form of input.”
I immediately like Chuck, and I was indeed intrigued. He recommended that I begin “practicing” by posting on EMC’s internal blog (which I did). It went well. My co-workers reacted favorably, because they were learning the origin of many of the products built previously at the company.
I asked one of the Vice-Presidents of my business unit what he thought about public blogging. He told me at Sun Microsystems the bloggers were the first to go whenever there was a layoff (because they were blogging instead of working).
That sealed the deal for me! I decided to give it a try. In an amazing twist of fate, EMC had an employee, Dan Schawbel, who went on to become one of the foremost industry experts on “personal branding.” Dan gave me amazing advice on how to start an external blog.
Some of the advice he gave me was:
- Blog as many days of the week as you can.
- Blog about something you are an expert in, so that other people that desire your expertise will subscribe to your blog.
- Put out excellent, thoughtful content.
- Name your blog appropriately. I chose “Information Playground”; the name reflected my enjoyment of working as part of an “information jungle gym”: 100+ companies acquired by EMC, all with amazing technologies and technologists.
- Comment frequently on other people’s blogs to cross-pollinate.
- Use the same name everywhere (“Steve Todd” instead of “Stephen Todd”) to enhance search results.
- Pick an image for your face that people will recognize as “your brand.”
I didn’t know what picture to use. At the time, Seth Godin (another blogging expert), was giving people advice on how to blog.
One piece of advice that he gave for selecting an image was “never wear a baseball hat. It’s unprofessional.” So I decided to use a picture of me in a baseball hat. At the time my family had been on a baseball vacation. I cropped the picture below and decided to use it as my picture for everything social media: Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I’ve been using it for nearly 17 years!
There’s many reasons why I love my particular social media image of me in a baseball cap:
- My wife Katy took this picture of my daughter and I watching a baseball game. I love my wife (and baseball too).
- We were watching my son Matthew playing at a national baseball tournament in Cooperstown, NY. I love him, too.
- I’ve got my arm around my daughter Becky. I love her a lot (and she was my favorite co-worker ever!)
So much love in one picture! Every time I made a post on social media, the love of my family was summed up in this one picture.
When Dell acquired EMC I made it a personal goal to get a picture of me with this baseball cap on my Dell badge. I was successful! (see below ;>))
And so I started blogging. And I made great friends, both inside the company (Chuck, Dan, Polly Pearson, Mark Twomey, Dave Spencer, Gina Minks, Dave Graham, Stu Miniman, Barry Burke, Chad Sakac, to name a few) and outside the company (Stephen Foskett, Ed Saipetch, Martin Glassborow, Devang Soni, Chris Evans, to also name a few).
I could have never predicted the benefits that blogging could bring.
- The company starting sending me on business trips to blog.
- I had direct connections to customers who had questions about our products.
- I got in trouble several times with EMC Executives. This raised my visibility just enough to get their approval to become a Fellow.
- I started to think a lot more. Anytime you push the “Publish” button, my company’s reputation (and my own!) were on the line.
- I made friendships with technologists, both inside and outside the company, that I otherwise wouldn’t have met. We visited each other all around the world.
- I received many requests for mentoring, which I obliged (and then I asked them to work on my projects!)
This decision eventually led me away from software engineering (but only for a while!).
After five years of blogging, my visibility was high enough internally to become EMC’s Global Director of Innovation. A couple of years later, the new CTO (current Dell Technologies CTO John Roese) asked me to run his messaging. I started visiting CIOs all around the world, telling them about the vision and mission of EMC. I took feedback from our biggest customers and fed it back to the CTO.
As strange as it seems, becoming a blogger was probably the best decision I made. Of course, I kept my finger on the pulse of software innovation and had many side projects and skunkworks.
Over time, however, blogging became mainstream, and I became less and less interested. Also, it’s tough to come up with content week after week.
And as my blogging career dwindled, my software engineering career resumed. And Data Confidence Fabrics resulted.
