Wes Kennedy Writes Things

If there's one thing that can be learned by being embedded deep in a marketing or product marketing team for 5-10 years is that there is never a shortage of things that you can say and an incredibly deep well of content that every company wants to get in front of their customers. Here's the thing, human attention spans are short. This blog post will likely take multiple sittings to get ready to release, not because it's complex, but because my attention span is short and modern business operations are interrupt driven.

There's plenty of content that has been written about how to properly pace videos to optimize for the YouTube algorithm, which in turn optimizes for keeping people on the platform consuming ads — not necessarily the content that the ads are placed in. But, what if we developed content based on how people are able to consume it, rather than optimizing for SEO or for an algorithm designed to make the content platform more money?

It's really as simple as this...

Say less.

That's it, that's the whole of it.

This post is obviously triggered by something I've seen in my day job, so it's about writing or recording technical marketing content and getting it in front of customers or prospects but can easily be attributed to other industries.

If your audience is being force fed content from hundreds of other companies, you need to be able to maintain their attention long enough to get the information in front of them that you meant to. But, if their attention span is two minutes and you try to cram in five minutes of content into that space – absolutely nothing will be retained. They won't remember what you said in the post or video, they won't follow your call to action, they won't learn anything... And most of all, you won't have given them anything.

Saying less is hard

It's often hard to break down difficult topics or ideas into simple material that is easy to consume. It's even harder to meet all of your marketing metrics when you have an audience with a limited attention span. But, you still need to meet your metrics. You need more MQLs, more SQLs, so how do you get there?

You break the topic down, chopped and screwed style.

Chopped and Screwed was a remix technique used in the 90s and early 00s that basically involved slowing down the tempo of a song and remixed it to suit the DJ.

If you've got five minutes of content to cover, based on reading a rough script, then you actually have 15 minutes of content to cover. Why? you ask... Well, limited attention span meets breathing meets giving brains time to consume what you just said.

Think about it this way, if I just spent 30 seconds explaining how hard drive failure is handled in a hyper-converged environment and you've been a SAN engineer for the last 20 years, you'll be spending the next two minutes reconciling everything I just said against everything you know about drive failures — chances are, that's a lot of knowledge to sift through. So, you missed everything I said after those 30 seconds.

There are two ways to combat this:

1. Address the likely reconciling that is happening in the video or blog post based on your intended target audience.

2. Take a pause, 1-3 seconds is usually enough. The pause is enough to let your brain mark something for follow up.

In the first option, addressing the reconciliation happening for your audience, you show that you know who they are and see where they're coming from. You address their concerns succinctly and offer avenues for future follow-ups with you or additional documentation.

Note: The additional documentation is also an opportunity to put out that deep dive video or post that doesn't abide by these rules. But by the time they end up on one of these pieces of content, they're invested and will read more.

In the second option, you're giving them just enough time to settle with the concept you just laid out and then you can continue on in the video or post.

Chances are though, option #2 will rarely be followed up on, especially if your audience is anything like the author of this post, ADHD AF, and will absolutely not follow up on anything that doesn't risk life and limb.

Even if option #1 is what you choose, beware as there be dragons there too! If I happen to be someone watching your video or reading your blog post and the reconciliation isn't happening for me, then I will immediately check out all together and go back to doom scrolling.

“But Wes, you just gave me two viable options for handling this issue...”

Did I?

Chopped and Screwed

Let's return back to the early 2000's where Wes was a highly sheltered teenager getting introduced to Hip-Hop for the first time (I was in a private religious school until high school). I had been playing drums for a number of years and rhythm, the sub-division of beats, and construction of music was (and still is) super fascinating to me.

The first time I heard a DJ completely de-construct Yeah! by Usher, blew my mind. I heard the sub-divisions in the music better, felt the groove better, and was miraculously able to hear those things in the commercial release of the song from that day on.

The same method can be applied to the content that we intend to release. If we stick with our original example of drive failure in a hyper-converged environment, then the commercial release of a song is analogous to the overall topic of drive failure, while the details of how the system handles the re-allocation of blocks, additional drive failures, drive replacement, and data integrity are all exposed in the chopped and screwed version.

So, you need to chop up your content into byte-sized chunks (see what I did there?).

This means that a high-level topic, such as drive failure, should be broken into a number of releases that can include different medium types:

Topic	Sub-Topic	Medium
Drive Failure		Overview Video
	Block Re-allocation	Video / Blog Post
	Addtl Drive Failures	Video
	Drive Replacement	Blog Post
	Data Integrity/Access	Video / Blog Post

“So wait, you're saying that a request from product for a video covering Drive Failure could potentially end up being FIVE different pieces of content?”

Yes. No. It Depends.

Drive Failure is a mundane but big topic, just how your feature release is likely a big topic disguised as a small topic.

To truly understand the impact of a release, you often need a huge amount of content. For instance, I'm currently laying out the content for release for a new... Feature? Mega-Feature? Product? There's a lot to cover, and while I can distill it down to a Twitter post, I'll hardly do it justice in that medium – but I can absolutely lead people to deeper, more impactful content along their journey.

So step back and figure out your main hook for what you're talking about and then take it from there.

If you're Nutanix in 2015, you're talking about handling drive failure in a way that RAID couldn't, so you had to break it down into explicit pieces.

1. “RAID is a failure tolerance feature built for tolerating data integrity issues on a small scale”
2. “Webscale technology requires failure tolerance across multiple nodes, while offering data locality”
3. “Data locality offers PCI bus-esque performance access to VM Blocks while giving you the ability to scale one node at a time”
4. “You can successively fail drives throughout an entire cluster until you run out of replication space”
5. “RAID-6? Pssh... You can lose 24-drives in a node and still have all your data accessible.”

One single feature, drive failure, lead to 5 high level topics, that could (and did) become blog posts, videos, social, and other pieces of marketing content.

Closing

So what's to learn from my ramblings here?

In a single piece of content, say less.

That's the whole thing. Say less. Explain it in more detail in a follow up. Say it again. Profit.

How do you feel when you’re using the internet today? Excited? Happy? Smarter? No, I didn’t think so. Like most things, Capitalism has failed the Internet. The Internet used to be a beautiful thing. Something that was a bit weird, but the weirdness was part of what made it special. It was “weird” because people exposed their ideas in raw form, there weren’t millions of “themes” that made publishing a slick website easy, meaning most sites were just whatever HTML/CSS someone could scrape together. What was beautiful about it was the content.

Individual humans spent huge amounts of time curating content, writing stories or programs, and did so just because they wanted to give the world a glimpse into the beauty they saw in the content. No one was writing to fulfill a quota, gain followers, or monetize anything – they were just there to give or to memorialize something they found importance in.

That Internet is largely gone, or rather has slipped into the background as giant corporations have destroyed the internet as we knew it. As usual, we can see the mark of Capitalism all over this murder of the Internet. In order to extract capital, social media, ad-tech, and corporations now own most of the material on the public Internet without most of us knowing it. And now, it’s getting even worse with “Artificial Intelligence”.

I’ve been operating a blog in some shape or form since the mid 2000s. I’ve lost most of the content to multiple platform migrations, just straight up trashing it, or for other reasons, but none of that matters – because I’ve largely been utilizing my blog from a taker’s mindset. I built my blog originally because I thought it was a necessity in tech, which it honestly was when I was getting started. So many people had their own blogs and that was where I’d find solutions to a lot of the problems I faced. But now, all that information is gated in various platforms instead of being owned by the creators and readily accessed in the future.

My mindset around blogging has been slowly evolving over the last few years, but it has finally solidified after being gifted a talk from my good friend Mark Snow, titled simply How to Present, and after I heard something in a podcast a while ago:

”Wait to write, until you must write the thing.” – Someone, at some time, on a podcast, somewhere

In Mark’s talk, he focuses on the tools you need to present to in-person and remote audiences, but I believe that a few of the themes can be applied to your writing as well. So let’s start there.

Are you giving or taking?

In Mark’s talk, he walks you through showing up to give to your audience instead of showing up to take, referring to those actions as the giver’s mentality and the taker’s mentality. The basic premise is, if you are presenting to an audience of any size or shape, no matter the goal of the presentation, you should be there to give something to them. The audience should walk away feeling like you gave them an important piece of information, a new perspective on something, or knowledge in a thing that you understand deeply.

Most sales meetings approach from the perspective of wanting to find a sales opportunity, move forward a deal, or to close a sale. This is purely coming from a taker’s mentality, not necessarily by the fault of those involved, but purely because of the environment that they’re forced to operate within – one rooted in extracting capital from another company. So many potential customers avoid meetings such as these because it doesn’t feel good to know that the person on the other side of the table is there solely because they need to meet a quota. This isn’t always the case, but is often.

Taking a step back from the sales portion of it, let’s see how writing to give would apply to something as simple as a personal blog. If your intention of the blog is to simply chronicle your life, then this won’t apply to you. If any of your content ventures upon the realms of imparting knowledge, thought leadership, or even opinion, you need to be able to give something to your audience.

When writing something, the first thing you need to do after understanding the premise of the content is consider who the intended audience is. If the audience includes anyone else other than yourself, then you should think deeply about what you’re writing – not as a form of self-censorship, but to ensure that you’re providing “a gift” in exchange for the time people will spend reading your words. In the case of this very blog post, the audience is whomever would consider writing content on the internet, but it is also me since I write content on the internet. If my goal were to take from my audience then there would be a few pieces of this post that would likely stick out to you:

• There would be a call to action to do something after reading this (share, subscribe, sign-up for a course, etc).

Note: I do accept “subscriptions” to this site, not for monetization, but for notification of new posts. I do nothing with those emails except notify on new posts.

• I would be portraying myself as an expert, someone who does this perfectly. And I definitely don’t do any of this perfectly.

In reality, I’m writing this post as much for myself as for anyone who reads it. I want to give more and take less, because there would be nothing better for this world than more people doing the same.

Say only what you must, when you must

If we think about our relationship with the Internet these days, for many of us it comes with a trigger of guilt, one that’s tied to not updating our various web “properties” often enough or without enough quality content. Why is that? Why do we feel that we owe the nebulous internet anything? We pay for access to the thing, shouldn’t it owe us something? This is one of many problems with Capitalism, the feeling that there must be an equal (or likely very unequal) exchange of value for time invested.

The fact that I tend to feel guilty when I don’t update my personal blog often enough is both sad and truly comical. So more often than not, I would write a random blog post that had little content and just met an invisible quota that I had created in my mind because I’ve been manipulated into thinking that posting more will equal “success”. If anything, my personal blog is a liability to my continued employment since I speak my mind there, but I’m a human with thoughts, but those thoughts apparently have KPI’s attached to them.

So from here on out, I’m only going to write something, if I must, and if I’m the only one that can or is willing to. Otherwise, this is nothing but noise.

Be human, at all costs

We are all multi-faceted humans with interests, who long to be loved, fed, and feel a sense of psychological and physical safety – ignoring that to appear stronger, less vulnerable, or having everything put together is a veil that can easily be seen through. In your writing and when appropriate, write from the heart.

I am a human who is struggling to find my way in a world that is continually more and more anti-human. I want to be a better husband, father, brother, friend, human. That means working through my shit. That means unearthing trauma from my childhood. That means learning more about and fighting injustices. My goal is to always approach this blog with vulnerability, openness, and honesty. If I make a mistake, put my foot in my mouth, or do something else that offends, I will admit and note it publicly, and learn to do better.

I urge you to do the same with your writing. We’re here on this same rock for such an inconsequential amount of time, but if we’re not our true selves, and open to feedback, then what are we truly doing? Surviving to die. That’s what.

So what’s next?

Approach each opportunity to present yourself with humility and confidence. It’s okay to know you’re good at something – and when you are – it’s okay to share what you’re good at with the world, when your intention is to give them that thing. If your intention is to build yourself up or to “me too” the situation, then you need to re-evaluate the why behind everything you’re doing (I hear that there’s a book about starting with the Why... you should read it).

There’s not a single thing in my life right now that I’m accepting without evaluating its benefit in my life and my impact on it. There’s not a thing I do that I’m not evaluating with this criteria:

• Am I giving or taking?
• Am I the one that should say/do this?
• Can I continue on without saying/doing this?
• Will the world be better or worse because of this action?

Write when you have conviction and when you want to give something to others. If there’s a hint of take, do nothing. That’s it, that’s the whole thing.