Making something out of a thing

Having been married for 9 months now, I think I have settled well into life as a husband. I have mastered saying “yes dear” whilst not actually listening to what beloved is telling me and I don’t leave the toilet seat up. Ever.

However, I’ve yet to fully master the language of woman. She phoned me up in a blind panic the other day and said she had forgotten to put the things in the freezer and asked if I could do it. When I asked her to elaborate on what this thing might be, I was informed they were the things she bought that morning. After more detective work, I eventually managed to get her to say “ice cream”. Ah, no problem. Despite pointing out she had purchased them some 5 hours earlier and they would almost certainly be beyond saving now, I then asked where these mystical ice creams were. She then helpfully informed me they were in the thing in front of the thing.

To cut a long and very boring story short, the thing she was referring to was a bag and the thing they were in front of was the freezer. The simple fact is that if this conversation had been between her and, say, my mum, they would have completely understood each other. Seriously, the conversation would have gone “I didn’t put the things in the thing can you get the things out of the thing and put them in the thing?” And my mum would have answered “Oh my god the ice cream! I’ll take them out of the bag and put them in the freezer now, dear.”

This is a problem often experienced in the business world. People who work in the same environment understand the jargon and will talk to their colleagues in that very bizarre language. What they don’t realise is the customers they are selling to don’t understand a word they are saying. Sometimes people use this jargon to deliberately confuse customers with bollocks and make themselves sound cleverer than they are.

To cut another long and very boring story short, we don’t do this at Datapartners. We like to make things as clear and simple as possible. Business is good; bollocks is bad.

Viral marketing of an absurd kind

I generally don’t take any interest in celebrity gossip but the recent story about Kirsten Stewart’s affair with a married film director raised an eyebrow.

Basically she was dating her co-star from the Twilight films but has recently admitted to cheating on him with the director of her new film. So let me get this straight; a couple who play a couple in a film are actually a couple in real life and she had an affair with a guy who was the director in her new film and whose wife played her mother in that film. Who says Hollywood isn’t incestuous?

The whole saga is obviously done for publicity. Actors and pop stars basically rely on the public’s peculiar need for celebrity gossip and have to keep dreaming up new and ingenious ways of keeping themselves in the public eye. Quite how the Twilight saga was so popular is something I’ll never understand but the chances of her new film being anywhere near as popular are highly unlikely. This “affair” is just a way of saying “I’m a stupid, insecure moron. Please watch my new film”.

It’s a kind of perversion of what is done in the business world. We have to do something called “marketing” which involves getting our name and brand seen in such a way that convinces people to phone us up and buy our products and services. This blog is technically marketing. Here I am basically saying “I am a grumpy individual who thinks the Twilight films are a dubious story involving a girl torn between necrophilia and bestiality. Please let us design you a website.”

Admittedly the above probably won’t generate any business at all but I know quite a few people read this drivel. It might even make some people chuckle. Either way it gets our name into the public conscious. It might also be something that people will forward to their friends. As a result, our name and brand spreads. Fair enough, comments about necrophilia might mean we spread more like a disease but viral marketing is very effective. It’s almost as effective as the celebrity virus which has now consumed 95 percent of the globe and will soon wipe out all intelligent life on this planet.

Facebook leaves a smelly floater

So Facebook took the decision to float itself on the stock market. Given it is one of the biggest and most well known brands on the planet now, you would think this was an obvious move. Well, given that it is one of the biggest and most well know brands in the world, I’d argue that it is over-valued and over-hyped.

So how has it got on in its first few days? Well, not very well seems to be the answer. As an over-valued and over-hyped brand, people paid over the odds for shares and the value has plummeted because there is no real value behind it. Of course I can’t really comment because I know nothing about the stock market. When I first read about its IPO, I just assumed it was another Facebook chat acronym like LOL and ROFL. And if anyone asked me about floating stock I’d hand them a coat hanger and tell them to break it up and try flushing the lavatory again.

It surprises me that anyone was daft enough to buy shares. After the massive dot com boom in the early noughties when companies like Lastminute.com were floated for obscene amounts and then crashed, I would have thought people would have learned that lesson. Apparently not. I mean how does one value a company like Facebook? Is it based on the number of users? Is it based on the amount it earns in revenue? Is it based on how many personal details it shares with the FBI? How do you quantify such a thing?

Twitter has apparently been valued at a Sicilian dollars as well. How does Twitter even make any money? It doesn’t offer PPC advertising. It has no obvious revenue stream. It has no real value other than to allow people to stalk their favourite celebrities and update their fake friends on the colour of their turds. Perhaps I’m naive but if a Twit offered to sell me a share of Twitter for more than 1p I’d tell them to chirp off and offer me something cheap…