What the ph... does it mean?
My first real job out of college was as a financial analyst at an international bank. I remember thinking, I understand how business and finance works, it’s pretty much based in common sense, however why does everyone use such complex terms to describe basic business concepts.
It’s 22 years later, I somehow found myself, like the rest of you, immersed in the world of social media (not sure how since I don’t really know what the term social media means) and yet again I find myself wondering why basic business and social concepts are given such complex names. This separation, at least it feels like that to me, between reality and terminology often makes me wonder if I am working in the right field. Shit, I don’t even know what the social graph is, yet I’m running, with the help of great team, blogcatalog, one of the the largest social communities for bloggers on the internet.
Sometimes I think, perhaps, this lack of deep understanding of key terms will inflict great harm on blogcatalog. Especially since our entire team seems to be on the same wave length of let’s do what will benefit blogcatalog members most and not being tuned in to the terminology of the day.
Two weeks ago we launched a Dashboard area for our members. We did this because Daniel & Oscar thought it would be really useful for our members to be able to quickly see what their friends were doing on other social networks as well as on BlogCatalog.
It was common sense that our members would benefit from this. What we didn’t realize though is that we had entered the world “Lifestreaming”. I’m not even sure Daniel and Oscar or Angie, my partner, know what lifestreaming means, or care to know. What they do know is that the Dashboard and News Feed features we launched for blogcatalog, make blogcatalog much more useful to our members.
Lifestreaming Ive since found out is the place to be. The discovery that blogcatalog had become a lifestreaming company was a marketing gift to us. It meant that we were able to promote the BlogCatalog Dashboard as a Lifestream, through press releases and blog posts, and social media experts would listen.
So while the tool was great, before we knew the name of what we had created, discovering that we had created a lifestreaming application simply made promotion of the blogcatalog Dashboard that much easier.
We did it again. Last week the blogcatalog team launched a News Feed widget. We didn’t launch it because we had discovered lifestreaming, we launched the News Feed widget because it was a logical next step.
Once we had the Dashboard, we asked the questions, why not let our member’s display their social network activity on a widget that can be placed anywhere they want? And, why force their readers and followers to have to come to blogcatalog to see their feeds? The answers are obvious. The result was the News Feed widget.
To say we were thinking “data portability” is to say we had plans to merge with MyBlogLog; why help them out. We just knew that our members would like it because some had told us they wanted it and I’m a big widget geek. I love widgets.
The launch of the Lifestream News Feed widget brought marketing Christmas back to blogctalog, as we could now claim to be a “social network aggregator”, offering truly “portable” member data. My friend Rich Becker, from the PR firm Copywrite, Ink., has written an insightful post about Data Portability.
After 22 years of resisting learning technical terms, I have come to realize the real power of these terms lies in the ability to use them in marketing your product to a “demographic” (this term still messes me up) that thrives on buzz words.
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