This week I caught up on a new(ish) podcast which is done through the medium of Google+ Hangouts. I enjoyed immensely, and that was by no measure of it containing many people who I know from the community (Josh Atwell, Amy Lewis et al).
I had hoped to tune in live but I was elsewhere. I forget what I was at the time, but most likely I was at choir or at rehearsals in a local play I’m in at the end of the week (not a starring role, just a walk on part – I play the 6th soldier who slopes on embarrassed at the back!).
This week the guys talked about FUD, and the various backbiting and unpleasantness that’s circulating online – often generated by folks in the pay of a vendor. This is a bit of bubble I guess – with a lot of the people like me on active on SocialMedia. So bit like any bubble – The Beltway, Westminster and so on – it might be only of interest to folks working in that field. There are a couple of choice examples of where things have “turned personal”, and drifted into elements of “mud slinging”. My heart always sinks when I see this – it reminds me of the trolls on Facebook and Twitter – who deliberately go out their way to be unpleasant or cruel to someone. It is a very public display of the worst aspects of humanity. I don’t really like to be reminded of how horrible humans can be to one another. I see it enough already on the evening news, to want to witness it amongst my peers. And no, I’m not going to do a link-o-rama to those posts. Why feed the trolls anymore than they feed themselves. Right? It’s tempting to repost – but it feels like thesocial-media equivalent of slowing down on highway to gorp at a car-crash.
An yway, I wanted to add my own pennyworth to the debate generally.
In many ways I feel a bit of interloper. I spent 90s as employee for UK-based training company. The 00’s were spent as independent freelance trainer (and some minor consultancy gigs). Late 00’s saw me be a tech journalist at TechTarget for 2 year stint. And then for the 1st time in my life I joined a vendor – VMware. I ended up in the competition team at VMware, before moving to EVO:RAIL team about 7 weeks ago. Incidentally, there’s isn’t much relationship between the two roles. It’s helpful to have links back to the Competition Team, but this is a net-new role for me in kind of Tech Marketing position. So the reason I feel a bit of interloper is for the vast majority of my career I’ve not been on the vendor side.
What I think is interesting about this – is would thought a majority of those people doing my sort of role are generally former customers, or worked out of the partner/channel. For various reasons these folks personal-star took off, and they were picked up by a vendor because they came with a ready-made audience. A couple of years ago, an impression was built-up that all you need was a blog and a couple of K of twitter followers – and you could line yourself up a cushy job with a big company or start-up. I think that’s a mistaken perception. It took me a good 18 months to find a role with a vendor – and I wasn’t just looking at VMware at the time. My reputation in the community was a door opener – nothing more. If you have social-media/blogging reputation its only going to carry so far up the corporate ladder until you meet more and more people who go “RTFM, who?”. My point here is simple one – I’m personally uncomfortable with the vRockstar title. It can distort people’s sense of reality and perspective, and can make them jumped up “Don’t you know who I am types”. As ever, I’m going off topic.
I think the reason some many of us (who work in this aspect of the industry – outbound, social, tech-marketing types) feel uncomfortable with recent developments. Is many of us aren’t corporate types who went straight from college into some Uber-Corporate machine, and worked ourselves up the ladder. So FanBoism, FUD, aggressively competitive activity – something most of us feel is a bit icky. Nonetheless, customers and audience will always want us to compare our tech with the alternatives. That’s understandable because customers want to know the differences – and there is precious small amounts of truly independent analysis (by which that I mean non-vendor affiliated, and free from personal ‘axe-to-grind’ bias). Independents are often under attack by the vendors for their lack of hands-on knowledge – whilst at the same time doing nothing to help them get their hands on the products.
So the question is how do write about your technology as compared to a competitor technology – whilst avoiding FUD or being accused of FUD. The answer is with great difficulty because whatever you do, you can be accused of FUD or FanBiosm by others. I think there’s only one way to do it. If you can – get hands-on. There were many times in my previous role where I felt the urge to write to something about competitive product. Most of my content was made for internal consumption only, but there was times I wished I could just blog about my findings. In the end I didn’t. Why? Well, because my blog content is usually known for being practical and hands-on. Generally, I think I’ve built my reputation on helping people – heck I even got comments from Microsoft customers for helping them with the SCVMM deployments. I’m not sure if that’s an outcome that my employer was expecting. But in away it made me smile. Despite being critical of aspects of Microsoft’s technology, I wound up writing stuff that helped one it customers have a better experience. In great ying-yang, instant-karma measure of life, that seems more valuable to me, than putting the boot into Microsoft.
For me the FUD debate really boils down to you as a person. Do you have ethics? Are you nice person? Can you engage with people who disagree with, with decorum and politeness? If you are, then should be able to talk about the advantages of your technology over another without it becoming a slanging match. If not you will find our yourself descending into personal attacks, and defamation. That behaviour will not, and does not enhance your reputation and standing within the community. It’s huge turn off. Why would you want to turn off the audience who listens to you?