Calling Batman and Robin

ver at Worthwile, David Weinberger wrote the best play. It sheds light into the marketing minds behind those in depth phrases that mean so much yet nothing at all like

“Autonomy is the leading provider of software infrastructure that automates operations on unstructured information.”

That does wha??

Before I started down this path of computer and internet enlightenment, do you know what the most confusing product was for me? Oracle. Yeah that big giant of a company. I knew it had something to do with computers but what the hell was it? I would see these commercials that say “we use Oracle”, and “Less down time with Oracle”, but for the life of me I had no clue as to what that meant. When I found out it was a really powerful Database, I remember saying aloud “oh, that’s it?”

Marketing for the internet seems to be like a blackhole. It’s this complete void where only Stephen Hawking of the computer world could possibly come up with a way to make it make sense to the masses (note: there needs to be a “brief history of time” for the computer world and not another “Dummy” book). You’d think that to make the rest of the world understand, companies would hire individuals to their marketing department with these kinds of insights. But instead, from my experience, most companies (that is not fortune 500) have people writing about their product that probably have to call the I.T. line every time they open up attachments that say “click me” and wonder how they got a virus.

When talking to IT people, hire IT people to do it!

But there is a warning! They need to be able to talk to the masses, and not D&D freaks talking to other D&D freaks (no insult intended by the term “freak”, it’s just I never understood the whole thing). IT and marketing need to be a dynamic duo with lots of “BAM”s and “WHAM-O”s (because let’s face it, chances are the 2 people will fight…a lot). As was pointed out by Steve Yastrow on Tom Peters’ site the detriment could be you get phrases like:

“Our CEO is a bigger geek than their CEO”

Which for some is amusing, and might be something to be proud of but for others…? Is that your market or just the people you like?

Posted in Uncategorized