make the talk resemble the talk

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>

1 files changed, 41 insertions, 36 deletions

diff --git a/lume/src/talks/2024/consentual-marketing.mdx b/lume/src/talks/2024/consentual-marketing.mdx
index 67d39d1..ff89cae 100644
--- a/lume/src/talks/2024/consentual-marketing.mdx
+++ b/lume/src/talks/2024/consentual-marketing.mdx
@@ -25,60 +25,69 @@ This was a lightning talk at [DevRelCon NYC 2024](https://nyc24.devrelcon.dev/).
   desc="The title slide of the talk. It shows the speaker name and the title."
 />
 
-Hey, I'm Xe and I work for fly dot io. We put your apps into microVMs across the globe (or flat plane, we don't judge) and then let people access them from anywhere. We've recently started a DevRel team and in the process, we want to avoid this:
+Hi, I'm Xe. I work for [Fly.io](https://fly.io). We put your app into microVMs across the globe (or flat plane, we don't judge), and then we let people access them from anywhere. We recently started a DevRel team and in the process, we wanted to avoid this:
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/002"
   desc="A sad table with a mild smattering of stickers."
 />
 
-Conferences want you to have a booth, but this is what you get when you have a booth: sadness, burnout, exhaustion, and low conversion rates. So as a result, we've changed ideas:
+Conferences want you to have a booth, but this is what you get when you have a booth: you have a sad table with some stickers on it, low turnout, low conversion rates, low utilization of financial resources.
 
 <Slide name="2024/consentual-marketing/003" desc="Make memories, not booths" />
 
-We want to make memories between people, not foster a sad booth full of people that look like they need to check out from the mortal plane for a week.
+So as a result, we've changed ideas. We want to make memories between people instead of fostering a sad booth full of people that look like they need a break from reality for a week.
 
-Okay, okay, booths do work well in an ideal spherical world where you can have the booth staffed with like seven people so that people can rotate out in shifts. But money is expensive right now, and I work for a startup. There's gotta be a middle path between nothing and a sad booth of exhausted people, right?
+Okay, okay. Booths do work well in the ideal spherical world where you're able to have like seven people at a booth and rotate them out in shifts so that you can make sure nobody's burned out to heck. But who's going to pay for that? I work for a startup.
 
-Today I'm gonna talk about what we've tried, what we've learned, and what we're gonna do next.
+Surely there's got to be a middle path between having a table like the one before and something terrible, right?
+
+Today, I'm going to talk about what we've tried, what we've learned, and what we're going to try next.
 
 ### That one time we accidentally had a booth
 
-To begin, let's talk about the time we accidentally had a booth. We sponsored EpicWebConf and as a result, they gave us a booth. We wanted to support the EpicWeb community and gave them money for the sake of giving them money. Then we found out that our sponsorship gave us a booth space. Then we had one mission:
+To begin, let's talk about the time that we accidentally had a booth. We sponsored EpicWebConf and as a result, they gave us a booth without telling us.
+
+[Laughter]
+
+We thought we were just giving them money for the sake of giving them money, but it turns out it had strings attached and the strings were a booth.
+
+Then we had one mission:
 
 Pull this off without going full capitalism.
 
-We needed to pull this off without affecting our ability to sleep at night. When you have a booth, people stop seeing your interactions as personal, everything becomes super transactional and we hate that. We want to talk to people like...people and you can't if you have the "$$$ paid shill $$$" badge around your neck.
+When you have a booth, people stop seeing your interactions as personal between people. It becomes very transactional. Like, "Oh, here, have a capitalism object. Would you like to use service? Thank you for being a loyal customer!" This is especially bad when you are a sponsor and you get the paid shill badge around your neck.
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/008"
   desc="A picture of our booth at EpicWebConf. It has cookies, flowers, and a lovely tablecloth."
 />
 
-So we set up cookies and flowers, then just hung out and passed out some spare hoodies from another event. We wanted to just feed people, make them happy, give them a fit, and send them on their way to do whatever it is.
+So, we did something different.
 
-We have three rules for this:
+We had cookies, flowers, and we just passed out some hoodies from a previous event. And in the
+process, we came up with these three rules of engagement:
 
-1. Make people happy.
-2. Make people look nice.
-3. There is no rule three.
+1. Make them happy.
+2. Make them look nice.
+3. There is no step three.
 
 ### The speakeasy strat
 
-In the process we've come up with something we call the speakeasy strat. We did this at KubeCon EU. We didn't have a table, we had a party:
+And in the process, we've come up with something that we call the speakeasy strat. We did this at KubeCon EU. We didn't have a table, we had a party. We gave out flyers for the party at the event and talked about it, twate about it on whatever we're supposed to call Twitter, and posted on conferenceparties.com.
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/011"
   desc="A bunch of nerds having conversations about the cloud in a speakeasy."
 />
 
-We gave out fliers about the party at the event, talked about it with people when we saw them, and then also twate about it on whatever we're supposed to call Twitter now.
+It was pretty great.
 
-We also gave out these lovely technicolor dreamcoats to everyone that showed up. As a company, we did a crazy thing and hired a human artist that does art for children's books. Annie's art is everywhere through our branding, and all over this hoodie. It's great. We also use these jackets as a carrot on a stick to get coworkers to give talks at conferences.
+We also gave these lovely Technicolor Dreamcoats out, and all of this is drawn by a human, an actual human that has a heartbeat and a soul.
 
-In our testing, we found out that most of the people that showed up were from our online promotion instead of in-person evangelism. It was something like a 5:1 ratio. We also got a bunch of people from conferenceparties.com, so you may wanna post your details there when you're vibing around bigger conferences.
+And in our testing, we found out that most of the people showed up were from the internet. A significant number of people also came from conferenceparties.com. Might be worth checking out if you want to hang out at a conference.
 
-This is a really hard balance to hit though, you wanna give people an after-party, but you don't want to disrupt the actual conference in the process. You're relying on the context and closeness to the event, but not trying to eclipse it. If you do this, you should probably sponsor the event out of respect to the organizers.
+However, when you have a side event with a conference, you need to be really careful, because you could accidentally end up eclipsing the actual conference itself. And that tends to make conferences kind of angry. If you do this, you should probably sponsor the event, just out of courtesy to the organizers.
 
 ### The Backpack
 
@@ -87,55 +96,51 @@ This is a really hard balance to hit though, you wanna give people an after-part
   desc="A backpack with a fly.io logo on it."
 />
 
-My coworker Yvette also tried something recently to try and get people to talk with her about fly dot eye oh, she got one of those neat LED array backpacks.
-
-The really cool part about it is that it is programmable with whatever message we want. At the time we were trying to go hard into the GPU product, so there's a few animated looping messages about using GPUs in the cloud.
+Another thing we tried is a backpack that is programmable and animated and says stuff about how you can do AI workloads with GPUs or something. This was a great nerd-sniping tool because people didn't know that you could program a backpack. It's got lots of really interesting conversations. I forget which conference it was at, Yvette knows this better than I do.
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/016"
   desc="A Borat 'great success' meme with 'Developers relled' over it in dark souls text."
 />
 
-This was amazingly successful. Yvette was walking around as a human billboard for the platform and had a lot of great conversations as a result. It may have been because the backpack had moving images, which probably was enough to make the developer squirrel brain go "oh, what's that? It's moving!"
-
-Not to mention, people didn't know that fully programmable backpacks existed (frankly, neither did I), so it made people want to talk a lot more than usual. As far as a $120 experiment went, that was probably one of our largest successes to date.
+And we successfully relled developers with this. Maybe because the backpack was moving and the squirrel-brain activated. Not to mention, people didn't know fully programmable backpacks existed, and frankly, neither did I. And as far as a $120 experiment goes, it's pretty great.
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/018"
   desc="The sticker table at AI Tinkerers Ottawa."
 />
 
-Oh, developers, they love stickers. Look at this:
+Oh, developers, stickers, get on it. You know this. I would gesture to my MacBook lid right now, but I don't have it with me. My laptop is coated with stickers, and they end up being advertisements for the people or services involved.
 
 (Xe points to their macbook lid)
 
-I'm a developer (and I have the GitHub squars to prove it), my laptop is coated in stickers, many other high value developers love stickers too. Take advantage of this. If you have cool stickers, then people turn into free advertising. People also love exclusive stickers, so we have a fair bit of them.
+We have some exclusive stickers. I did not get a collage of them in time for the slides. But we have exclusive stickers for places where DevRel lives and specific events. We had one for DevOps Days KC, as I'm sure the person in the blue hair can testify. Not to mention, you can put QR codes on the back of stickers. Every sticker becomes a coupon for 50 capitalism dollars of credit.
 
-There's stickers per locale and we give them out for meetups and events. We give Annie (our in-house artist) inspiration and then we love the whimsical and cute stuff that ends up on the stickers. In the best case, we have a custom design for the event and people feel loved. It takes us time to make stickers for the event like that, but it pays the heck off.
-
-Not to mention, you can put custom QR codes on the back of stickers. Every sticker becomes a coupon for 50 capitalism dollars of credit. Try it! Maybe it'll work for you.
+Try it, maybe it'll work!
 
 ### NYC Event
 
-Here's what we want to try for the future. We want to make our marketing consensual. We want people to come up to us and ask questions instead of people having to feel like we are coming to them to give them information. Yesterday we ran a solutions architecture and chill meetup in a bar.
+Here's what we want to try for the future. We want to make marketing consentual. We want people to come up to us and ask questions instead of feeling like we are coming to them and telling them things they may not want to hear.
+
+Yesterday we ran a solutions architecture and chill meetup in a bar.
 
-I'd love to have photos on how it went but I had to submit the slides before the event happened so I'm just gonna talk about it instead.
+I'd love to have photos on it, but I had to submit the slide deck before last night.
 
-It was pretty great! About two dozen people showed up and we all just nerded out about the cloud. I ended up meeting someone I only knew from the internet and overall a great time was had by all. We're gonna do more stuff like this in the future, but I don't know what the capitalism line impact of it was yet! It was a lot of fun though.
+And it was pretty great. We just hung out in a bar, had free drinks, and some people got their nails done. We're going to do more stuff like this in the future, but we don't know what the capitalism line impact of it was yet, because I haven't looked at the metrics. I don't have my work laptop on me.
 
 ### Conclusion
 
-TL;DR:
+But TL;DR:
 
 - Your booth sucks.
 - Make memories, not booths.
-- Make people feel happy to attend by giving out exclusive stickers, use that fear of missing out to your advantage in a nontoxic way.
-- Let people come to you to find out more, don't go over to them to tell them things they don't already want to hear.
-- Developers love stickers, take advantage of that.
+- Make people feel happy to attend by giving out exclusive stickers and use the fear of missing out to your advantage in a non-toxic way.
+- Let people come to you to find out more. Don't go over to them to tell them things they may not want to hear.
+- Developers, stickers.
 
 <Slide
   name="2024/consentual-marketing/027"
   desc="My conclusion slide, with links to various social platforms."
 />
 
-And with that, I've been Xe Iaso, thanks for having me! I'll be around if you have questions or want stickers. Stay frosty y'all.
+And with that, I've been Xe Iaso. Thanks for having me. I'll be around if you have questions and stay frosty, y'all.