Say Less
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:
Address the likely reconciling that is happening in the video or blog post based on your intended target audience.
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.
- “RAID is a failure tolerance feature built for tolerating data integrity issues on a small scale”
- “Webscale technology requires failure tolerance across multiple nodes, while offering data locality”
- “Data locality offers PCI bus-esque performance access to VM Blocks while giving you the ability to scale one node at a time”
- “You can successively fail drives throughout an entire cluster until you run out of replication space”
- “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.