Its interesting to look at personalities and how they react to certain things and the reasoning behind them. I've always been very promotional. I help others promote themselves and I promote the things that I am doing. Some people don't like that. There's always the infamous, at least to me, scene at Mix 2006 where someone cornered me in the hall and just beat me to death about being too promotional about what I was doing and I was a bad person and blah, blah, blah. My thinking about that was
- What is your problem?
- My marketing must be working if you are upset over what I am doing.
- What kind of person are you to be mad that I am out spreading a message trying to get a potential customer's attention?
Moving on, I've always tried to help people. I've made some friends on this. I hope I made some more this past week at Mobile Connections, which is a new conference geared towards mobile application development. Somehow, the majority of technologists think that marketing is somehow bad. There's a thought that if you have the best technology and word will somehow magically get around and the world will beat a path to your door. As my father says, and with apologies to "Field of Dreams", "Build it, and they shall not come." I believe that you have to do good work and you need to market what you have done as well. If not, you might as well forget that you did anything to begin with. Jackie Casper and I had a conversation about this at the speaker's party at Mobile Connections. To take it further, some people want to fight you and bad mouth you when you attempt to promote what you have done. "Oh, he's vain, he's only in it for himself, he's ...."
I just had this happen yesterday. There was an interesting discussion on MS and what they need to do to get back on their winning ways. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics, but I made a comment about cloud computing and my article being available online that day (so I was happy) along with disagreeing and agreeing with the original poster on various items. I guess this was somehow interrupretted that I thought I was better than he. I never said that, didn't think that, nor did I imply that. I was happy. I should have remembered that some people feel that the only way to make themselves feel big is to bring others down. The response was along the lines of "You obviously don't know anything about cloud computing." What? Excuse me? Where did that come from? Oh well, I've had run ins with this same guy over the years. These things happen, though, I don't accept a browbeating very easily. I should have just been quiet, but I did something stupid and responded. I don't think I am 100% perfect, and I don't remember who even started this years ago. I happened to be in Miami for about 48 hours in 2007. I tried to get a hold of this guy. I wanted to sit, talk, meet him so that I could learn where he was coming from. I like to get out and meet people, so this seemed natural to me. He never responded. Moving on.
This whole incident got me thinking about human interactions. I used to think that I was the only person with personal insecurities which drift towards an inferiority complex. Now, I think that I am just one of many people with this.
Given what I see in the media with all of these fringe and tiny groups all out there fighting for attention, I start to think that there are too many of us out there with skin that is too thin. Lets all work on thickening our skin and get over these small slights. I know I am better at it than I used to be, but I still have a long way to go. I'm going to work on getting better on this. We need to move on and .......