Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Sometimes, it feels like marketing is the hype of the millenium.  Or a decade at least.  There are marketeers, marketing divisions, online marketing, marketing this and marketing that.  But what the heck is this marketing thing after all?  Can we have it in simple terms?

Well, either I don’t understand a lot (and I don’t claim that I do), or I haven’t met with the right marketing people, or both, or something else, but what I am thinking is that marketing on its own is nothing.  Nada.  Not at all.

Before you eat me and my old shoes, let me explain.  Marketing is that thing that supposedely helps the product (or service for that matter) reach the customer.  Or the other way around.  And then maybe even convince the customer that he is actually satisfied by what he got.  Or maybe I am way off already.

Anyway.  To do that (connect the customer with the product or service), marketing people need to know three things.  First is the product or service - the destination.  Second is the customer - the source.  And third is, well, marketing - the path or possible pathes between the two.  Am I even remotely right ono this?  If I am, then let me tell you something - this doesn’t work.  How about that, eh?

Marketing on its own doesn’t work for exactly the same reasons that MIS doesn’t work.  MIS is this gray area between Information Technology and Business Administration.  It’s supposed to help them communicate with each other.  But because MIS never (or almost never, or extremely rarely) truly understands both the business side and the technical side, it only makes things worse.  Instead of having two languages - one very technical with lots of terminology and precise definitions, and another one business - with lots of money and people-related processes - the company now has to speak three languages, with the third one being a weird dialect combined and distored from the other two.

The product and the customer are like two magnets.  When connecting them, they will either be of opposite polarity and will hurry towards each other and live happily ever after, or they will resist each other as much as they can.  Is it possible to bring two magnets of the same polarity to each other?  Yes.  If the magnets are small and you hands are strong, you can pull them together.  That’s marketing for you.  Let it go and both magnets would be much happier.  And if they were of the different polarity?  Guess what?  You don’t need much force to put them together.

Back from the abstract world.  I think marketing makes sense on the secondary level.  That is, everyone should have a bit of marketing knowledge - from sysadmins and programmers to accountants and managers.  But marketing shouldn’t stand on its own.  In fact, if marketing is taught to everyone, then it can be that common language for everyone to help to understand each other.  The one that MIS so miserably failed to be.

Those who are at the top, they want to grow, increase, make more and better.  Those are down below, actually doing things, really know how to make things better or faster.  The problem is that they can’t communicate with each other usually.  So what they need is a little help in this area.  Not someone else who neither understands what is possible or not or how big or fast things can go.

That’s about it, minus a few disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: all my knowledge of marketing came from working at or talking with people who are working at small or medium companies, the majority of which deal with information and technology.

Disclaimer #2: I was thrown off balance by a some marketing types recently.

Disclaimer #3: I had a few pints of a lovely Guiness draught before I typed this whole post in.

More and more people spend more and more time online. I wish more and more of them read RFC 1855 which covers netiquette guidelines. This document is more than 10 years old, but most of the points that it discusses are as valid today as they were back then. Some are even more important today than they used to be. Another good thing about this RFC is that it has theoretical directions combined with some practical advice.

A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

Reading this document won’t make you wise enough to avoid all the mistakes of online communications, but it can seriously minimize them.

IRC is one of the best things that happened in the world of online communications ever.  But, it’s a pity that most non-technical users have no idea of its existence.  Getting on IRC usually required downloading and installing a client software, and then going through a list of networks, picking a server, a nickname, and finding a channel to connect to.  While not exactly rocket science, it was more than enough to seriously decrease the user base.

Via this Web Worker Daily post I learned about a great tool - Mibbit.  It is a web-based interface to IRC.  It is straight forward, easy to use, and doesn’t require one to know much about IRC.  No installation or registration is needed - you can jump straight into it.

In fact, even many technical people who use IRC will find Mibbit useful.  It adds some useful pieces of functionality which many traditional IRC clients miss (unless, of course they support plugins).  Two things that I was glad to see were Paste Bin support, which is a quick way to send around pieces of text, often with syntax highlight, and editing capabilities; and integrated translations.  You can pick the language you want your messages to be translated to, as well as the language you want other people’s messages to be translated to.  Of course, the translations are done automatically, so they aren’t of the best quality, but at least you’ll get a slight idea of what those other people are talking about. In case you don’t speak a common language, that is.

I also liked the interface of Mibbit.  It is clean, simple, and fast.  You can participate in multiple discussions, which will appear as tabs, which you can switch between.  Updates are fast and the whole thing feels very much like a desktop application.

Thanks to Web Worker Daily for bringing attention to this service, and, of course, to Mibbit developers for making a useful tool.

P.S.: If you are trying to get a hold of me on IRC, my contact page has all the information that you need.

Paul Graham wrote yet another excellent essey - “How to Disagree“.

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

He then proceeds with identifying a hierarchy of disagreements.  In his view, the forms of disagreement are:

• DH0: Name-calling.
• DH1: Ad Hominem.
• DH2: Responding to Tone.
• DH3: Contradiction.
• DH4: Counterargument.
• DH5: Refutation.
• DH6: Refuting the Central Point.

Paul’s post reminded me of something - a course of formal logic back in college.  One of the things that course covered was a list of fallacies, which are often used in arguments either intentionally or not.  Of course, the complete list of fallacies is much longer and will take more time to memorize and understand.  But, if you wish to win and rule online (and offline) arguments, you should at least get familiar with those.

Paul organizes hist list of disagreement forms into a hierarchy. He says:

Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

It would be nice to see a similar, hierarchy organization for the longer list of fallacies.   Which ones are the most frequent in online discussions?  Which ones are easier to create and why?  How to recognize and respond to them?

Here is an insightful bit from this comment in this Slashdot discussion:

Someone I know went for a job interview with (I think) Vodafone. Their open-plan office was set out according to the OSI model — physical layer people at the end, application people at the other end, and everyone in order in between!

Talk about integration of technology and corporate culture…