Business and sense

Things to con­sider: I have a feel­ing peo­ple work­ing with net tech­nolo­gies and dig­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion are hav­ing fun these days. Com­pa­nies are begin­ning to see social media as real­ity, just as the devel­op­ment of new web tech­nolo­gies in recent years seems to have paved the way for a new way of pro­vid­ing ser­vices etc. But if we are to take our­selves seri­ous, what are we doing to pre­vent things from going dot-com 2.0? For every new breed of tech­nolo­gies and ways of doing things, hype builds and under­ground entre­pre­neurs and devel­op­ers make it into main­stream. What do we think of our ‘indus­try’? Are we doing our best to pro­vide real value? What are the odds that peo­ple won’t be writ­ing books on the web 2.0 bub­ble in 5 years time. Will peo­ple smile when we men­tion ‘social soft­ware’ just as we do now when talk­ing about mid-nineties ad agen­cies enter­ing the world of the web?

I find too much buzz every­where I look. And already, I’m spend­ing a lot of time jok­ing about a lot of the terms that reflect the things we are doing, just as I find myself explain­ing to clients that “this is not hot air” when they’re curi­ous about some of the new ways of think­ing. I’d like for every­one to think about what they say and write, how they por­tray their own field of work and how and what they sell.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Man­i­fests should only be made, when there’s a rev­o­lu­tion around the cor­ner. This is a list.
• Words are impor­tant. Sim­pli­fi­ca­tion equally so. but you don’t say ‘beta’ when you mean ‘agile’ — or ‘web 2.0′ when you mean ‘ajax’ — or ‘social soft­ware’ when you mean ‘com­mu­nity’, do you? Don’t worry about miss­ing out on all the good buzz, your cus­tomers will thank you in the end.
• Words are impor­tant. Be care­ful with terms like ‘econ­omy’, ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ and ‘par­a­digm’. New oppor­tu­ni­ties don’t make a rev­o­lu­tion, some­thing involv­ing money doesn’t con­sti­tute an econ­omy. It sounds cool but these words have a mean­ing already. Maybe your cus­tomers get con­fused when they know the orig­i­nal one. Iook it up — and use with care.
• When point­ing to tech­nolo­gies mark­ing a new begin­ning, make sure you’re point­ing to the actual one mak­ing the dif­fer­ence. Blog­ging might not mean shit — easy pub­lish­ing in gen­eral might do.
• Show value. Telling cus­tomers that “it’s new”, “every­one else is doing it” and that they should “jump on the train” remind me of the early dot-com years. You’re sell­ing hot air based on fear.
• Buzz is bet­ter than hype. Both, how­ever, have a ten­dency to end up as sell­ing points in their own right. They’re not. When you say “web 2.0″, do you know why you do it? Do you think it is a fit­ting con­tainer for a new way of doing things — or a clever mar­ket­ing tool?
• That something’s ‘new’ isn’t a rea­son for any­one to do any­thing. To refer to the speed of which infor­ma­tion travel and gets gen­er­ated and to claim that ‘things are hap­pen­ing really fast now’ is to ignore how most civ­i­liza­tions evolve. I would be very sur­prised if things didn’t con­tinue to develop this way from here to eter­nity. So that’s not the prob­lem you should say you’re solving.
• What hap­pens when all your cus­tomers have bought your ser­vices? Does your com­pany name or pro­file imply that what they’re buy­ing is just a way to ‘get up to speed’ or imple­ment ‘that new thing’? Can your see your­self and your com­pany in two year’s time? Are you hon­est about that you can’t?
• Is it clear from the way you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing that you didn’t invent all the terms you’re using? Is it clear who did? And what it is you’re adding on top?
• Fram­ing is impor­tant. In many ways, our core ser­vice is to enable peo­ple to use new tech­nol­ogy and pro­vide new ways of think­ing about a lot of the things they would nor­mally do by giv­ing them a vocab­u­lary; a way to think and talk about things that are new to them. Think hard about how you use terms. Are you draw­ing on known con­cepts to make things clearer where you should make a clear dis­tinc­tion? If you didn’t know what you know, would it make sense? Is there a risk your terms could obscure a good inten­tion? Have you thought about metaphors lately?
• Net­works are cool. Being in more than one is not bad. Is the foun­da­tion of your net­work based on val­ues you’ve made an effort to explain — or is your pro­file ‘new’; hint­ing that this is the new black with­out fur­ther proof?
• When you explain the pos­si­bil­i­ties with tech­nol­ogy and the ways we use it, do you attempt to trans­fer indus­try terms to a busi­ness envi­ron­ment uncrit­i­cally? Are you con­fi­dent that term x, known and debated within the indus­try, pro­vides any real value to a cor­po­rate client — or would they be bet­ter off get­ting your take on some of the values?
• Would you rather not worry about all this hippie-nonsense and force your cus­tomers to swal­low the blue pill — as it is
  movie wall street: money never sleeps online

  good for them?

I might add to this list, i might not. That doesn’t mean it’s in beta. It just means that maybe i find some time and some more input — and maybe i don’t.

Update: Gun­nar Lange­mark posts what I believe is a com­ment to this post. Some dif­fer­ent views…and some of the same conclusions ;-)