NTTG_020_Joel Benge

[00:00:00] 

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Hey, it is Joel Benge that rhymes with Stonehenge, the nerd that talks good with another solo episode on this 20th episode of Nerds That Talk. Good. We’ll keep this one short. I just wanted to thank [00:01:00] you guys so much for listening .

And also give you guys a peek of what’s coming up next.

I’m gonna be wrapping down this season. I’ve got a couple more episodes in the bag, and then I’m gonna be taking a break because I’m getting ready to, here’s some big news I should probably drop in a, a drum roll here. My book is coming out. I have finally got a release date. The book is gonna be coming out in the middle of June, 2025, so you do not have that much longer to wait.

The book is Be a Nerd That Talks Good, and I thought what I would do at this episode is read the opening, read the, the introduction, give you guys a little bit of flavor of what to expect from that book.
 

The book is kind of a how to manual for technical practitioners or founders or, you know, all the people out there who are nerds, who wanna learn how to talk good, who wanna learn how to put their, their messages out there and without overwhelming their audience. 

It’s the result of, 25 years in in communications and technology and marketing.

If you’ve listened to my [00:02:00] previous solo episode, I sort of gave you my nerd origin story. I’m gonna recap that in this introduction for you. But the rest of the book really gets into the nuts and bolts of how do we create a message that sticks and scales with our audiences. 

I’m very excited about this.

I’ve been working on this book for over a year. I’ve had a lot of support, a lot of people who have been on the podcast previously contributed to it. So thank you to them. And you can join the Book Army. I’ll give you some more information on how you can get at the head of the line, join the wait list and get the book early.

But thank you so much. 

So without any further delay, here is the opening dedication and the introductions to the book.
 

Be a Nerd That Talks Good. 

“Transform your technical knowledge into powerful messages”

by Joel Benge

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Joel: Dedication: [00:03:00] 

For my doctor, father and artist mother.

For my wife who always has my back. (Sometimes shaking her head in disbelief.) 

For my son who helped me create my first card game when he was only eight years old. 

And of course, for the developers, technical founders, product marketers, and other nerds

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Joel: Introduction

The Blank Stare Moment.

I think every technical founder, practitioner, even every tech marketer has experienced it. You’re giving a demo or talking about your tech, and you see the audience’s attention drain away, or you’ve stood up a new marketing asset and gotten no traffic at all. You did everything right, included all the talking points and background information, opened with the business case, and used just the right amount of graphics.

Still no one is picking up what you’re putting down. You may be telling yourself, “some people are just born communicators and I’m not,” or “it’s not me, it’s them.” Or “if I just dumb things down a [00:04:00] little.” Don’t listen to those voices. Every technical communicator has experienced this at some point, it’s not your audience’s fault and it’s not yours.

Why do the blank stares happen? What to do about them and how do nerds like us overcome our tendency to either overwhelm our audiences with detail or dumb things down? That’s what we’re gonna tackle together in this book. 

This isn’t a Marketing Book. 

You won’t find the answers to mapping the customer journey, identifying the ideal customer profile or icp, or setting up an ABM/GTM/PLG/BLAH strategy.
 

A footnote, that means account-based marketing, go to market, product-led growth, and boring long as heck strategies, respectively. 

Though I will say that the efforts in such areas will be greatly improved if you do read and follow the advice in this book, [00:05:00] but maybe you’re thinking, Joel, this book is literally listed in the marketing book category, WTF?” Yeah, about that. I didn’t write this book to turn you into a marketer. 

What I’m about to share are the thought processes and models I’ve used– influenced by my technical background– in my marketing career. My goal is to help you uncover deeper truths about why, and as a technical communicator, you are doing what you do and why others should listen to you.

In the end, I hope to help you create a foundation for technical communications, even marketing that goes beyond mere tactics and playbooks from one nerd to another. 

I’ll be borrowing from some of the greatest minds in classical philosophy and psychology, along with modern neuroscience and the entertainment industry to rock your technical messaging world.

Stuff like: 

– Tapping into ancient philosophy to find balance between the discrete persuasion modes of emotion, logic, and credibility. 

– Using [00:06:00] the neuropsychology of an audience to give them exactly the words they need at the right time, and ,

– Playing a few hands of cards (with the deck stacked in your favor.)

Along the way, we’ll explore practical and fun ways of engaging with both technical and creative teams to create messaging that sticks and scales. So come along nerds, tech wizards, and even you, marketing gurus. It’s time to give your messaging a major upgrade and transform the way you talk tech.

But First, a Story.

Before I help you tell yours, I’d like to tell you my story like, like any epic transformation tale, star Wars, back to the future, Nickelodeon, rugrat, et cetera. It has three discrete parts, so buckle up.

By the way, if you want a really interesting look at the rule of three, check out chapter four. 

From Slime to Security.

I’ve always considered myself a bit of a performer. My [00:07:00] first high school job was wearing a six foot rat costume at a national entertainment chain restaurant where a kid could be a kid.

By the way, best job ever. Nothing says “children’s entertainment” better than a high schooler in a first suit Pantomiming a happy birthday dance while you and your friends stuff your faces with pizza and plunk coins into video game machines.

My final summer job was at a regional theme park, working with producers from Florida to create a stage mashup of the Nickelodeon network’s greatest hits– physical challenges, pie fights, and green slime, of course. 

I entered college with a theater scholarship and visions of Oscars and Tony’s dancing in my head.

Somewhere around the middle of my sophomore year in college, I figured it was time to get an actual job and make some actual money. This was before the Dotcom bubble deflation of the late 1990s, and I found myself working in technical support at a video game company. Believe me, you [00:08:00] haven’t lived until you’ve worked customer service.

On Christmas morning, your game ruined Christmas.

But through that job, I learned how to listen to customers and quickly diagnose their challenges, crafting a technical explanation at the level that matched their aptitude and solve their problems, set their holidays right, and got them the hell off the phone so I could go back to playing Doom.

Fast forward through help desk system admin, network operations, security Operations Center, or SOC and IT compliance roles, and I found myself squarely in my thirties wondering where all the pizza, cake, and games had gone.

Uncle Sam Comes Knocking.

A chance. Lunch with a family friend pointed me towards an open position in the US government.

I applied for a security and compliance analyst position with the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. They took one look at my resume and the hiring manager asked whether I was interested in a different position: [00:09:00] communications manager. “What’s the difference,” I asked,” between communications and compliance?”

“One lives in Microsoft, Excel, and the other in Word,” was the reply, and I figured my partial liberal arts background could serve me well there. So I found myself working for the Chief Information Security Officer at DHS as the principal cybersecurity communications manager. I spent my days coordinating cyber policy and strategy communications across the various departments, managing data calls for the executive secretariat’s office, and writing the annual, “change your password as frequently as you change your underwear” cybersecurity awareness messages. That role laid the foundation for skipping the technical nonsense and getting to the point when it came to presenting technical information. 

Tech Startups and Tabletop Games. 

Fast forward nearly seven years and I was at another chance lunch meeting with the same manager who had hired me at DHS.

He had recently left the White House [00:10:00] position as a national security advisor on cyber security and completed his PhD, and launched a startup, but he found it challenging to quickly explain how his product worked and how it fit into customers’ lives.

I asked him for his pitch. The tech was cool, but the story left something to be desired. He invited me to join the founding team as a product-evangelist-cum-marketing-director.

“I don’t know anyone who can tell a technical story like you can,” Joel. He told me, I wasn’t sure I believed him, but the pace of government work was wearing thin and I accepted. 

Together, we redefined the product and I accidentally invented my first card game with the assistance of my then 8-year-old son to explain the core algorithm. (More on that later.) 

When it was about time to move on from the startup, I found myself in branding and content roles at a handful of creative marketing agencies just outside Washington, DC, supporting clients in the [00:11:00] defense and intelligence markets with a few cybersecurity startups on the side, you could say I came full circle and became a marketer for the same nerds I was working with a few years prior.

Today I spend my days working with technical founders and leaders, product managers, and marketing teams to identify and nail their target market message.

As a nerd myself, I love working directly with technical people in an organization to draw out gold nugget messaging elements and put them on display in what I call their “first-principles” messaging.

I’ve helped pivot early stage companies towards human first messaging, improving their websites, to the point where qualified inbound leads increased by 400% in the first year. And I’ve aligned internal technical teams at multi-billion dollar defense contractors around a bigger corporate vision.

Something previously considered a big joke. To do this, I deploy a little bit of what I call “message therapy” [00:12:00] (not a typo) to make sure they not only cover the technical “how?” details of their story, but also the “so what?”, the “why?”, and sometimes the “WTF?” elements that really engage the customers. 

This book is an in-depth look into the philosophies, methods, and frameworks that I’ve used to pull some of the most hardcore nerds out of their shell until they were world-class communicators and advocates for their own companies.

The book is broken into four major parts. 

Part one focuses mostly on philosophical and scientific background material to help us understand why technical marketing sometimes falls flat to human ears. 

Part two presents my philosophy on creating a well-balanced messaging stack.

Part three contains a step-by-step model for executing a successful messaging workshop.

Part four includes a whole bunch of other fun reading and resources that will help to reinforce [00:13:00] your messaging. 

After all, what nerd can resist a little extra credit homework? 

I sincerely hope it all helps your journey into the ranks of the nerds that talk good.

And there you have it, just the opening, just the introductions to wet your whistle a little bit. If you’d like to read the entire book, you can do so before it comes out. You can join my book Army by going to nerdthattalksgood.com/book. Fill out your interest form. I’ll follow up with a special link that’s gonna give you a digital advanced reader copy.

You can give a, give it a good read, 
 

Prepare a review for release day. I would appreciate that very much.

It’s gonna be coming out in June. So there’ll be some opportunities for some awesome swag and giveaways and raffles and things like that if you buy and review the book. I would also like to thank everybody who has been supporting me so far in this process.

It’s not been easy, it’s not been as long as I thought it would be but it has been a blast. And thank you for sticking with me, sticking with the podcast. Got a couple more [00:14:00] episodes that’ll be coming up, and then I will probably be taking a break. So thank you so much for joining me. 

This has, once again, has been Joel, the nerd that talks good.

You’re listening to Nerds That Talk Good. If you want links reviews, swag, any of that type of stuff, you can head on over to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. And I will talk to you again soon.

Remember, you don’t have to learn how to speak well. You only gotta learn how to talk good.