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Tech Field Day

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Surprise! Facebook Shares Dramatically Improve Reach, Clicks, and Views

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been streaming video of our Tech Field Day presentations on Facebook Live in addition to our web site. All this time, we’ve been advising our presenting companies to share our Live video post to increase viewership. Although it’s obvious that this would increase viewership, we thought we would share some hard numbers to prove it.

More shares leads to more reach (X-Axis) and viewership (bubble size)

The bubble chart above shows what happens when companies share our Live event video posts: Reach and viewership dramatically improves. Our “baseline” is indicated as one share and colored gray. Additional shares uniformly increase reach and viewership. Our best-performing video posts had at least two additional shares, with that one purple bubble shared 8 times and generating over 600 video views.

Shares Generate Views

Over the last five events, our own posts sharing a Live Tech Field Day presentation video generated a median 623 “people reached” and 108 “video views”, according to Facebook. This is pretty strong, considering this is a single post to our Tech Field Day Facebook page. With 1,370 “follows” currently, this means that nearly half of our audience has each Live video added to their stream, and over 10% are watching at least some portion of it.

Each additional share generates about 525 more “reach” and 114 more “views”. In other words, a single share will likely double the views for a Live video post! Yet 12 of the 29 video posts included in this study were not shared by the companies presenting. But it’s not too late! This is “evergreen” content, and we have seen excellent viewership of these videos months and even years after the event. All it takes is a fresh share!

Clicks Require Shares

Interestingly, Facebook “clicks” seem to require post shares. This is logical, since a post share shows differently in the timeline, encouraging a click. But even page posts generate a few clicks: Our median click rate is 2.4 per Live video post.

What happens when a company, person, or page shares a Live video post? Median clicks went up by an amazing 25 per post, excluding our 2.4. This shows the impact of a shared post in a stream, with different behavior on the part of Facebook users.

Field Day in Facebook

We were skeptical about using Facebook for the enterprise IT content from Tech Field Day. But the viewership of our videos is incredibly strong. That’s why we added Facebook Live video to our page, and why we’ll continue working in Facebook to engage our Field Day audience.

This study includes 29 full presentations at five Field Day events in 2017. Overall, there were 5,753 video views and 26,796 “reach” for these posts.

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Storage Field Day Exclusive Comes to Pure Accelerate 2017

Foskett Services is proud to announce that we are bringing the Storage Field Day experience to Pure Accelerate 2017! On June 12 through 14, nine Tech Field Day delegates will head to San Francisco for exclusive briefings and direct engagement with Pure Storage executives and customers. This is part of our Field Day Exclusive program, which tailors our event for a single company.

In the past five years, Storage Field Day events have generated exceptional technical conversations seen and heard throughout the enterprise IT community. The event series brings the most innovative and influential companies together with independent technical experts to facilitate these conversations. And our pro video team captures and shares these discussions with a worldwide IT audience through our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and web site.

As Pure Storage expands their Accelerate conference, it was natural that we would bring an exclusive Storage Field Day event to the event. Nine prominent storage experts will join the presenters from Pure Storage in San Francisco to hear the latest announcements and technical deep dives on their all-flash storage portfolio.

Pure Storage has made many exciting moves in the enterprise storage world, including the launch of the first all NVMe flash storage array, the FlashArray//X, earlier this year. The Storage Field Day Exclusive delegates will get a front row seat on this kind of innovation. Combined with their technical questions and industry perspective, the event truly has its own unique voice in the enterprise IT landscape.

This year, Pure Accelerate will be in San Francisco from June 12-14. This Storage Field Day Exclusive event is poised to stand out in an event already expected to have its own share of interesting speakers and presentations. Watch our web site, YouTube channel, and Facebook page for video from the event.

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Tech Field Day Viewership Rockets Forward in 2015

Last year, we were thrilled to report that video viewership had reached 750,000 views over five years of Tech Field Day. This year we’re proud to report that we’ve more than doubled that number: In 2015 alone, Tech Field Day videos on YouTube and Vimeo were viewed more than 839,000 times! This brings total viewership to just under 1.6 million views in six years. And our live stream viewership is extremely strong as well, with over 10,000 different people tuning in live in the last six months of 2015.

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839,000 YouTube and Vimeo Views

Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!
Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!

When we started Tech Field Day, we thought the video recordings would mostly be a historical curiosity. But once we began posting them to YouTube in 2012, viewership really took off. Today, Tech Field Day sponsors are as excited about reaching our 5,000 YouTube channel subscribers as they are to talk tech with our delegate panel.

Overall, Tech Field Day has almost 1,400 videos online. Although we have a few videos with truly amazing viewership (Cisco and Dell both have videos with more than 20,000 views), our average viewership is very impressive at over 1,100 views per video on average.

The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market
The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market (click to enlarge)

We have always wanted to keep the Tech Field Day videos open and free to view, so we have resisted any kind of registration or tracking. But our presenters often wonder just who out there is watching all these videos. With that in mind, we ran the demographic reports from YouTube and were unsurprised: The vast majority of our viewers are men between 30 and 50 years of age, predominately in the United States but also in English-speaking countries like India, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

10,000 Livestream Viewers

In addition to posting our recorded video, Tech Field Day added live streaming video in 2013. Since we didn’t have a registration page, we didn’t have much visibility into these viewers until Livestream updated their system (and our account) at the middle of last year. Now that we have more data, we can share some interesting statistics in that area as well.

Overall, the six events we live streamed since July attracted 10,035 unique viewers, as measured by Livestream. The average viewer watched for about 30 minutes, but many stayed much longer than that. There were a solid 100+ viewers watching at any given time, with the core audience interacting on Twitter and commenting that they felt like they were there in the room with us.

Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)
Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)

Once again, our strongest country for live streaming video was the United States. Our English-speaking event certainly plays a part in that, but time zones are a major factor as well: It’s very difficult to tune in to an event that runs from 8 AM to 6 PM Pacific time when that’s the middle of the night where you live! Yet we still had non-trivial viewership from India, Australia, and Japan, with some of these folks saying they rearranged their schedules just to watch the event live.

Thank You For Watching!

In summary, video engagement with Tech Field Day has been off the charts, dramatically exceeding our expectations. If you’re one of the 10,000 people who watched live or the thousands who subscribe to the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, we would like to thank you. Our event is dedicated to sharing knowledge and expanding the community, and that’s exactly what’s happening! We have many more events planned for 2016, and we hope to see you there!

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Join Tech Field Day at ONUG Fall 2015 in New York City

Next week, Tech Field Day travels to New York City to participate in the bi-annual Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Conference. Luminaries from the networking community like Martin Casado, Ken Duda, and Dr. Douglas Comer will be speaking about the latest advances in open networking. Attendees will get a chance to hear about industry changes that will affect the way they do their jobs in future.

Tech Field Day and ONUG have been working together since 2013
Tech Field Day and ONUG have been working together since 2013

We will also be producing our on-site Tech Field Day Extra event. Our select group of delegates from the networking community will get an opporutnity to dive deep into technologies from exciting new companies like Versa Networks and OpenSwitch, as well as hearing updates from great Networking Field Day presenters like CloudGenix and Cisco.

Tech Field Day Extra, as implied by the name, is a way for companies to gain extra engagement from industry event such as ONUG, Interop, and many more. The delegates that take part in Tech Field Day Extra represent some of the best and brightest voices in the community. Their expertise and viewpoints are very valuable perspectives for any company to consider.

Each one-hour Tech Field Day Extra session is recorded and the session videos are posted to the popular Tech Field Day Youtube channel. This helps continue community engagement after the event by increasing the reach of the message after a big annoucement. Tech Field Day Extra can help your company continue to be a community conversation long after your presentation.

ONUG Registration will be open through the event. It starts with ONUG Academy on November 3 before the main ONUG Conference on November 4 and 5.

This event marks our fourth collaboration with ONUG, dating back to 2013. We have been pleased to see the event grow and adapt as “open networking” moves from the lab to the datacenter, and always look forward future events. In addition to sharing video from our own Tech Field Day Extra presentations, we are working with the ONUG organizers to share video of some of their sessions for the first time. We expect that this additional visibility will help grow the event in the future.

We invite the public to stay tuned to our coverage of the ONUG Conference as well as Tech Field Day Extra at ONUG. We will be posting videos next week from our presentations as well as sharing the thoughts and observations of the delegates on our event page. We will also be using the event hashtag of #ONUGFall15 and #TFDX during the week, so please feel free to join in and add your voice to the conversation!

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Live Streaming Video Adds to the Tech Field Day Experience

Tech Field Day is a live, in-person event for the dozen delegates selected for each event, but as that term implies, a far greater number are represented. Indeed, our latest events have drawn a far-larger audience to the live video stream, and these viewers are joining the event via Twitter as well. This hybrid approach is unusual in the IT event world, and part of what makes Tech Field Day so special.

Storage Field Day 8 drew viewers from all over the world
Storage Field Day 8 drew viewers from all over the world, even beyond the English-speaking nations one would expect

Let’s look at the numbers for our recent Storage Field Day 8 event. Overall, 2,629 unique viewers tuned in over the three days of the event, October 21-23, 2015. Some of these are likely the same people using different computers or devices, but it’s safe to say that literally thousands of people were watching!

Our live stream was “on air” for 19 hours over the course of three days, but our viewers collectively spent 1,226 hours watching the event!

Although we have been suggesting that Tech Field Day events draw about 100 live viewers, this event exceeded that number by far. There was no “down hour” with less than 100 viewers, and some drew multiples of that number. It wouldn’t be fair to compare the statistics for each of the 10 companies presenting, but all should be happy with the live viewership of this event.

The Tech Field Day staff recognizes that tech talent and interest comes from all over the world, so we bring delegates from many nations to our events. Overall, about 1/3 of the Tech Field Day delegates come from outside the USA. Our livestream viewership similarly draws an international audience: 29.5% of viewers are outside the USA, with significant live viewership coming from Canada, European nations like Italy, the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as Israel, India, and Australia. Overall, live viewers in 49 countries tuned in for Storage Field Day 8.

Live streaming video is an important component of the Tech Field Day experience, to be sure. But it is only one of the many benefits of participating. Our recorded video viewership keeps climbing, with over 21,000 YouTube views that same week. We also recorded thousands of tweets, and are cataloging blog coverage on Facebook and Reddit. Learn more about Tech Field Day at our web site, and get involved!

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Storage Field Day 8 Brings the Enterprise Storage Industry Together

This week marks the largest Tech Field Day event ever. Storage Field Day 8 will see 10 companies, from hot new companies like Cohesity and Infinidat to industry stalwarts like Nimble Storage and Intel, present to our panel of independent delegates. These writers and speakers were brought from around the world to learn, discuss, and share insight with our presenters. Like all Tech Field Day events, Storage Field Day 8 will be broadcast live on the Internet for all to see.

SFD Logo

As implied by the name, this is the eighth Storage Field Day event produced by Foskett Services for Gestalt IT. With two focused events per year, this wraps our fourth year of Storage Field Day events and brings us close to the sixth year overall for Tech Field Day events.

In that time, Storage Field Day has seen the launch of exciting companies like Coho Data and Primary Data, who will both return for this event. We have also watched the development of Pure Storage, NexGen Storage, and Violin Memory, who have returned to the event frequently over the years.

Every Tech Field Day event features a delegate panel made up of of a dozen independent experts, and Storage Field Day 8 continues our tradition of mixing newcomers and familiar faces. Alex Galbraith and Josh De Jong are joining us for the first time, joining sophomore delegates Vipin V.K. and Jarett Kulm. This will be the third Tech Field Day event for Jon Klaus, Dan Frith, and Mark May. Rounding out the event are Field Day veterans, Ray Lucchesi, Enrico Signoretti, Scott D. Lowe, and Howard Marks.

Our delegates were selected by their peers through a process of nomination and voting. All were vetted on the basis of their technical expertise and storage focus and independent-mindedness. Becoming a Tech Field Day delegates is also a recognition for the contributions they have made to sharing their knowledge through social media and events. Most write popular blogs or contribute to industry publications, and many speak frequently at live or online events.

We invite the public to tune in for Storage Field Day 8 throughout the week. Live broadcasts will be hosted at the Tech Field Day web site and video will be shared on our YouTube channel. Those wishing to be part of the discussion can join in using the #SFD8 hashtag on Twitter.