Speaking Human

NetQoS is a company that, like all companies, is designed to make money, among other things. It’s fair to understand everything we do we as springing from the belief that it will benefit our bottom line, directly or indirectly. Our corporate philosophy is based around the idea that our business will only succeed if we solve customer problems, and we provide the software, appliances, and services that can do so. But we do want to succeed.
We’re not evil or malevolent about it. In fact, we tend to think that companies that are in business to generate profits off of shoddy products or by ticking-off customers to satisfy the balance sheet do eventually tend to shoot themselves in the foot. So in the interests of full disclosure, we are hereby admitting that part of the reason for this blog is that we want to use it to promote our brand promise–our relentless drive toward performance. Equally important, we will use this to interact with our customers, helping them to solve problems and get ideas from their peers, so that we can increase customer satisfaction, grow our business, and, in the end, make more money.
But of course you already knew this. Collectively, you are smarter than we are, and we’re convinced that some pretty darn smart people work here.
There’s a bunch of books written on the collective intelligence of the masses that turn to blogs for information, including Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger’s Cluetrain Manifesto, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, and so on. The simple truth is this: everybody who is any sort of expert on blogs, blogging, and the blogosphere tends to agree on one thing: If your company acts childishly, it will get spanked.
If companies misrepresent themselves, (or as a 5 year old would put it: “fib,”) as “Wal-Marting Across America” shows, they get found out. When Alienware threatened to refuse computer review site Hexus access to their systems for coverage (or as a 5 year old would put it, “I’m taking my ball and going home,”) they got tons of negative publicity and a story on Digg.
If we ever do something stupid, call us on it. If you have a question, fire away and we’ll do our best to answer. We’re trying to make money – yes – but this blog is doomed if we try too hard to make money and lose sight of the conversation to which we want to contribute.
So we’re putting away our childish things. And the first childish thing that we need to put away is the fear of being seen as childish.
Or more appropriately, the fear that what if we say anything that isn’t approved by a pyramidal hierarchy of managers and directors, that hasn’t gone through the “marketing spin machine” to make sure we’re “on message,” that we’re somehow going to look “unprofessional” if we start talking less like the corporate bleh that comes out in most slick corporate communications. We fear it because this “bleh” has been the language of business, and we are a business-to-business business.
But let’s put away that childish fear, let’s put away the idea that somehow our products or our professionalism are maligned because we’d actually say, on-line, in official communication, something that comes from what we really feel, unfiltered, and unabridged. Something that doesn’t use the latest buzzwords just because it has to, something that, in the great scheme of things, lets our readers be more informed because we’re speaking English… no, not just English, but Human.
From time to time, we’re going to be putting stuff out there. It may have too much “marketing lingo” or “technical lingo” or any number of other “lingos.” It may go too far in the other direction and seem “disingenuously hip.” If you think something could be phrased a better way or is irrelevant, or is too complex, or too simple, then please, let us know. If we fail to provide new information, if we fail to make ourselves understood to you, then we have failed in the primary mission of any blog – to communicate.
And if we fail at doing that, we won’t make as much money.