There is a story that I will paraphrase because if I quote it I will get it wrong. In the story of the tower of babble the people all spoke the same language and decided to build a tower to reach god (one interesting note is that this story lives in almost all major religions in some form). God didnt like this and struck down the tower and spread the people across the land. He then also broke up the languages so that there could be no inter communication and there by be no where enough cooperation for a second tower to be built. That is just the general idea of the story since I have not read it in more years then my son has been alive. And today it struck me how much that story relates to things I do everyday. I have spent a lot of time the last two months talking to all sorts of people at all sorts of level about what it is I do. When my son asks what I do at work all day I tell him I make websites for people so they can send there girlfriends flowers (he thinks girls are fine but girl FRIENDS are gross). Because that is what I do and that is his vernacular, he can grasp it at that level. When I try to explain to others what I do it is a little harder. If I start throwing out terms like a bad mama jama and bust out with the PR, TR, backlinks, anchortext, CSS (or ccs as my boss will call it more often then not), load speed, page size, PPC, SEO, natural SEO, SEM, click through, keywords, metaanything, or even just html most people, even if they know the terms, will have to take time to process what I am saying and translate it into a concept they have a firmer grasp on. That is all well and good if people were like my crappy mac which will pause noticeably when it is thinking and processing. People don’t so I don’t know when to stop my diatribe and let them process. But if I do the upfront translation for them and then spit it out in there on vernacular then they don’t have that processing time and I can go ahead at full steam and never break the pipe. When I did sales I hadn’t thought through this whole concept even I was haphazardly creating the ground work for this idea. When I was in sales and still many people in sales refer to something called the golden connection. The golden connection is simply a place that you and the mark customer can have a common connection. If they have a dog I have a dog, if they have a fear of tech I only use this hunk of junk because my boss makes me, if they have kids I live with a woman that has kids and although they are not my own I love them as if they were and am looking forward to having my own one day soon. It is a place where they can say this guy is like me and since he likes what he is doing then it must be ok. It really breaks down the communication bearer between the sales person and the mark customer. Taking that to a higher level I would notice that when I was in a region for a few days I would actively work on picking up there local phrases and dialect so by the end of the week in any location I sounded local. It was funny I would even do it on the phone when I was talking to people I would start to use there phrases and speech patterns on long calls. Many people thought I was from different parts of the country all the time because of the way in which I spoke. And really it was just my sales man side kicking in. after I got sick (I might talk about that sometime in the future) I worked hard on losing all aspects of the salesman I had formed in myself. But as in the sort of the hippo its not that easy to be something you are not. I am a sales man and I am finding that part of what that means is picking up on the vernacular of the person I am speaking to and then rephrasing what I am trying to communicate to them in that vernacular. One current example is when I talk about SEO and all of its scary associated terms I am starting to rephrase it in more accepted marketing speak so as to not get that disconnect and to be better able to phrase my thoughts in a way that will fit in better to others. Its noticeable who much better my ideas are understood when I use there terms I think it does two main things one I have rambled on about for the last few to many lines and the other is it gives me my own TR for that topic. People like to talk to like minded people and if I use there vernacular then I must have something in common with them, again the golden connection, and if they don’t have to process the idea into there own thoughts and patterns as well as feeling that we are like minded people then im in like flin as it were. The problem with all of this is that it takes time and I have to balance the translation step with getting the idea out in a timely fashion but as I actively do it more and more it will again become a part of who I am and I will not have to spend the active clock cycles to process it. Now I am back to the salt mines. Someone told me yesterday to not talk it all so serious its only flowers. Well that’s true it is only flowers but they still have thorns and thorns hurt no matter how pretty the flower attached to it is.
