Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I’ve noticed over the years that there is a tendency of companies to try to be trendy in their use of buzzwords. Consistently–across different industries and sectors–there’s a tendency for marketers and executives to try to jump on the bandwagon on the latest and greatest trend. Usually, this isn’t done so much by actually doing something related to the trend, but suddenly re-defining that buzzword to include whatever you are currently doing.

For example, if you’ve always allowed people to log into a message board on your site, suddenly you’re at the forefront of “user generated content”.

Or, if you have any sort of a consumer-facing web service, you’re suddenly “Web 2.0″.

Or, if you’re in a really, really narrowly defined niche, you’re a “long tail” company.

Finally, if you have any sort of a web site that people can buy a product from, you’re now an “ecommerce” company.

I recently came across a press release where a company called themselves an “business process outsourcing” company… And after some careful digging, it turned out they provided building inspection services.

What a lot of entrepreneurs don’t realize, is neither the press (nor venture capitalists) care if your Powerpoint or press release is “buzzword compliant”. Throwing in the latest and greatest buzzword into your pitch–while it might be tempting–is not going to make it more likely that you will either get funding, or any attention. The vast majority of venture capitalists will ignore whatever buzzword of the day you are attaching to your company and dig into what you really do, and the press is naturally skeptical and more likely to ridicule you for using the buzzword than write a glowing article on it.

What a lot of companies really mean when they use these buzzwords nowadays:

• Web 2.0 - we run a service which you can access using the Internet
• User generated content - we’re too lazy/cheap to create or pay for content, so we’re hoping users will do it for us for free
• Mashup - we found some cool tools from Google/Microsoft/someone else, plus some data from Craiglist/Ebay/elsewhere, and put it together, and now we are going to pump it up for some press
• Citizen journalism - see “user generated content”.
• Wiki -we found this neat software, it allows people to post their own content, but it doesn’t seem like anyone who is technical enough to post content on a wiki would want to post anything on our pages anyway
• User community - we have an Internet message board!
• Social network - see “user community”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.