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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How you doing today? Outside today? On a stunning day. It's about minus five 掳C and we're expecting about five centimeters of snow. I love it when it's falling down like this. It's just so uh relaxing. And what's not relaxing right now is the absolute onslaught of fantastic feature releases and functionality from Aws leading up to Aws re invent next week.
And what I wanted to talk about today was how do you handle communications with your user base? So this is a really interesting scenario where Aws has this massive conference next week, 50,000 plus people and they have this constituency of millions of customers around the world and over the next uh well, starting last week, moving through next week and the week after, they're probably going to make around 500 announcements of varying sizes from like, hey, we fix this one workflow to here's a completely new service and they have a number of outlets to do that.
They've got their blog, they've got the console, they've got their documentation, they've got social and they've got webinars. They've got the itself, there's tons of different things that um the opportunities for them to discuss news and you're not going to see the same piece of news repeated in each of those avenues.
And I think it's a really interesting challenge and it's one that a lot of us face, especially in security and in privacy trying to get the message out to people. Um And I think, you know, I go back to Gary Vanner who's business guru and he always talks about attention um attention and specifically for him underpriced attention because he's in marketing, he's looking for, you know, where can he effectively get his message there and get a disproportionate return?
I think for everybody else, we're not looking for a return. We're looking, well, we are looking for a return, but we're not looking for a direct return. We're looking to get the message out about new functionality that people are already using. It's just an overwhelming sort of amount of tools to kind of wrap your head around and security.
It's a very similar problem even within your own company. How do you get everybody to kind of understand the full context of it? Is it, is it easy enough to do? The challenge is, you know, finding out where that attention is from my experience doing this vlog for 100 and 42 episodes, I think now, um you know, for the better part of the year uh for trying to communicate for the last few years at scale, you can't bring people to you in volume, you can get, uh, people to come and maybe check out one thing or two things.
But if you're relying on bringing people into your, uh, digital asset, like into your website or at your booth at a show or something like that, it's just not gonna happen. Um, not at the scale you want, you're gonna have that funnel effect where you're gonna maybe talk to enough people and maybe a small percentage will convert and actually come to your uh to hear the message.
So you really need to get out to them. And that's aws strategy here. And you're seeing that if you're following the community at all um over the last couple of weeks is that they're going to put that message out um into a stream wherever you are. And I think that's a really interesting approach.
They're gonna put it on Twitter, they're gonna put on linkedin on Facebook um on their website, in their documentation on stage at their events. Um They're very much using their own properties. Absolutely, because that's sort of the single source that you can refer back to. Um But also they're making sure that the message gets out where people are.
So if you only consume information through Facebook, they're gonna be there. If you're uh linkedin only, they're gonna be there. Now, the challenge for you as a communicator is, how do you make sure that that's consistent? How do you make sure that you are actually making sure that you uh if I start to talk to you on Twitter, how do I continue to talk to you on Twitter?
Um You know, how do you make sure that, you know, that message goes out to the appropriate levels? I don't have an easy answer for it other than it's a lot of logistics and tracking for me. I track uh what I do here with mornings with Mark. Um I monitor where, uh I'm getting uh audience where I'm growing where it's not working so much.
So, you know, personal example, Twitter works really well. I get uh some great viewership on Twitter. Same when I post these on linkedin, Facebook. Not so much. I get great questions on Facebook. Not, not a lot of views. This also goes up to Twitch. I don't really get much traffic on Twitch.
Twitch experiment is gonna be for next week because that's what Aws pushes a lot. Um But we'll see if I don't get a good traction on Twitch, then I'll probably stop going on that medium. I'll wind that down gracefully because you can't do everything and I'd far rather focus my attention on a channel that is gaining traction than one that's not there.
And I think that's the same problem you have internally. So if you're running a security program, you wanna make sure that, yeah, you're emailing people but you know what a lot of people are gonna ignore those emails. So you want to have an internal website, you want to get in front of them at meetings, you wanna make sure that, you know, you're pushing out some videos to people cause video content is really easy to do.
Um And it's highly effective, you wanna make sure that you're pushing updates to their systems themselves, you know, and monitor these channels for success because no one channel is gonna hit everybody. Uh but you can't do every channel as well. You've got to find that balance.
So that's what I'm thinking about today, especially while I'm building out content for next week. Again, as a word of warning. Um you know, this weekend, next week is going to be a lot of aws, a lot of cloud content because that's where my mind is focused at right now, but I'll be bringing it back to that security and privacy aspect.
In the meantime, I am gonna have a hot cocoa and enjoy uh this beautiful snowy day here. Um I hope you are set up for a fantastic day as always, I'd love to discuss this online at Mark NC A in the comments down below on the vlog and by email for everybody, including our podcast listeners.
Me at Mark and dot C A. How do you handle communications through multiple channels? Are you trying to pull people in or are you going out to them or are you trying to balance both? Let me know, have a wonderful, wonderful day. We'll talk to you online and see you on the show tomorrow.
