{"id":208,"date":"2001-07-09T21:50:05","date_gmt":"2001-07-10T02:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/?p=208"},"modified":"2001-07-09T21:50:05","modified_gmt":"2001-07-10T02:50:05","slug":"eyeballs-impressions-bullshit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/2001\/07\/09\/eyeballs-impressions-bullshit\/","title":{"rendered":"eyeballs, impressions, bullshit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the past couple of weeks, there&#8217;s been a bit of hoopla about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.knownow.com\">KnowNow<\/a>.  This company has cool interesting technology and is populated by more than a couple of  industry <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/cgi-bin\/dict.pl?term=cognoscenti\">cognoscenti<\/a>, but likely due to the dynamics of the post-bust dotcom situation found itself with an internal power imbalance leaning away from the technology and its potential and towards <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kpcb.com\/\">venture capitalists <\/a>and marketers.  The website read like a &#8220;how-not-to&#8221; guide for clarity in communication.  I was glad to see that they listened to the <a href=\"http:\/\/doc.weblogs.com\">various <\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.megnut.com\/archive.asp?which=2001_06_01_archive.inc#20000627\">voices <\/a>who decried the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/cgi-bin\/dict.pl?term=vacuous\">vacuous<\/a> marketspeak and rewrote their introductory pages to actually convey understanding.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been researching some CRM stuff this morning, specifically call scripting software.  Marketspeak abounds.  It&#8217;s remarkable what lengths they go to to provide rambling verbose descriptions of their products without ever giving me a clue what its actual technical specifications might be, how I might be able to use it or integrate it, etc, etc.  Just who is the target of these sites?  I can only assume it&#8217;s aimed towards government and corporate buyers who don&#8217;t actually know the problem space the product fills, although my experience with them is that they&#8217;ll at least want a technical laundry list.<\/p>\n<p>If I want to know more, I have to supply my contact information, exposing myself to a sales call, numerous followups and a lifetime of self-authorized spam. One place requires me to give them contact info just so they can send me their whitepaper.<\/p>\n<p>Hey guys, just give me <b>INFORMATION<\/b>.  Allow <b>ME <\/b>to discover your product and its specifications, and I will <b>ASK <\/b>when I want to know more.  The minute you try to force me into your salespitch stream, you&#8217;ve lost me.  I&#8217;m out the door to find a shop that will let me browse in peace without a salesman stalking me through the store.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Ain&#8217;t it always the case.  I blog about something and then immediately run into someone <a href=\"http:\/\/webword.com\/interviews\/krug.html\">yakking<\/a> about the same stuff, usually saying it much better than me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the past couple of weeks, there&#8217;s been a bit of hoopla about KnowNow. This company has cool interesting technology and is populated by more than a couple of industry cognoscenti, but likely due to the dynamics of the post-bust dotcom situation found itself with an internal power imbalance leaning away from the technology and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}