www.integrasoftware.com Good Girls / Bad Boys

Michael Di Stefano May 2013

It has become a sport in my house, my kids and I surf Netflix for a TV series to watch and the marathon begins. Right now it is Cheers. Last night Lilith Sternin Crane (Frasier’s wife) was angry because her editor changed the title of her book from "A Cross-Sectional Study of Control Group Females with a Tendency Towards Self Destruction Vis-A-Vis Damaging Relationships with Members of the Opposite Sex," to "Good Girls/Bad Boys." Doesn’t that say it all, not the merits of Lilith’s book but rather the importance of effectively communicating the value our work brings to our customers? Often we are too close to what we do to talk about it without diving down into the weeds of the technology, the theory, the details of why what we have done is so superior. We intuitively know why we went down this path but quickly loose the ability to communicate it; that is if we were even able to do that in the first place. Trust me, I am stricken by this same affliction. I agonize for days and sometimes weeks on what to call something, like this blurb. Good Girls/Bad Boys is catchy, grabs attention but who’s attention. Do I go with a title that more describes the topic? “The Importance of Effectively Communicating ….” So Good Girls/Bad Boys it is. A customer purchases our services or product because it fills a specific need. And it fills that need in a time and cost that meets their budget. So as important it is to produce that service/product it is more important to understand the market for it, to understand the customer. To talk to them in a way that hits home. A long time ago I took a writing class and the few things I still remember are: • If you are listing items then use a list. • If something can be said in 3 words or in 10 words, simpler is better use 3 words.

It is that last one, efficiency and effectiveness in our words that is the most difficult. Remember Mark Twain’s famous quote “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” The target audience to Lilith’s book are people who find themselves in difficult relationships. Picture yourself in a book store and you see 2 books one titled “A Cross-Sectional Study …” and the other “Good Girls/Bad Boys”. Which will you grab first? Good Girls/Bad Boys! That is unless you are having trouble falling to sleep at night. Some years ago I wrote a book “Distributed Data Management for Grid Computing”. And that was the short concise version, the other choices were eliminated because we ran out of room on the cover! How proud I was to see it on the shelves of Barnes & Noble! How confused I was to see it buried in the Relational Database Management section. Couldn’t they tell from the title it was about distributed computing? Maybe my royalty checks would have been bigger if I went with something like “Data Here, Data There, Data Everywhere” or “What is this Grid Thing Everyone Keeps Talking About?. Lessons learned. Know your target audience. Know your customer. And if you cannot efficiently communicate the value you bring to the market, find someone who can help you!