When reading about marketing yourself as an expert and building authority, there’s a piece of advice that keeps popping up: your content should attract your ideal buyers, but also turn away (and maybe offend) the ones who aren’t the right fit.
I thought I understood that advice, but a few weeks ago I got a very visceral taste of it. “The Incident” still feels a bit embarrassing, but I want to share it because sometimes it’s tough to truly internalize advice until you live it personally, or at least get a vivid example.
I had made a post on LinkedIn about my own experiences around collaboration in UAV development projects. It focused on the importance of all disciplines working in an integrated way, instead of just passing work from one group to the next.
I thought it was a decently smart post, definitely not earth-shattering but hopefully food for thought.
The comments ended up taking it in a much different direction than I intended. Most of those commenting were folks in the passenger aircraft domain (veterans of Boeing and similar companies), saying their experiences hadn’t been how I described them. It felt like I’d fallen right on my face, but I had some decent chats with those folks and was able to come away having learned a few things.
There was one comment that really stuck in me like a gnarly thorn, though. It insinuated that my post had been AI generated because it was so “wrong”. It also addressed me as if I was a new college grad, instead of a professional with years of experience not just in my industry, but in working with and leading the kind of teams my post talked about.
Reading those words put me in a funk all weekend, to put it mildly.
I debated deleting the post entirely—of course I don’t think I have to be right all the time (and I won’t always be right, either) but man that response hurt.
Then the universe decided to surprise me.