Mind Readings: What Does Intermediate Mean?

In today's episode, let's talk about intermediate. Intermediate. In a discussion about uh conference sessions I was having with a friend recently, I raised the challenging question what is intermediate even mean? I was looking at uh I think it was either content marketing world or inbound, and of course, you know, there's the sort of the levels of sessions. This is a beginner session, this is an intermediate session, this is an advanced session.

And I realized this is not helpful in any way, shape, or form. What is intermediate mean? I mean, beginners pretty clear. Like most people can self-identify, like, yeah, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm I'm here, just give me the 101.

Intermediate and even advanced to a degree, are a lot more challenging to deal with because it's not clear what that means. Who is intermediate? What is intermediate? Because if you think about a scale from say zero to a hundred, you would think intermediate, okay, maybe that's like a 50 and advanced to be a hundred. But that's all relative, right?

Your 100 might be my 1000, in which case intermediate's 500. Now, if I go in saying thinking 500 is intermediate, and you're thinking 50 is intermediate, we're gonna have a pretty big mismatch. So, what does this mean? We don't know. And here's an even bigger challenge with that term.

Not everybody is super self aware. I'm putting it nicely. Not everybody is super self aware. There's a bunch of folks who underestimate their skills. They think, oh, you know, uh compared to all these people, I don't really you know know anything.

So I'm gonna put myself in the beginner session. And then they're disappointed because it's like uh not really learning anything here. Other people um dramatically overestimate their skills, like, oh yeah, I'm I know I know everything there is to know about attribution modeling, and they jump into uh an intermediate session, and you know the speaker's talking about Markov chain modeling, and you're like, uh you just pretend to smile and nod, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew I knew that. Um so these these grades of beginner intermediate and advanced in the context of conferences are really unhelpful. So what do we do about this?

How do we how do we figure this out? Well, from the perspective of an event manager or a speaker, be more clear, be more specific about what intermediate means. So, for example, if I'm leading a session on uh attribution modeling, I might say instead of this is intermediate, I might say, if you are familiar with the differences between ridge regression and lasso regression, you will get benefit out of this session, right? Because we're gonna talk about those those approaches to attribution modeling. On the other hand, if you don't know what lasso regression and ride regression are, much less what the differences are between the two, this session's not gonna help you, right?

The session's just gonna be way over your head, and that's okay. That is okay, but that specificity draws a clear line in the sand that says, Yeah, I I could benefit from this. I could see how you know Lassar regression would be useful against really dirty marketing data, and you would be okay in that session. If you went, ah, I've heard of those terms, but I don't really know what they mean. You might flip a coin.

Maybe I'll attend that session. Maybe there's another session in that that block that would be helpful. And if you're like, uh, I don't even know what regression is, then you know that session's not for you. That level of specificity is a lot more helpful than it is, you know, beginner or intermediate, right? So from a speaker's perspective, our job as speakers is to say, this is what we mean.

This is this is the level of experience or knowledge I expect you to have to be able to talk about the session. For example, if I was doing a session on Google Analytics, I would really simply start off by saying, okay, if you are comfortable with Google Analytics 4, you've made the migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, this session is for you. And if you're like, uh, what's the difference? Then you know that session's not for you. Even something as simple as that, a simple bench test.

If you're doing something like email marketing, and you said, uh, in this session, we're going to talk about the differences between SPFDKIM and DMARC as email authentication protocols and how they affect your deliverability. If you don't know what that means, you'd be like, uh, this is not for me. On the other hand, if you're like, that god, that was so 2015. What about BIMI? Then you might know that session might not be for you, right?

It might be too basic. You know, like you want you want to know how about BIMI? How about uh doing you know, segmented list sends to to identify whether a certain percentage portion of our list performs better or not? That would be an indication to you, like what the session's probably about. So why don't we do this?

Well, a few reasons. One, um, it asks a lot of the attendees to read the descriptions of the sessions and go, okay, I can self-identify correctly. And it asks a lot of speakers to find that delineation that would be useful to say, like, yeah, this is a session where I feel like I could get some benefit or not. Now, if you're an attendee and you want to do something simple, uh, one of the easiest things to do, if you're looking at a session, you're like, ah, this is a really tough call, find that speaker on social media and message them and say, hey, I'm thinking about attending your session at you know, Marketing Profits B2B Forum. I am reasonably well versed in Google Analytics for his built-in attribution models, but I don't know uh the data-driven model, I don't know how it works.

Uh is your session appropriate for me? And I might write back and say, Yeah, actually it would be because we can talk about that. We can talk about the time to event decay model that we which is what Google uses, and that might be okay. Or I might say, uh, you know, I think I think you might be better served in a better in a different session because we're gonna go in assuming you know the difference between, say, Shapley values and Markov chain models. And if you don't know the difference, the session's probably gonna not benefit you.

So that's what we should be doing as attendees and as speakers and as event planners to make conference descriptions more useful than beginner intermediate and advanced. Beginner intermediate and advanced is too relative, it's too easy for people to self-identify in the wrong category. And it doesn't help someone hone in on exactly that even the type of information that's going to be discussed in that session. If you have those much more clear grades, like this is the line, you must be this tall to enter. Um, it's a lot better for people, they'll get more benefit.

For the people who do show up, they'll get a lot more benefit from the session. And for the people who don't show up, they won't feel like they're missing out on something because they're like, Yeah, I'm just not there yet. So give that some thought when it comes to how you describe conference sessions. Get rid of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.