It’s always fun to read email from folks that just discovered Vladville and watch their horror / dismay / confusion or outright anger having read stuff here. The other day I got an email which basically said the following (paraphrased):
Hi Vlad, I’m a long time customer and I just found out your Vladville blog. Very insightful but I am a little surprised by the tone. Do you find that works or do you just not care (is it meant to blow off steam or is it intentionally like that)…. the jist of the last paragraph is that she knows I’m not illiterate and she knows how good I am so she wants to know what the trick is.
OWN does business all over the world, yet our most dominant area and frankly some of our best partners come out of UK. At the same time, Brit’s happen to be the most reserved and appropriate folks I have ever met. I’m fairly confident that the SBS Show banter Chris and I used to have would get us thrown into a jail over there. Thats why we don’t travel abroad. Yet, I’ve always enjoyed more traffic from UK than places like North Carolina. Sure, many will point out “First in flight, 48th in education” line from The Simpsons but regardless of location, nationality or literacy level, people respond to humor.
Frankly, professional writing hurts. Majority of people no longer have an attention span to read a full paragraph. They seek headlines, highlight boxes, pictures and visual distractions that take away from careful consideration of the message. Have you ever wondered why I have bothered to take screenshots of me right clicking and showing the shortcut context menu? Why I have to bold face things like Next > Finish? Why I now spend time recording videos because people are allergic to text?
People.. don’t.. read.. And if they do read, they do not comprehend or at the very highest level of intellect, they don’t remember. Everyone remembers a video of me smacking Indian in a Bucket on the head, but I get questions every day about Exchange 2007, SP1, if it will work on 32bit hardware and other items I have discussed here hundreds of times.
Certain things stand out. Prostitutes for example. Have you ever NOT noticed a prostitute? You are more likely to notice a prostitute than a traffic signal – in part because they wear shinier clothing. So people can see them at night! Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Cingular logo is blinding orange and white, that Sprint is flourescent yellow or and Verizon is pulsing red against a black background? Why not a nice earth tone, that blends in with the background. Ahaaaaaaaaaa! Gotcha.
You see, nobody actually reads the crap trade press puts out. They throw it on the coffee table in the break room, they skim it, see it on the side or maybe at the corner of their screen. And thats the people that try to stay informed. Why? Because you’ve read that news article 50 times and you can guess what 51st is going to sound like too: “Nothing happened. One partner sees the next coming of Christ, the other flushes reseller agreement down a toilet.”
Just because a random journalist needed to squeeze out 1,000 words doesn’t mean that there is any value in it, particularly when it’s packed with 5 irrelevant quotes just to fill the copy – trust me, NOBODY needs to see all that just to figure out how Symantec is yet again going to fuck up it’s SMB approach.
And therein lies the big secret. Since the beginning of press people have been trying to get attention. We’re in 2007 – blogs, new media, connections and personal experiences are thriving. Newspapers and magazines are dying – so why the hell would you want to imitate something that the audience does not want and is completely fed up with? More importantly, if you had a message that you wanted people to hear should you deliver it in a professional, authorative and overbearing way that they will ignore, or do you smack a picture of Brianna Banks and correlate her body of work to what the government and corporate lobbying is doing to the US consumer?
I work with over 10,000 companies so I’m willing to bet that amounts to over 50,000 people that I would like to stay in the IT business and not a day goes by that someone else doesn’t find this blog and contemplates the same profession. No, I will never make $26,000 a year as a professional journalist nor is this blog going to be printed and submitted for a Pulitzer.
But the message will come across, at the end of the day we’re all trying to get better at what we do and I’m doing my part to share what I know because I believe it benefits my audience. Why did I let you in on this? Because I hope you do the same. The difficult question is whether it is better to be thought of as an ass/joker or not to be thought of at all. I guess it’s a personality thing.
In the meantime, I get my SBS news from an accountant, I thank tens of thousands of you that give me your attention each week, I thank you all for coming back and I have my very own empirical evidence that nobody pays attention to the professional blogs.
Got something to say? Do it in a way that will make people listen.
For the less coherent, more grammatically correct realtime insight, follow me on Twitter at