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When publishing blog or Road Test report, do you know your audience ?

robogary

After doing a powerpoint presentation for a large online meeting to a global audience of mostly engineers and engineering leadership of various departments, my boss assembled me and my team into his office for a chat.

He asked to give ourselves a grade of our presentation. We gave ourselves As, Bs, maybe even a C thrown in. 

The boss said "I generously give you folks a D."

He continued that the presentation included far too much detail on how much time was spent troubleshooting, collecting data, and other related analysis issues and obstacles getting information.

He concluded our feedback session "reminding" us that the audience really didnt care how hard it was to get the needed data and how long it took, their interest was the results and any corrective action recommendations.

I think of this lesson when publishing a Project or Road Test report.

If a video is made to share a project, no one is really interested that it took 15 takes or 12 hours to edit the video (unless the article is about the video editor).

The audience probably doesnt care if you filled your hard drive taking hi-rez photos and had to get cloud server space.  

If publishing a schematic, it doesnt matter if there are 5 revisions or 50 revs from start to finish unless there is a key knowledge point to learn in one of those revs. If someone cares, they will ask.   

Its OK to share an anecdote the major milestones and challenges about the journey if it helps tell the story. 

What's your experience  ? 

   

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  • Can't please them all. Some like stories and background, motivation and history. Others, mostly the managerial types, only care about the bottom line - they just want an executive summary with the bottom-line up-front.

    You'll just have to imagine which audience you want to read your review and write accordingly. I like to imagine that I'm writing for a technical audience that is savvy enough to skip the parts they don't care about, and facilitate that with proper chapter headings/subheadings. I imagine that they care about the methodology, as that influences the result, as well as the results themselves. I imagine they also would want that with a side of opinion and interpretation. I don't write targeting a general "high-school" audience as some newspapers would, as I feel that to be too restrictive, even though it may improve accessibility. There are plenty of spaces where marketing PR material is spewed out verbatim - that has been minced and shaped for general consumption and I (personally) feel we don't need any more of that.

    If concerned, perhaps stratify your review for an overview up-front (an executive summary) and detailed blog-post click-throughs for those who want more meat.

    But yes, the process is perhaps not all that interesting - but it can also depend on how you present it. Some of the best talks out there talk about the process from the perspective of reflecting on their learnings and making it humourous. It's probably no fun to go through each iteration procedurally without having a "point" to convey about why you even mentioned it.

    I suppose in the case you were talking about - perhaps you should have known more about your audience before you assembled it, had the chance to practice it with your superiors for their input prior to the event and kept some of the detail in reserve slides to answer questions from the audience if they were actually interested. Presentations and videos may be similar - you're there to convey information, but you have to be engaging and entertaining for it to work. This is part of why I usually don't do video. Written reviews, however, may be more relaxed in their requirements.

    - Gough

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  • Can't please them all. Some like stories and background, motivation and history. Others, mostly the managerial types, only care about the bottom line - they just want an executive summary with the bottom-line up-front.

    You'll just have to imagine which audience you want to read your review and write accordingly. I like to imagine that I'm writing for a technical audience that is savvy enough to skip the parts they don't care about, and facilitate that with proper chapter headings/subheadings. I imagine that they care about the methodology, as that influences the result, as well as the results themselves. I imagine they also would want that with a side of opinion and interpretation. I don't write targeting a general "high-school" audience as some newspapers would, as I feel that to be too restrictive, even though it may improve accessibility. There are plenty of spaces where marketing PR material is spewed out verbatim - that has been minced and shaped for general consumption and I (personally) feel we don't need any more of that.

    If concerned, perhaps stratify your review for an overview up-front (an executive summary) and detailed blog-post click-throughs for those who want more meat.

    But yes, the process is perhaps not all that interesting - but it can also depend on how you present it. Some of the best talks out there talk about the process from the perspective of reflecting on their learnings and making it humourous. It's probably no fun to go through each iteration procedurally without having a "point" to convey about why you even mentioned it.

    I suppose in the case you were talking about - perhaps you should have known more about your audience before you assembled it, had the chance to practice it with your superiors for their input prior to the event and kept some of the detail in reserve slides to answer questions from the audience if they were actually interested. Presentations and videos may be similar - you're there to convey information, but you have to be engaging and entertaining for it to work. This is part of why I usually don't do video. Written reviews, however, may be more relaxed in their requirements.

    - Gough

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