The Technology Echo Chamber

Working in the technology industry, we are flooded with new information constantly. And for every news release, thousands of journalists, bloggers and social media experts have something to add.

It’s fantastic to have access to such a wealth of real-time information and analysis. But there’s a downside: we risk losing our ability to communicate effectively to people outside our particular echo chamber.

As bloggers start commenting on each other, and then commenting on those comments, the initial message and relative importance can be lost in the resulting melee.

Suddenly you have “news” headlines reading “Steve Jobs may or may not have coughed on an iPad 5000 sometime last week.” Talk about diminishing returns from an information value perspective. (But maybe I clicked on it.)

It can even happen inside individual companies—perhaps a product messaging discussion spins out of control, or an internal vernacular becomes inbred and arcane. If you’re trying to craft a marketing message about your product, it’s something be very careful about.

Father knows best…

I recall a conversation with my father a couple of years ago. He was looking for software to help him run his small business, and asked me for advice. The conversation went something like this:

Dad: “I really need to figure out how to manage these projects a little better.”
Me: “There are a ton of options for SMB productivity tools out there.”
Dad: “What’s an SMB?”

Of course, SMB is marketeer for “Small-to-Medium Business.” Exactly what he was, but not a term he’d ever use or self-identify with.

You see companies advertising “SMB solutions” online all the time. I’m sure their marketing teams use the term constantly, but there’s a danger that your audience will fail to connect. Try searching for “SMB” in Google. Are they talking about “Server Messaging Block”, or the “Society for Mathematical Biology”? Maybe “System Management Bus”?

(Full disclosure: We’ve used the SMB phrase in some of our marketing. There’s plenty of debate within our agency whether it makes sense or not. You see what side I’m on… but there is some evidence that the larger companies in that segment [the M’s, if you will], are starting to get the SMB moniker. But I digress.)

Trompulating the Gampultons

The worst is when you see marketing where clearly the team behind the work has started drinking their own Kool-Aid. You’ll see it from time to time with all sorts of companies, and it’s plain as day when it happens.

A marketing message might say something like “The WidgetCo® Confabulator™ now Trompulates™ with 10% higher Gampultons™.” I may need 10% higher Gampultons, but if I only know them as “cookies per minute,” I won’t know what you’re talking about.

The company has come up with their own names for everything, and in the process lost the ability to mean anything to someone who isn’t familiar with them already.

I recall HP had this problem with “Adaptive Enterprise” under Carly Fiorna’s reign…This painful interview shows how well that worked for them.

So basically…

As technologists and communicators, our job is not just to absorb information, but to translate it.

That means wading into the fray of our industry and communicating in our own special language, but also creating messages that resonate with a wider audience.

Personally, I love the noise. But when communicating value is your job, you’ve got to remember the fundamentals:

• Who am I talking to?
• What’s their pain?
• What solution are they looking for?

Getting too fancy just dilutes the message.