I absolutely hate 90% of the buzzwords that get thrown around when it comes to internet marketing. I understand the human desire to label and categorise, and of course it’s useful when utilised properly, but we’re definitely getting to the stage where we’re excessively labelling and categorising and it’s getting out of control.
One of the terms that annoys me the most is ‘Web 2.0’. From a technical perspective, it’s a completely meaningless number; the internet has been through several huge eras both socially and technically and ‘2.0’ doesn’t do anything to describe that in a logical way. Used in reference to a particular style of design or sites that fit certain interaction attributes, it’s just about passable. But the ‘Is Web 2.0 Dead?’ thing (in fact, ANYTHING which contains ‘Is … Dead?’) really annoys me. ‘Web 2.0’ is a trend. It’s kind of cute in a jokey way to refer to a person or animal as going through an upgrade period and being ‘[Name] 2.0’, but the people who try to make it mean something in a serious way are heading for disaster.
Another common method is to take a word/phrase that actually means something and create a relative (but completely meaningless) word/phrase from it. Bonus points if your invention is considered ‘buzzworthy’ and people think you’re a genius because you’ve invented a new idea or way of thinking (by the way, you haven’t). This method creates a lot of extremely pointless and vague words which don’t stick around in language for very long. For example, ‘B2B’ and ‘B2C’ are useful shorthand ways of referring to ‘business to business’ and ‘business to customer’. Trying to create your own – if you follow me on Twitter you’ll have seen my despair over this – such as ‘H2H’ to mean ‘human to human’…well, I don’t even know where to start with that. We know we market to humans. We know we need to be friendly and personable and think of people as individuals. Thinking in terms of B2B and B2C doesn’t mean you’re dehumanising your marketing efforts; it means you understand who you’re targeting and what their needs, budgets and problems are. We need new ways of thinking, but we don’t always need new words to describe them. The danger with these kinds of phrases is that we start to compartmentalise instead of seeing the bigger picture. The more you invent unnecessary phrases, the more you risk alienating the people with whom you’re trying to communicate.
Eventually it gets to the stage where you communicate with people in an extremely meaningless way; kind of ironic considering the point of inventing these words and phrases is to explain your thoughts more coherently, no? To illustrate the point, these are a couple of sentences I received in a message via LinkedIn:
“We deliver marketing automation and demand generation services for technology companies. We have extensive experience in delivery of demand generation campaigns for a diverse range of technologies…”
What does that even mean? I’ve read it several times, and even in the context of the four or five other sentences in the message I still can’t draw any tangible conclusions from it. If I saw it on a website the only conclusion I would reach is that someone’s targeting ‘demand generation’ for search and putting meaningless words around it. It’s too vague. It explains what you do to yourself and to people within your company (and not very well at that)…not your potential clients. It’s hardly going to excite your potential audience. As someone receiving an unsolicited message – which at most I’m going to spend a minute scanning – you need to explain to me what you do in a sentence. Explain why it would benefit me in the second sentence. Give me a call to action – preferably a website address (with tracking so you can gauge interest), and wrap up by thanking me for my time. It’s not just messaging and email that this applies to – it’s the same for job descriptions, on page copy, and pretty much any form of web marketing. You risk losing potential employees, clients, partners and respect with your words, so use them carefully.
*waves* Hi, I'm 
I’ve always hated the term “Web 2.0″. It makes no sense to a lot of people, especially the general public. In in the field of marketing, if you’re dealing with someone who has little to no knowledge of how the web works, they won’t know what you’re on about. What irritates me too is other people who think they know what Web 2.0 is and throw around the term as if they are an expert on it. It’s just a playful term, like you said, to differentiate some new improvements on the web to the old ones. I also don’t think people should take this term so seriously. ._.
That paragraph made no sense to me either. It is not in any way specific and to be honest I think it should have just been written in layman’s terms. Back to the basics of getting your message across and writing in school, you just have to be straight to the point and tell your story, instead of hiding it with words/terms that just seem advanced and ‘cool’.
Agreed. You got me on the H2H. Things should be talked about with the actual WORDS and not with.. well those trend names. Though I don’t think it’s only the IT-world that uses this technique.
I’m all for reducing vapourous words, and getting to the point, but I also remember when Web 2.0 was first used – and in my experience – it was to describe tools such as blogger, that meant people didn’t have to code static webpages from scratch. Pages could be updated in the browser using form fields, which wasn’t just a new era, in terms of suddenly a load of dynamic websites appearing, but represented the introduction of a second abstraction layer between a human, and the creation of a webpage, and to me, that was kinda what the “2″ was getting at. I saw the internet go from programming geeks, to normal people [in many cases using the tools the geeks had programmed]. Since then, I’ve witnessed the 2.0 term used far more generically, and if used vaguely, I’d sympathise with your annoyance, ^_^. But I just remember what a big deal it was at the time, and I think that it was useful to see that movement and trend labelled, so we could talk about it. I see you concede it a trend too, and if used to describe something specific, is “passable”.
-_-…I’m doing part time work for a company atm, that own a social networking site, and of their three staff, not one of them can code … they just use Social Engine. Perhaps that scenario is more web two point oh no(!), than 2.0… I’m not sure, =S.
I never really notice that they were using those terms but now I think of it… People only try to sell themselves with those terms. I must agree, it can be annoying.
Couldn’t agree more.
I’m in marketing so I see this kind of gibberish all the time, too. Daily.
On more than one occasion I’ve come away feeling dumb for being unable to make head nor tail of what I’ve just read, but then I remember: they’re the ones potentially losing business over it. Meanwhile, I go elsewhere. So who’s really stupid?
Off with their heads, I say!
Hi Jenni,
Followed you here from “Warrior Forum” and glad i did. Really enjoying your site. I particularly like this article because it echos my own feelings working in online marketing. I have become so deflated with reading sentences that do not form any kind of legible sentence! I find these are usually created by some sort of software rather than a real HUMAN.
Take care, keep up the blogging
Thanks!