Well, I sort of wrote it "to" you all, so I guess what I'll do is put it all here, ask people to just please scroll on past it if they get too bored, and then later I'll take the more widely-applicable parts and make it a Tangent Blog.
Here's all I've got so far, I'll do Opposed as soon as I can. (On the blog, I'd also promised to do a Tangent one about Belief, and obviously, there'll be a lot of overlap there, so I guess I'll just keep typing and see what ends up on the page together with all of you. Plus I have that Secret Agenda of hoping you will tell other things I leave out).
A lot of people, in fact most people, will look at anything new with some degree of hestitation, even wariness, hence the term "early adaptor."
So if you look at just your initial experiences with the "sample" of just these two support groups, it's to be expected that the first one will be the more resistant of the two, especially since Other Group Original Recipe is an e-cigarette immigrant. It was born before e-cigarettes.
The The Kinder, Gentler Extra-Crispy group is an e-cigarette native. It's never existed, nor will it ever, in a world where e-cigarettes do not.
That doesn't mean that it won't have members who range from unaware/uninformed to hesitant to frankly opposed to e-cigarettes.
Of those three, the first group is easy cheese. Announce the Glad Tidings, now they're aware, make information and resources available, now they're informed. Good Deed accomplished, yay you!
A healthy chunk of Team Hesitant will also respond to Operation Glad Tidings n' InfoDump.
That would obviously include those whose hesitance is of the simple "don't know much about it" variety.
Some will be hesitant, even to the point of resistance, for reasons we not only understand, but share - Fear of Marketing!
Just from the little bit of hop-skipping** I've done on the two "sample boards," I've seen several instances of people voicing this outright.
Although "viral marketing of the internet forum kind" is a relatively new thing nested into yet another relatively new thing (the internet itself), the arrival of multiple new members bearing Glad Tidings has already established itself as a classic technique employed by entities who are selling something.
It's become so classic, in fact, that our own Serene Management here has spent many a sleepless night developing and implementing strategies to protect us all from it.
In contrast, Good Deeds have established themselves as a rarity, online and offline, on a species-wide basis.
So it's to be expected that another healthy chunk of the population of any community you go to will immediately assume that you're there to sell something.
The bad news is there's not really anything you can do to combat or vanquish that.
The good news is that it's a self-limiting condition. After you're there for a while, openly, blatantly, and consistently not selling anything, most of them will shake their heads in bewilderment and concede that whatever you're doing, you don't seem to be selling anything.
Because that distaste is a virtually universal sentiment, those bewildered head-shakers will include the whole range of opiners on e-cigarettes, from people who are delighted they exist to those who believe they are of Satan.
There's no question that technology has dramatically impacted the typical "arc" of new product acceptance on the part of "mainstream" consumers, and I mean mainstream in the "neither early adapter nor borderline Luddite" sense, nothing to do with demographics.
It's not instant, though. What this means to you is that a lot of people who say they "just don't know much about them" really mean that they're not going to to take "even one puff" of an e-cigarette until they become so ubiquitous and widely used that someone in their circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances offers them a hit of the one they're notsmoking right there before their very eyes.
(If we were among that person's circle of friends, etc, we'd remember that they didn't have anything even internet connection-inspired until the fin de siècle, when their youngest child came home from school bearing one of those pretty holographic coffee table coasters from AOL, whereupon they proceded to believe AOL was the internet until the company itself finally admitted to its customers and itself that in fact, it wasn't).
The FauxPosed
I have a tendency to want to divide things up in two neat piles, and say it's about either information or belief.
That's a big mistake, because it ignores the very large and vocal group who lives over there on Feeling Street, at the corner of Human Nature Avenue.
In actual fact, the FauxPosed may run the gamut with respect to both information/lack thereof as well as belief, but in actual practice and the immediate present, they're not driven by either, but by emotions.
The Caught-Unawares
Sometimes, people may consider themselves to be a little more Informed and Up-To-Date with things than they really are, and are therefore put a little on the defensive by something that claims to have existed for several years without their having been aware of it.
Their FauxPosition, their driving emotion, is just a little bit of embarrassment, which will go away by itself as they look around and see how many other people are wearing the same color name tag. They just need to do some harrumphing.
I have a special place in my heart for these folks, in a sort of there-but-for-the-grace kind of way, because while there are plenty of young ones, typically they're folks who are a little bit older, and haven't quite gotten used to how much more there is to be aware of and keep up with these days!
Social Butterflies, People-Pleasers, and Old Faithful
Within any group, half of this subgroup will be FauxPosed. They don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other about e-cigarettes, but they do have a strong affinity, sense of affiliation, pre-existing comradeship, or simple desire to be "socially accepted" by one or more people who are Opposed, so they go sit by them.
The other half, of course, will be FauxPro, and they'll go sit by you!
The Righteously Indignant
e-cigarettes are new, so there are plenty of people who, at great personal cost, managed to stop smoking before e-cigarettes were available - or worse, were available but neither they nor their Shaman knew about them, or worst of all, those who had Shamans who knew but deliberately witheld the information - and they're .......
After all they went through, here they are sweating out their one day at a time lifelong not one puff struggle, in their support group, which is supposed to be their safe and happy place, and in stomps a gang of young turks announcing that nobody needs to suffer like that any more, here, just have one of these. YumYumGood, huh?
This group is driven by extremely strong - and understandable - feelings, from resentment to envy to sheer rage.
They feel ripped off and deceived, ill-used, passed over and generally stomped on, and they have every right to feel all those things.
These are the people who, in the freshness of their grief, are most liable to say things that hurt our feelings - those "trigger" things that invoke our worst fears about the scariest element of humankind, and gets into primal stuff that has jackpiddle to do with smoking or e-cigarettes.
They may make the loudest noises of all, but in reality, they're so FauxPosed. If they'd had the opportunity, they'd be you right now, scampering around the internet doing Good Deeds while contentedly notsmoking their electric hookah-doodles.
They aren't bad people, just hurt and angry ones. Once their grief subsides, and their rage gives way to their true nature, they WILL be you.
As people of goodwill, they'll be just as eager as you are to see people everywhere reap the benefits of this blessing.
Next: The Real Opposed: Belief is Their Co-Pilot
** I have a hard time understanding how the other boards do conversations, processing the visual picture and relating the boxes to each other, so any and all text strings I pull out of there are liable to be entirely unburdened by context.