My name is Helen Gurnau. I sit in Seattle, Washington. It's a little little overcast today. But I'm here today.Thank you so much for the Women Tech Network, for sponsoring this event. This is the second year that I've been participating in it. And I'm here today to talk a little bit about marketing and emerging technologies. So spotting those trends, and positioning your messaging. A little bit about myself first. I think we only have about twenty minutes, so I'll try to jam through these slides, and we can have a conversation, a little bit more about the topic if you're interested in it. But, my background is in politics and communication and journalism. This picture is actually from, when I worked at The US Capitol, from the very tippy tippy top of the Capitol Dome, kind of staring down the National Mall.

You, like, climb all the way up to the very top, and then you even go kind of further above that. And it was it was pretty fun. I was there for about, I think almost five years, working with national media covering the Capitol Building. My interest in politics brought me there and, sort of my love for journalism kept me there. But, as I think some of us might have experienced, having, starting a family, I had a bit of a career pivot, and, got into marketing, writing, telling the story, telling complex stories in marketing. And I've been working in this sort of new kind of, you know well, ten years ago, it was new blockchain space, talking about blockchain identity, and, kind of the associated technologies that go with that. So that's a little bit about me. Right now I work for a company called Indecio.

Indecio, was, founded I was one of the cofounders with a a few colleagues, and, we we, founded the company in February of twenty twenty, which is a great time to start a company. We, set out, to create the software, the infrastructure, the network, needed to, create a simpler system for identity, making it easier to log in, to identify yourself, to take information from point a to point b still privately, securely, easily, efficiently, but without a million passwords, without keys and rotating keys and emails and text messages and thumbprints and retina scans and all that kind of stuff.

And so, we found that, through the work with our, engineering staff that it, blockchain provided, a good way to do that. So we had our first deployment, by a government in 2021 associated with health records because at the time, there were the requirements for certain health records being divulged, when you, when you traveled. We launched our, consumer product in DCO Proven, which, again, is this sort of software that, makes all of this possible, in 2022. And then, we're, had some kind of industry recognition. And now we're moving into the kind of passwordless authentication using, these verifiable, or portable credentials. So it's been a a kind of a a long, road for a start up, especially in the last year or two with, just the, financial position that, you know, investment money is, kind of not always, not not the easiest to come by these days. And a lot of, companies, have been impacted, in the last six months.

So it's it's, you know, we're we're we're continuing on, but it's still a very exciting field to be in, and we're really looking forward to seeing some, more deployments this year. But what I wanted to talk about today is this idea of messaging, the mess the challenge of messaging, with emerging tech. So this could be anything from, I mean, examples, AI, blockchain is one of them, AI, quantum computing, you know, even when kind of SAS products first came out twenty years ago, you know, more than that, you know, it it is challenging for a marketer to then take this really interesting technology, something that developers, engineers have worked on, standards bodies have written about, specifications, protocols have been written for this really cool thing, and now how to get it in the hands of your customers, your the the, you know, the greater, you know, market.

And a lot of this has to do with the fact that it is that, terminology, that people kinda get hung up on. Right? So we're talking about these highly technical, capabilities. But what does that mean for the end user? Right? I mean, new new technology rarely just sells on its own, just people reading about this really highly technical thing. You know, it's it's connecting that story. It's telling that complexity around the workflows that it it it connects with with the regulations that impact it with, you know, partnerships or other organizations that are coming together to use it. You know, it's it's learning, I think, as marketers, learning how the whole system works to be able to then tell that story. You know, for us using, creating this, the software and using the standards and specifications and protocols around decentralized, or blockchain based identity, you know, we really had to talk about, well, what is what is this technology bringing us?

Where is it going? Where is it taking the end user? It's taking them towards this place of, you know, passwordless a passwordless life of where you don't have to, come up with another password again. You know, something where, you know, you can walk through you never have to stand in an immigration line again, showing somebody a paper passport and hoping they, you know, have that make those connections, visually with the person. Or, I mean, I was a I was a waitress when I was in college, and people would show me their their ID, and I would have to sit there and do the math if they're 21, if they're trying to buy a beer. Like, it's like, I don't know. And whatever. You know? It's like that that shouldn't happen that way. And it's telling that story and how the technology, connects with that that I think is has been the most, valuable.

Because a lot of the goals are, you know, this this idea of finding where our customers are, finding what they do understand, what they do get, you know, where the market has, you know, news and and information has kind of seeped in and then taking them where kind of they want to go.

So it's, you know, it's translating this into that those relatable outcomes. You know, these these moving targets about what people care about, what they're searching for, what makes them want to act, you know, and we'll talk a little more about that in a couple minutes, but, for us at, at my organization, it, it was, you know, it, it was about not making another password about, not having to identify yourself for the fifteenth time.

You know, not about the protocol, or, you know, the technology itself. So how are we gonna find find our customers and take them, to what they're what they're trying to do? And that's that's that trend spotting. So for me, what I what what I really focus on in in our team is is that messaging framework. Again, maybe it's my journalism background, hello to the journalists out there, but, or the folks that have, you know, those those writing backgrounds. But it's it's it's, you know, how are we identifying that problem? Right? How are we being able to, you know, find the problem of, let's say, you know, for anybody who's had a who's who's moved, from one house to another, then they have to fill out their address 50,000,000 times everywhere you go.

Like, everybody kind of gets those pain points at a personal level for for organizations. Right? If you have 10 different logins for 10 different systems that you you have a thousand employees using, that's a huge amount of time. When you start looking at the the the the time spent resetting passwords, the time spent getting people the right authorization, individual granular, you know, putting in, you know, putting in a a tick trouble tickets. You know, the the idea of being able to identify somebody online, it it affects so many different, systems, both for your, you know, for your workplace and for your private life. So I think that there's, you know, these these problems are things that we could definitely, we've found ways to tell the story for our customers and then our customers' customers, to fly to focus on the outcome they want. They want efficiency. They want better security.

They want to not, have they they wanna, reduce the customer drop off because there's too many steps in their online registration system because they maybe a a company bought a digital identity, product from a digital identity provider, but it's just too complicated. It just takes too long. It's too cumbersome. There's too much friction. What do they want? They want ease. They want something that you should like, digital identity should work. Like, you should be able to click on something and it tell you what you get you into what you want it, you know, what you want. And so it's finding what they what that outcome is, language that they're already using. We're not talking about, honestly, when we talk about blockchain, it like, like people are like, I don't crypto now that I'm not interested. And so it's finding that language that they do use. Oh, do you use a wall? Do you have that, you know, that wallet on your phone? Yeah.

What if your driver's license was in that? What if your, health records were in that? And what if you control it and you were able to share it, digitally? Oh, well, that that sounds really interesting. And so when they start asking they they will start asking questions why and how, and, we will start kind of unpacking those terms. But they aren't terms, like, you know, blockchain or AI or whatever, you know, quantum computing. It's not something you can just kind of drop in though to, you know, typically in, in language, it's something that we've had to really, find ways to educate our customers, and do it, you know, in a way that, rolls, rolls it out so that, slow enough so that they can, understand kind of each step of the way.

So example, you know, using something called a decentralized identifier, which is a specific tech piece of tech type of technology built on a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium, the w three c. No. That's not helpful when we're talking about, meeting our customers where they are. You know, verified once used everywhere, issued once, you know, get, you know, prove prove your email address and send it to somebody, and you don't have to start, you don't have to, you know, create a new login at every website when you just can prove your they just wanna know that you are who you are.

So, you know, there's ways to, kind of look at the complexity of of the language that say is coming out of our engineering teams, is coming maybe even out of our product teams, and finding ways to simplify it and make it more, direct to that to the, end user, to your your your target audience needs.

So part of what we do and did, and have you I've used in the sort of blockchain identity space is this idea of trend spotting, right? So finding those, that those threads, those outcomes that we're looking to, attract and connect with. So, you know, we all have those sort of commonly used tools. We have kind of search, analytic tools, you know, product. There's different tools that let you search the trends on product websites. Certain industries have certain tools, you know, that depending on what if you're a kind of consumer or, consumer product company or software company, you know, there's lots of kind of search functions. I also use, if you are lucky enough to have, access to analyst reports, the paid subscriptions to a Gartner or Forrester, you can really see what organizations are, looking for, what they are, searching for and, you know, start making those connections with what you're doing.

I also love looking, even if I don't go to all of all the events. You could go to events probably every day of the entire year and be on the road forever. Definitely that's come come back since since COVID's been over. But, you know, watch for those session sessions. Watch at RSA. Watch, you know, the the different industry conferences. What are what are other speakers speaking about? What are things that, have been picked up by the, organ by the event organizers as being key, key, topics that people are interested in hearing about. I mean, even, women in tech this conference this year, there's so much you know, AI is absolutely everywhere, and us as marketers need to understand, you know, what those trends are in the usage and the deployments, and where it's going. So even if you don't go to an event, definitely scroll through the, the the session topics, and then also, you know, keep you an eye on competitors.

And I'm gonna keep an eye on the time because twenty minutes goes by fast. So keep keep trucking here. So this just talks a little bit about why the term our term verifiable credentials really at first didn't didn't really register. People were confused with it, with, you know, whether it was passwords or mobile wallets or what have you. We really had, again, anchoring it in those outcomes of reasonable identity, government grade digital identity. Governments really have specific, requirements for digital identity be digital identity to be used as something that they can, trust to, you know, say, let somebody into a con you know, let somebody into a country or, you know, let them cross borders. And so, that is, you know, a term, a specific term that was called out that, you know, we've been able to, to use.

And then also not, you know, not just using, verifiable credentials as describing us as just kind of another digital identity provider, which we're not. We're not providing any identity. We're creating the infrastructure for people to use identity more efficiently. So, that's kind of how it started. You know, the we realized quickly, though, that we had to find keywords that were more, targeted, that were more useful, that were more successful, that were more yeah. It would perform better. And so talking things about talking more specifically to the user experience about their wallet, about identity that they control. You know, there were times where the keywords were really important, but then times it was just that that plain language that was more important than trying to stuff a bunch of keywords into a piece of content. So there's def definitely a balance, to be to be made there. And we know when our messaging is not working. Right?

We know when our sales team is rewrite rewriting the whatever ask that we've given them. We know when we're having webinars and there's a lot of, I don't understand. Can you explain? Go back and show me this, that sort of thing, and also analysts, you know, using different language. So if we if we're going back to those reports and we're seeing, you know, the Gartner Gartner, Magic Quadrant come out and it's totally it's describing something totally different than where what what you have been using, what I've been using. We know that there's some some tweaks to be made. And then just, oh, gosh. Time goes quick. And so it's important again to create set up a living messaging system that works for you and your company. Right? So you wanna provide, and your team. Right? So you wanna provide those, like, core foundational messaging elements, but, you know, make sure that it's you're constantly scrubbing it.

I mean, that's I think any marketer can say it's like rewrite and rewrite over and over and over. Find the analytics, find the data that's going to inform the keywords and things that will inform the general framework, but it's always it's always in motion. You're always editing. And so, yeah, weekly weekly, syncs, you know, weekly, quarterly reviews, updating battle cards, landing pages. It's gonna be, you know, a never ending tool. That's why I tell every single person I've ever mentored is write, write, write, be a good writer, know how to write, then go be a biologist, then go do something, you know, be an engineer. But everybody eve on our team at in DCO, we're always encouraging that every developer, everybody to learn how to write first. And so it's a it's a constant, constant battle.

So takeaways for today, what I wanna, you know, make sure that that, I leave you with is, you know, start with look at those outcomes that you're trying to communicate. Don't get hung up on the, on the technology. Don't get hung up on the standards and the protocols and the ones and the zeros. But really you're telling a story, and of how this product will make people's lives better. And so that's, just been a very important, very important, aspect of, the way that I I I work in in our team. You know, let trends guide, but not dictate. Let, you know, keywords even guide, but not dictate. You know, always use your judgment and your, again, what what is what is impactful, to the story and the narrative, to to really be that that guiding force.

And then, messaging is a living system. So, you know, always always be editing, rewriting, you know, giving feedback, setting up those systems so that, you know, it's never it's it's never kind of a a finished a you never kind of have that finished piece. Some resources, obviously, you know, all the SEO tools, I wasn't gonna list them here. But, definitely, you know, keep keep them, you know, keep keep them in mind. And, you know, the ones I'm talking about, you marketers out there. And then, customer feedback has been so like, we all know it's worth its weight in gold. So, you know, really, you know, working closely with sales teams to be able to have that communication with the customers so that, especially kind of in a b to b world, where you can, you know, reach out and talk with them and and be able to, tell those user stories, is just so important.

Don't forget analyst reports. Follow investors, like, where the investment is happening, I think, is also good when you're trying to define the the the technology or the trend that you're, working on is, you know, where is where is the investment money going? You know, where the where are some of those, kind of investor influencers, you know, talking about? Where are they going? Yep. And then always, you know, keep keep track of it. Stay organized. As we all know, it's a it's a a never ending battle. Some books that I thought were really I thought were worth mentioning, are listed here, and I am out of time.