Reaching the Disconnected

I know I’m barking up the wrong tree asking anyone reading this blog this question, but maybe someone can steer me in the right direction. Folks that read this blog (all 3 of you, Hi Mom!) are at least a little internet savvy. But there are a lot of people who aren’t, or who believe that blogs are places for self-conscious adolescents to ruminate about details of their lives no one cares about (hold it…)

Still, there are supposedly 650,000 licenses of SolidWorks out there, and no matter how you slice it, there must be a whole lot of users. There are tons of people at user groups and among the 3500 attendees of SolidWorks World events that I have never met, and even that number is less than .5% of existing users.

So, there seems to be a lot of “dark matter” in the SolidWorks universe – folks who aren’t connected, aren’t involved, don’t know or don’t care about all of these events and resources – SWWorld, Tech Summits, user groups, newsgroups, independent end user sites, blogs, forums, email lists, etc. How do you reach these people? Is it true that they just don’t care, or is it that somehow word has just not reached them yet?

The reason I ask is to promote things like user groups, raise readership of blogs, sell books to folks who might need a good one cheap, and so on. Also I suspect that areas of the latest version of SolidWorks seem to indicate SW has lost touch with their main constituency, and that they are asking questions without taking into account all of this “dark matter”, or disconnected users. If you take a poll about web usage, but the poll is on the web, you are going to get different results than if you ask people who somehow live without the web.

Do you know any of these disconnected folks? Any insights?