I’ve been reading an interesting book by the name of “A Whack on the Side of the Head” over the last many months.  One of the interesting concepts that I’ve tried to leave myself open to is that of “Cross-fertilization”.  This would be the theory that you can learn many concepts from areas of expertise outside of your own.  A software engineer can learn things from a gardener.  A professional sports player can learn things from a grade school teacher.  Well, I have been involved with my wife in team teaching 3 year old children in Sunday School at my church.

Now, I must give a lot of credit to my wife who is an excellent teacher for children.  She is absolutely fabulous at grabbing the attention of children and teaching them at the level they’re ready to learn.  She loves to do it to.  And to watch and participate in that instruction and activity is inspiring on so many levels.

What occurred to me today, however, was that ties can me made to the concept of knowing your audience, and communicating to them only what they are prepared and interested in hearing and learning.  So much of the time in marketing campaigns this concept is largely underestimated.  Many campaigns focuse simply on age range and/or gender for consumers or company size and revenues for businesses.  However, most cold calling and mailer campaigns (not to mention email campaigns) I’ve heard of usually have many more people simply ignore them than actually respond or end up converting into a sale.

However, it’s not just the marketing department that has a tough time at truly understanding their audience.  In fact, they probably understand that concept quite well given that they deal with it in such an intimate fashion.  Many other business units suffer from the problem of being unaware of their audience’s needs and interests in and how to communicate with them about them regarding those topics in a manner that both parties understand.  For example, how many times does an IT department truly understand where the executive team wants going with the business.  What if the IT departments took the time to learn how to communicate ideas and capabilities of technology to executive teams that were business savvy rather than tech-savvy?  What if engineering teams took the time to work with materials acquisition experts to understand the costs of their designs?  (to be honest, I’m not sure the good ones don’t)

My point is that many benefits of efficiency would be realized.  Costs would be reduced, businesses would be more nimble, marketing campaings would be more effective and less annoying.  These are just some examples.  I could probably do better at explaining HOW to find out more about your audience, but I’ll save that for another post.  Something about suppliers and consumers being willing to engage in open conversation about their products and services and consumers valuation of them…  Yeah, that’s a topic that I think I need to explore more about.

It pains me that I have anybody on my list of Facebook friends that would even consider this chain-letter for a minute…  Today I (along with 14 of my other “closest” friends) received the following message:

Attention all Facebook users
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerb

My reaction:  Ugh…  Do people really take this kind of thing seriously any more?  I mean seriously…  Reading the email and applying the smallest amount of commen sense would say that sending MORE messages would only serve to further burden the system, a bad idea if it were really having performance problems in the first place.

What it DID remind me of, however, is the willingness of people to believe anything without understanding where to go in order to “check the facts.”  This is a problem that the security industry is forever battling with end-users that are not very technically or security saavy.  I guess we will always still have work to do in educating our friends and neighbors.

Ok, so WordPress finally and completely won me over today.  They have a wealth of plugins, themes, and a huge community supporting their ecosystem.  Whether you’re running your own web-blog, a photo-blog or even a podcast, there are plugins to support that.  Since it’s free, it’s even a great resource for small and large enterprises alike.  I’m hosting my own instance of WordPress-MU simply to make it easier to maintain the 2 or 3 core blogs of different topics I am interested in, and the soon to be 2 or 3 more “test” blogs I’ll be creating as I attempt various less-common blog types such as photo-blogging and knowledge-blogging (a probably mistaken name for the concept of blogging at least one bit of information that you learned about on any given day).

I knew I’d do it too…  This is actually an edit since I posted the entry and then remembered the big feature that I just learned of that made me think to write this post.  There are instructions on importing your blog from wherever you hosted it last, and the instructions are quite clear.  I have found that this is very compatible with the overall experience of the latest versions that I have seen of WP.  Things are laid out simply, clearly and the user experience seems to make a lot of sense.