Podcasts about poppulo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive. I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications. I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side. David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage. Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams. For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now?  Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo. Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave.  Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right? Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology?  And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive. You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right?  Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time.  So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left.  It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again.  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it.  We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good.  My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established. Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool. So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate.  Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office.  So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer? Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home? I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things. So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it.  When you say customer-facing, how do you define that?  Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment. What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar.  How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define. You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that?  Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible? So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera.  To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful. I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate?  Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage.  Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling. I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on.  Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security.  Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios.  If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure  So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process?  Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth. They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned.  It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey? Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey.  There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years.  Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage?  Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business. Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It's a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.  I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit.  I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed. Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo.  It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff.  Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well.  At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base.  You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team?  Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion.  But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America.  Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore.  The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market.  Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America. Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for.  Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match?  Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees. So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss.  Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade.  Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays.  Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing. Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything. Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees. But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that.  The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration.  Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real?  The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth. There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience. You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing?  Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization.  Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be? Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense. Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time.  I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base.  I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there.  Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it. The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution.  So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters.  All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com?  Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together. All right, Joe. Thanks again!  Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.

Jennifer Didier interviews Samantha Bufton on how she has leveraged her skills to assist her in building her career.  Her journey will take us from her arts and English literature start to COO of Poppulo.  A little more information about Samantha Bufton: Highly-accomplished business, product, and innovation leader adept at growing global business lines via sophisticated B2C/B2B, product, and technology strategies. Over 20 years of success driving transformational growth for organizations of all sizes. Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIN.

Chris Keefe, Chief Product Officer at Poppulo, joins me to discuss the topic on this live recording of "The Business Storytelling Show."We touch on: How AI impacts corporate communicationsHow to use AI tools to your advantageWhat downfalls should we look out for?And more... This episode is supported by Zen Media and produced by Trappe Digital.

LifeBlood: We talked about the difference between going to work and getting work done, the shift from the Great Resignation to return to work, how to ensure good communication during uncertain times, and how to think wisely about important decisions, with Eoin Byrne, Chief People Officer of Poppulo.     Listen to learn why a four-day week once a month could be the right return-to-work strategy for your organization! You can learn more about Eoin at Poppulo.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Thanks, as always for listening! If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review here: ​​https://ratethispodcast.com/lifebloodpodcast You can learn more about us at LifeBlood.Live, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook or you'd like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood.Live.  Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates. Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffee. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifeblood

Our guest today is COO, President, and Board Member of Poppulo, Samantha Bufton. Samantha has successfully driven transformational growth for organizations of all sizes for almost 20 years. Prior to joining Poppulo in 2022, Samantha served as EVP/ General Manager of Momentive-AI's (formerly known as SurveyMonkey) survey business. She joined Momentive as a product leader […] The post Ep. 261 – COO, President And Board Member Of Poppulo, Samantha Bufton appeared first on COO Alliance.

Our guest today is CEO, President and Board Member of Poppulo, Samantha Bufton. Samantha has successfully driven transformational growth for organizations of all sizes for almost 20 years. Prior to joining Poppulo in 2022, Samantha served as EVP/ General Manager of Momentive-AI's (formerly known as SurveyMonkey) survey business. She joined Momentive as a product leader […] The post Ep. 261 – CEO, President and Board Member of Poppulo, Samantha Bufton appeared first on COO Alliance.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There have been a few companies that have come along in recent years offering a platform that used templates, image library and stored data to largely automate the production of videos - but few if any of them had their heads wrapped around how that might work with and for digital signage networks. A Louisville, KY start-up is taking a run at the concept, and the big difference with Adificial is that its CEO and co-founder started and ran a digital signage software company for many years ... so he has his head around the desire for content automation when it comes to videos that find their way to screens. Some listeners will know Brian Nutt as the founder of Codigo, which had built up a strong and interesting business focused mainly on regional banking. That business was acquired in 2018 by Spectrio, which now also owns and publishes Sixteen:Nine, and Brian spent a few years away from the business, before thinking about and pulling together Adificial. It's a platform that uses web services and the scalability of cloud computing to enable HTML5-driven motion media files to be generated quickly and easily, by the hundreds or thousands. At scale, a motion file unique to a person or place can cost only pennies. Nutt is a digital signage guy, but he's launching Adificial with a focus on media embedded in staff and customer emails. That makes sense, as the idea is that this platform can generate many thousands of custom videos for emails, versus the dozens or maybe hundreds that might be needed by a digital signage network that wants different messaging for, let's say, each store in a chain. But the capabilities are there to make this relevant for digital signage. Have a listen. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT David: Hey, Brian. Thank you for joining me. For people who don't know you or maybe recall you from your past, can you give me your background and what you were doing with Codigo?  Brian Nutt: Sure and great to talk to you again, Dave. Codigo was a digital signage company that I founded back in around 2004, so set up kinda early on in the trajectory of digital signage. That morphed into us introducing a number of different retail media products, interactive kiosks, overhead music, on-hold messaging, all that type of, and we had a focus on financial institutions, really, like regional, local banks and credit unions. Although towards the end there, when I sold Codigo in 2018, we had installations around the world and all sorts of different industries from restaurants, universities, office complexes, and all the places that you would see a digital sign installed today, or retail media, as I said.  Did that and sold that in 2018, took a few years off and launched this new project which is pretty exciting.  David: So what is Adificial?  Brian Nutt: Yeah, so Adificial really began I guess in terms of me thinking about this back before I sold Codigo, so Codigo and I think like a lot of digital signage products, at least today, maybe not back then, but we had the pretty robust online content engine for creating content that could be either sent down to a kiosk or digital signage or any of the devices, whether it was on-hold messaging or any of those things, you could create the content on the web, and so I had this idea that might be an exciting product as a standalone product. We never launched it, and it's probably a good idea because folks like Canva came along, and Promo and these other products came along, and they did a pretty good job so I'm glad I didn't do it, but after little time off, I was still thinking about the product and just how video is forcing businesses to do things differently, and this requirement today to personalize content for folks that are your customers or are interested in the product. So the idea of an Adificial is to solve the problem that's traditionally been around video, which is, it's expensive, it's time-consuming and yet the requirement of it by consumers continues to race forward daily, and then the age today where data, people are willing to share their data with brands freely and why is video passive still? Why is it that it's audience-based where I press play and I watch it and Dave gets the same video as I do, even though we have totally different lives and we live in different spots and have different ages and all those things.  It's this idea that you can make videos personalized with data. What I know about you, I should be able to map brand assets, audio, video, and language even, and insert interactive elements, calendar invites, pdf, downloads, buttons, and anything like that into the video. So it's fully interactive and engaging in ways that just really haven't been largely available and at reasonable rates. David: So this is a content automation platform?  Brian Nutt: Yes. I would wrap it up by saying we're not in the marketing automation space. We're not trying to compete with Mailchimp or anything like that, what we're trying to do is automate the production of the video with data and available assets and return that piece of content back to the market automation platform that would then send it out, primarily via email, although I can see this transition to social and SMS in any other way that you communicate to consumers.  David: So if I'm running a digital signage network, and I have a hundred different stores and I want a video for each of those stores, but I want it localized to each of those stores, instead of getting an agency or in-house designer to generate a hundred different videos, you would run it through this and it would use data to generate those hundred videos? Brian Nutt: That's a decent comparison, but this product's really not built for digital signage. So imagine a little bit bigger than that. You know the value of data on your consumer today is tremendously high. So if you have a CRM that has 10,000 people that are either current customers or leads or somewhere along the customer journey. What we do is we could produce videos for all of them and you insert video into your marketing stack, into the customer journey and send it out via email.  David: Oh, okay. Are the files not big enough to run on a large format screen?  Brian Nutt: They could, and in fact, when I initially started this, the idea was to send content to any device, but we've narrowed that down and focused on market automation platforms. But there's no reason it couldn't morph into a digital signage play. It's just not today.  David: Right, because there's more scale in those and it's just a bigger business.  Brian Nutt: Yes.  David: So it's one of those things like Poppulo, App Space, and some of these other companies that are starting to blend platforms, where it's one stock that can send to a digital screen, that can also send to a smartphone, to a tablet, to a website, whatever. It would kind of plug into that kind of thing.  Brian Nutt: Yes, and here's the other reason that I've gotten into this, and I'm a huge believer in power digital signage, obviously. But at Codigo, our growth was really built around this incredible drive to build more stores, more locations, more branches in the banking space, and so we leveraged that and grew off that and really benefited from it. But today what's happening is, in fact, I was looking just recently, they're suggesting that in the next five years, 50,000 retail stores will close. Since 2009, when we were going into the great recession, banks and credit unions numbered about 15,000 total, that's not branches. Today, there are about 7,000. So it's this consolidation and push not including the number of locations that close during the pandemic, what 20,000 retail stores, something like that.  So what's happening, in my opinion, is the store or branch does a couple of things. One, it's meant to educate a person in person on the product, build trust, and sell products. But if stores are closing, people aren't going to the store, how do you communicate to them personally and to me, the conversation today is done in data. If I'm willing to give a brand my data, trust them with that, even if it's unreasonable. I'm not going to the store. I never wanna meet a person that's going to tell me about a shoe or a bank loan or whatever, but that doesn't mean I don't expect you to communicate back to me with things that are specific to me, to help me learn about products, build trust, and ultimately sell me something. So that's taking it from the digital science in-store installation, that's the next progression of what we're trying to solve.  David: It's another output.  Brian Nutt: Yeah, exactly.  David: So how does this work? Brian Nutt: I guess, where do you want me to start? It did take quite a while to figure it out honestly. You start with this gigantic idea and then try to distill it down into something actionable. So that's where we are now.  But at the finest level, it's really not that dissimilar from digital signage. It's just one level deeper in how you're delivering the content, so you know the right time, right place, right person, all those things. And a large well of content that's either procured the third party ShutterStock, et cetera, or first party to the brand and then using technology to map these pieces of content to data, and data could be something like just knowing your name and having it be, “Hello Dave”, and so if the first name equals Dave, then show the text Dave on the first screen and if language equals Spanish, say, “Hola Dave”, and that's really what it is.  It's mapping data smartly to assets, no matter whether it's something as simple as text or a background image or a video, things like that, and then you stitch those together based on where you are in the process towards, or whatever it's you're involved in. It could be something like onboarding an employee. It could be obviously selling someone, onboarding them on a product, or following up with a customer service issue, and you do it at scale. Because you can automate it.  David: So if you have the data tables, you have the image assets, and you have maybe some core templates, you could conceivably generate 10,000 videos that are all tailored to each individual? Brian Nutt: That's exactly right.  David: Are you dependent on templates? Brian Nutt: Again, it's very similar to digital science in many ways. So what we're doing, just like we did at Codigo, is leveraging a high degree of design skill and allowing folks to manipulate that as they choose. Now we've done a couple of things a little smarter this way, which is we're building in functions where we call it a branded function, which I guess is kinda out there in the market in software where you just click a button and it'll map your brand assets the best it can to template that we're building, but the same thing with Codigo is that we have a pretty high-end content editor that allows you to build whatever you want.  David: Do you need to have graphic design skills? Brian Nutt: Not a high degree of them. As I said, it's very similar to what we did at Codigo from a user experience perspective. David: So you wanna have somebody using this who has some core design chops and knows not to use Comic Sans for a font, or use pink and everything?  Brian Nutt: Exactly. I can barely sign my name much less, create a piece of content that's gonna be sent out to thousands of consumers and I'll never do that. But the thing about this is not the design skills. It's meant to be, the whole set it and forget it attitude, which is once we have content mapped and I have the data that's associated with different pieces of content, and I have the story, we call it a story setup, and maybe I'll give you an example: If they use a CRM and I have David Haynes who showed interest in Red Wine and you wanna join the wine club, the Friday Wine Club at the local wine establishment. So you show interest in that, and in their CRM you meet a condition that says, “Hey, Dave just joined the wine club” and what traditionally happens is when you meet that condition, you're sending an email and the email says, “Hey Dave, thanks so much for your interest in the wine club”, and it's got a picture or something of it, there, and maybe it shows people what the wine club. Well frankly, that's boring. So what we wanna do is take that same approach and it's all that is: a form, it's all merge fields. “Hello, first name” - it just that it happens to be Dave. “Thank you for your interest in Product ID” - wine club, or whatever that it might be. Brian might be a white wine drinker, but it all comes from the same engine, so it's effectively a similar approach. We're taking data from those systems, current systems, we're not trying to be a CRM and mapping that to assets that we have, whether they're the first party to this, in this case, the wine club or something that we've provided you from a third party library, and then turning that into video, right? Stitching each of these assets together with dynamic fields that represent, “Hey, Dave, thanks for your interest in the wine club. All the red wine drinkers are meeting down the road on Friday afternoon. Come by. Would you like to attend?” You could click yes.  David: Gotcha. So this is rules-based, it's not AI?  Brian Nutt: Today, no.  David: So there's a plan? Brian Nutt: There's a grand plan.  David: So what are the outputs like? What's the output file?  Brian Nutt: The output file as well as a URL, and so what we're generating is a PURL, a personalized URL.  David: So it's not an mp4, it's not a video file of any kind, it's an HTML5 file? Brian Nutt: Yes.  David: Do you work in parallel with a CRM system or how do the two platforms play together?  Brian Nutt: Yeah, now we're going to beta in February. Today, there are a number of different ways to do it. You can either upload it yourself or you can, there are a number of systems that can automate the transfer of data, like Zapier, et cetera. And you map these just like anything else. If you have a list of people that meet conditions, like the Red Wine Club, you take that data and get it to our system. As long as we understand what the fields are, then we can choose the correct content to weave together and return it back to you as a PURL, which can then be sent out as an email. David: How seamless will it be?  Brian Nutt: It should be very seamless. Take any system, let's take Mailchimp for example. There are custom fields and automation that allow you to insert links into an email template or a landing page. So we're routing on top of those existing systems and the features that they have and so once you have that, you can have a custom record for each person, like Dave O'Brien or whomever that updates itself, and when those conditions are met, it knows to send the email.  David: So would you use APIs or would you use middleware like you were mentioning like Zapier?  Brian Nutt: That's the first way to do it. Oddly in the financial space, it's more of a security requirement. Rather than doing that, oftentimes I'll just use SMTP, which seems old school, but there are reasons to do so, like man-in-the-middle attacks, and things like that. But there are ways to do this. Now, do we wanna integrate with as many systems as we possibly can? We'll let the market dictate that.  David: Because it's HTML5, is it responsive?  Brian Nutt: Responsive to the size of the device? Is that what you mean, like web responsive?  David: The screen resolution, and if it's going out on Facebook, it's a 4:3 square and if it's going out on a larger screen, it's a 16:9 rectangle?  Brian Nutt: Yeah, again, it's very similar to the product we had with Codigo, which is, you can do custom resolutions, you can do whatever you want, but then again, it's gotta be responsive to the area of the device, or in this case, the browser, whether that's mobile or your laptop or tablet or whatever.  David: So when you look at this from financial aspects, what's the benefits argument of doing this versus producing individual videos? It's pretty obvious, but tell me nonetheless.  Brian Nutt: As I said, producing videos is incredibly expensive, and I've termed it the content gap, which is what I call, it's the distance between what consumers require in video - and they want everything in the video - and what businesses can reasonably produce. So it's not just the cost, a lot of times people outsource this stuff, and then it's got a shelf life.  But with what we're doing we think we can reasonably produce hundreds of thousands of videos, for pennies on the dollar, and I say video because that's what people understand, but it's actually HTML that you render, that's the other component that is good. It's favorable. Now, will that be something that every brand wants? Do they want rendered videos? Sure, there might be folks that require rendered video, and maybe we'll do that at one point we actually did, at Codigo, we ended up using a very similar approach. Then we built a rendering engine that rendered as HTML5 to true video. But today it's HTML5 and it's just from hosting to production to the delivery of it, it drives the cost down to prices that were impossible. David: So when you go to market in a couple of months, two or three months, what am I paying? Am I subscribing to something? Am I buying an enterprise license? Brian Nutt: It's a SaaS model, and it's usage-based too. So it's a tiered-based model similar to the digital signage space, there definitely be some content creation elements to it where we assist clients if they need the content made, and you probably remember at Codigo we did that as well. It's the same approach here, and it really depends. It's hard to give you a specific pricing point. But I think most customers will probably land somewhere between $500 and $1500 a month. That's where I think it would be. It could be far higher, depending on usage.  I was at a trade show recently and there's a customer of mine, who said that they sent out emails last month. Well, If you make 140,000 videos, it might be a little higher, but that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to do the same thing as the last business, which may get a very attractive price that they can leverage.  David: So that's the scale argument why it makes more sense for a cable company or a phone company or power company, something like that, that has tens of thousands of subscribers and customers versus something like a digital signage network, which as I said, might have a hundred iterations of a similar ad, and you don't get the same economies of scale from. Brian Nutt: That's right, and in a lot of ways I feel like this is very similar to when I started Codigo. I remember telling people, I'm going to replace printed posters on the wall with flat screens, and they're like, what? And I'd say it's called digital signage. They'll say, oh, you mean like those LED, those red blinky lights that go across like that? I'm like no. That's not what I mean, and I would go around with a 42-inch screen, and those things were heavy, and so it's almost the same thing where I have to show this to everyone so they can understand this, and go oh I can use this. There are all these different permutations of a relationship with a client or an onboarding of one or whatever it is and then they kinda get it so that's where we are. David: Yeah, that's very familiar to me. Years ago, back in the mid-2010s, I had a little spin-out product that I did with a Korean partner called Spotamate, and it was automating videos based on templates and by far my biggest challenge was education. Because people just couldn't wrap their heads around it. So how are you gonna deal with that?  Brian Nutt: I think that today, the state of the consumer today around video is totally different, and the other thing is that I think Spotimate was sort of Adobe-reliant, right? David: Yeah, it was an Adobe plugin.  Brian Nutt: Yeah, so we're skipping all that. So from a user perspective, it makes it a little easier to get started, since it's a lot fewer steps to take, but from an education standpoint, I think people are starting to expect this. It's like if you log in to Netflix and you see all these interesting shows that you know, that makes you think, oh, wow, boy, that's something I would watch, you understand that there's a data-driven decision behind that, and whether it's content while you're scrolling through on Instagram or across the web, all these technologies exist and I feel like most folks understand that when they see something like this, they get it, where before it might have and it still can be creepy. I'm not saying it can't be, but depending on the use, before it was perceived entirely like that.  With the pandemic and, if you go back before the pandemic, or let's go five years back, a lot of people didn't wanna take videos. They didn't wanna do a zoom call or whatever. They wanted to do it on the phone or they shut off their camera. But today, if I have a Zoom call with you and you don't turn your camera on, I think something's wrong. What's going on? So it's this drive to video and the requirement of a personalized experience that when people get this, I think they'll be like, oh yeah they'll understand.  David: So I realized, as you've said that your core market is email marketing, maybe social media, some of those things. If you have digital signage, software platforms, or solution providers who are interested because maybe they do this whole omnichannel thing and they see this as an opportunity, how would they work with you? Would it run in parallel?  Brian Nutt: That's a sort of broad question to ask. I'm not sure I don't have that nailed down yet. But I'd take all inquiries, so to speak. Because again the idea is to insert this into the marketing stack. So whether it's digital signage or traditional email marketing, or any omnichannel approach, as you said, contacting a customer, why aren't you using video? And so it does seem as I said from my perspective, the growth of digital signage, which isn't anywhere, relies on footprint and as it declines or appears to decline at least from different ways. This is one of those ways to pick that up.  David: Yeah, and I think you're gonna start seeing a lot more screens, but in places other than what people thought about, which was, in stores and so on, but there are all kinds of operational messaging that could stand to be personalized based on location, not personalized to individuals, but to the dynamics of that, area of a building or whatever. Brian Nutt: Sure, and the same thing holds true. The level of personalization is all really based on the quality of the data that you have and if you try to make it too deep and too complicated, folks I think will shy away because, yeah, it might not be possible, remember, it's the same thing with digital signage. You can make things super, super complex, and try to do all these really neat things, but the reality is a lot of people don't have that capability. So you can only deal with what is reasonably available to you from a data perspective, but there's no reason you have to be specific to a person. Obviously, digital signage doesn't do that but automates it specific to an area, of the work floor, or whatever that's doable. David: You've been out of digital signage for roughly four years now. I'm curious now having kinda left the industry, what's your perspective on it now?  Brian Nutt: I think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation, including me, right? So a lot of the players that existed before have been rolled up in some ways. So it's like the wild west that existed when I really was looking back in the wild west, but it's gotten a little more sterile, at least that's my opinion. I think that the interesting pieces of it are in the hive stack arena with retargeting and programmatic ad buying, which I was never a really big proponent of the ad model. I think we talked about it before, but there are interesting ways to serve content and that's really more, kinda what, where you're going with what your comments were before, how do you serve that content to folks in a unique and timely way, and I think there will be, and there already has been this approach to multi-device from a screen, just one big screen, but honestly, since I got out, I haven't paid a tremendous amount of attention to it.  David: What you're doing is very current in terms of the shift more and more to using data integration and automated content so that it's always relevant, so you're doing what the industry's doing. Brian Nutt:  All right, there you go. David: So if people wanna find out more, where are they gonna find you online?  Brian Nutt: Yeah, it's www.adificial.io - we're signing up beta users, although it'll be a closed group and already have a pretty good number that we've signed up from some past relationships. But anybody who's interested, just go on there and there's a beta sign-up little form there, and you can learn about it. David: And you're bootstrapped?  Brian Nutt: Yeah, bootstrapped in entirety. I've got one co-founder who was actually with me at Codigo as well, and we've got a team of six developers working on this thing full-time and are pretty excited about it. David: All right. It was great to catch up with you.  Brian Nutt: Yeah, you too, Dave. 

Peter Lyons, VP of Global Customer Success at Poppulo joined the company in 2019. Since then he has made waves working with the Professional Services and Customer Success teams to deliver success-led outcomes, scale services and grow ARR. In this episode, he shares the meaning of his mantra 'moving the needle', the world of CS Operations and adopting change management and the impact of managed services on retention.  Follow Precursive on: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/precursive Twitter: https://twitter.com/precursive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/precursive/Youtube: http://ow.ly/RPxH50Chv9k

In the fifth episode of the Red Cube Podcast, Great Place to Work CEO Cathal Divilly is joined again by the insightful Yvonne Frost. Yvonne is the VP of Employee Experience with Poppulo and the most recent recipient of The Great Place to Work Ambassador Award. Yvonne shared her people-focused approach to navigating the psychological impact of Covid-19, and how her experiences have influenced her approach to wellness moving forward. The duo goes on to discuss all things future-readiness, including the pressing topics of post-vaccine working, remote working versus working from home during a pandemic, adapting to a hybrid model of working and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second of a two-part conversation, Great Place to Work CEO Cathal Divilly is joined by Yvonne Frost, VP of Employee Experience with Poppulo. Yvonne is also the most recent recipient of The Great Place to Work Ambassador Award. In this episode, you will hear about the role of trust in leadership, the necessity of engaging with employee feedback, and the connection between trust and genuine feedback. Yvonne also discusses building credibility as an HR practitioner, managing morale and expectations, and how to action feedback. You will also learn about managing meeting fatigue, learning from mistakes and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first of a two-part conversation, Great Place to Work CEO Cathal Divilly is joined by Yvonne Frost, VP of Employee Experience with Poppulo. Yvonne is also the most recent recipient of The Great Place to Work Ambassador Award. In this episode, the duo discusses Yvonne's involvement in Poppulo's progression from a small start-up to a global leader in employee communications technology. You will learn about the role of culture in Poppulo's success, maintaining culture through growth, and the connection between strategy and culture. Yvonne also discusses development, engagement, effective listening, the changing role of HR and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast episode, the Digital Channel Team Lead & Inbound Specialist at Poppulo, Micheál McGrath, talks about how to increase profitable website traffic. If you want to know more or get in touch with Micheál, you find more information in the links below: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micheal-mcgrath/?originalSubdomain=ie https://www.poppulo.com/about/

This week on the Digital Marketing Scoop we're discussing Business to Business Marketing & Lead Generation with Micheál McGrath from Poppulo  This week's episode of The Digital Marketing Scoop is brought to you by the team at www.CLIQ.ie. Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/cliq.ie/ or subscribe on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1PmmAJcTTQ-XWDfTyzbiwg 

Engati is the world's leading multilingual Digital CX platform. It is a one-stop platform for powerful customer engagements. With our intelligent bots, we help you create the smoothest of customer experiences, with minimal coding. And now, we're even helping you answer your customers' most complicated questions in real-time with Engati Live Chat. Website: https://www.engati.com/ Blogs: https://engati.com/blog Check out our CX Library- CX Community page: https://www.engati.com/cx-community CX Content page: https://www.engati.com/cx-content YouTube Interview series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05g56Qg9-goNEUmZlGGPHWfVjQRPpwr4 SoundCloud Interview series: https://soundcloud.com/user-670584022/tracks Spotify Interview series: https://open.spotify.com/show/3G0uQwPnQib22emRi9VhUg https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterbartonlyon/ Peter Lyon, VP Customer Success at Poppulo, Co-Founder Customer Success Network talks to us about the main pillars of customer success and how we can evaluate customer satisfaction with qualitative and quantitative metrics Check out the 200 CX Thought Leaders to follow for 2021 - http://s.engati.com/2z9 Follow us on- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getengati LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/engati/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/getengati Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getengati/ Talk to us: contact@engati.com #EngatiCX #AI #CX #CustomerSuccess

Next week we’ll see who are this year’s winners in the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards and for the last few weeks we’ve been chatting to finalists and alumni of the Awards about some of the issue facing Entrepreneurs and also some of the opportunities. Bobby wanted to get the big picture and look at how businesses can survive in a world of constant disruption and new paradigms. He was joined by Andrew O’Shaughnessy of Poppulo who is a finalist this year, Cathal Friel of Open Orphan who is also a finalist and Evelyn O’Toole of Complete Laboratory Solutions a former winner and now a judge. Listen and subscribe to Down to Business with Bobby Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.    Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'. Listen and subscribe to Down to Business with Bobby Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.    Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Are you looking for tips on how performance testing is done based on real-world examples? In this episode, Lukasz Nowanski Technical Team Lead at Poppulo shares his experience with finding performance bootnecks and more. Discover a unique approach to performance engineering, using architectural fitness functions that help build evolutionary architectures. Listen up!

The week I'm joined by Poppulo's Head of Testing Conor Fitzgerald to chat about the importance of communication within testing, along with his leadership approach and what organizational practices he recommends to ensure good quality software.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy had ambitions to be a global player with Poppulo, the internal communication software firm he founded over 10 years ago. The company now serves 900 of the world’s largest organisations and last year raised €30 million in funding. Listen to Andrew talk about the impact of good internal communications on business, the importance of inclusive company culture, and lessons he’s made along the way.  

Special Guest: James Lawson-Miln, Head of Internal Communications (IC), Poppulo James Lawson-Miln has a wealth of experience in IC working in various industries throughout his career. During the span of his 15-year career in IC, he has worked in both the private and public sectors in industries such as finance, retail, health, telecommunications, and technology performing a range of IC roles at companies such as Telefonica (O2), Barclays, the NHS, and Poppulo. Join us as we talk internal comms from James’ experience and how, often, the challenges are similar across different sectors and size of organisation. Host: Jo Dodds

Robby speaks to Robert Meaney, Head of Testing & Test Coach at Poppulo. Robert explains the difference between technical debt and testing debt, the importance of observability, and more! Helpful Links: Follow Robert on Twitter Robert on LinkedIn Testability Book Follow Testability Book on Twitter 3X with Kent Beck Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. Loving Maintainable? Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to help grow our reach. Brought to you by the team at Planet Argon.

Admiring Cork-based software firm Poppulo's people-first trajectory.

It’s chaos week in Enterprise Software! Cloudera misses their forecast, Oracle and Microsoft team up on cloud computing and more open source licensing discussion. Plus, we try to make sense of the metric system once and for all! Relevant to your interests Open-Source ‘Great Satan’ No More, Microsoft Wins Over Skeptics (https://bloom.bg/2Wsh6wM) Reporter's Notebook: Trees, fiber, petition (https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/06/reporters-notebook-trees-fiber-petition/) The boldest WWDC move: Sign In with Apple (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-login-8232a6e0-a0fb-49b6-ac24-dfb1344ba217.html?chunk=2&utm_term=emshare#story2) Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company (https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/apple-is-now-the-privacy-as-a-service-company/) An update on Sunday’s service disruption | Google Cloud Blog (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/an-update-on-sundays-service-disruption) Why We're Relicensing CockroachDB - Cockroach Labs (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/) What's actually changing with iOS 13 (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-login-5dc3f703-6465-4481-b8b8-db848c8c640a.html?chunk=1#story1) Why the new Mac Pro makes sense (https://twitter.com/Cruftbox/status/1135645748945534976) Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/05/microsoft-and-oracle-link-up-their-clouds/) Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/google-to-acquire-analytics-startup-looker-for-2-6-billion/) Mad King Leo pulled the wool over HP shareholders' eyes, ex-CEO Whitman tells court (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/05/autonomy_whitman_testimony_apotheker/) Cloudera plummets 40% after CEO abruptly departs and company cuts forecast (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/cloudera-drops-40percent-after-ceo-tom-reilly-leaves-forecast-cut.html) Mongo Q1 Numbers (https://www.nasdaq.com/article/mongodb-mdb-q1-loss-narrows-revenues-up-on-atlas-growth-cm1160239) (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-login-8232a6e0-a0fb-49b6-ac24-dfb1344ba217.html?chunk=2&utm_term=emshare#story2)## Nonsense Microsoft is making Xbox body wash (https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/6/4/18652484/microsoft-xbox-lynx-body-wash-axe-lifestyle-gaming-products) “what does Xbox smell like? Microsoft says the answer is fruit, herbs, and various styles of wood.” ## Sponsors This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds® and one of their web APM tools: Loggly®. It’s scalable cloud-based log management that won’t break the bank. Learn more or try it FREE for 14 days. Just go to http://loggly.com/sdt (http://loggly.com/sdt). Conferences, et. al. ALERT! DevOpsDays Discount - DevOpsDays MSP (https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2019-minneapolis/welcome/), August 6th to 7th, $50 off with the code SDT2019 (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devopsdays-minneapolis-2019-tickets-51444848928?discount=SDT2019). 2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringOne Tours are posted (http://springonetour.io/). Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Coming up in: San Francisco (June 4th & 5th), Atlanta (June 13th & 14th)…and back to a lot of US cities. ChefConf London 2019 (https://chefconflondon.eventbrite.com/) June 19-20 Monktoberfest, Oct 3rd and 4th - CFP now open (https://monktoberfest.com/). Recommended Jobs from Listeners Director of Product (https://boards.greenhouse.io/poppulo/jobs/1693409) for Poppulo (https://www.poppulo.com/) Waltham, MA SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Matt: Deadwood (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348914/) Brandon: This Land (https://crooked.com/podcast-series/this-land/)

This week on Red Business it’s the Kerry Show in Cork as Jonathan Healy chats to Kerry legend, Tommy Doyle about his company Kinsale Bay Food Company and he also chats to Kerry woman Stephanie Sheehan of Poppulo about RebelCon 2018

Show notes: Welcome to our second episode of ‘Inside Vignettes’, Vignette, The Employee Experience Agency. As we are working on new content for the Podcast, we thought we’d share a recording of a webinar on IC strategy we hosted with our friends at Poppulo. We produced a white paper covering our thoughts on IC strategy and how to go about wrapping your head around creating one for your organization. If the idea of ‘white paper’ does not float your boat, this podcast is for you. Gregg and I discuss the critical importance of having an Internal Communications Strategy – and guide you through the steps for developing and implementing a strategy that places internal comms central to driving business goals. Key Takeaways: Understanding the difference between tactics and strategy Working with the four pillars to success Using research & insights to remove the guesswork The building blocks you need to create your strategy Implementing your strategy Poppulo Files: Webinar: Creating and implementing a successful internal communications strategy White paperThe Ultimate Guide to Internal Communications Strategy We hope you enjoy and would love to hear your feedback. Please subscribe to the podcast if you have not already. Lastly, if you like what you hear, please leave a review. We want to make this better for all of you working in internal communications, employee experience, and company culture. Thanks for listing and enjoy!

In our opening podcast episode, Mike and Gregg revisit EX Trends with a new twist. Instead of jumping into the latest platform, technology, or engagement philosophy that ‘guarantees quick results,’ the two share insights on why many trends from last year are relevant. If you are looking ways to improve your EX practice or just explore ideas to improve your planning, tune in to our lively discussion where we’ll cover the following ‘trends’: Leadership DisruptionIf leaders are not driving a transformation of EX at your company you need to get them there. Why should they care? How should you approach them? StrategyIf you have no plan, you are planning to fail. What are the ins and outs of an IC or EX Strategy? Vignette partnered with our friends at Poppulo to co-create and publish of “The Ultimate Guide to Internal Communications Strategy” whitepaper: The Ultimate Guide to Internal Communications Strategy. The Ultimate Guide to Internal Communications Strategy. Understanding Your AudienceYou are not the target market when it comes to employee communications. Get to know your audience, and you’ll deliver better quality communications and experiences. Employer BrandingYou may have an employer brand but is it being used the best of its ability? And if you don’t have one, how to you create, leverage, and govern an employer brand? MeasurementWhy is measuring so hard? Understand what, how, and why you should measure in your EX practice. Insights Driven Creative/ExperiencesRemove the guesswork, make better decisions, create better briefs. Drive your EX with insights, not guessing or being a copycat. StorytellingAs we are getting to be better storytellers it is time to sharpen our skills and realize that different types of stories have their place in EX. PilotingTake bigger risks on a smaller scale to get your ideas tested and validated. Piloting is such a great approach before rolling out any type of communication to the entire employee population. Brought to you by Vignette, The Employee Experience Agency™

Ethan McCarty can freak you out, particularly if you’re an internal communications professional. For example, he recently wrote a blog entitled, “Don’t Measure Internal Communications.” Wait … what? And when I heard him speak at a Poppulo conference last summer, I knew he’d be a terrific EE Voice guest. Because he’s doing some unexpected – and successful – work in his job as Global Head of Employee and Innovation Communications for Bloomberg. He didn’t disappoint.Continue Reading → The post Episode #22 – Should We Stop Measuring Internal Comms? – With Bloomberg’s Ethan McCarty appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

As we live in a tech revolution, this week’s RedBusiness is focused on companies in Cork that didn’t exist ten years ago. This week Jonathan chats to Sean Prior of Wavebreak Media. Also on the show is Ronan Murphy of internet security firm, Smarttech247 and former Irish Examiner Editor, Tim Vaughan who is now with Poppulo. Don’t miss this fantastic episode focused on many Cork companies operating on a global scale.