It amazes me how many people in the tech world like to speak Geek to potential clients. I’m guessing that they do it to impress and to appear knowledgeable, but it usually turns a potential client into someone who feels like an idiot. I wouldn’t want to do business with someone who makes me feel like an idiot… would you?

Plain English gets us way more business than Geek speak. Yeah, sure, there are times when we speak Geek speak to someone who has some knowledge about the topic. But in many cases, they have read some Geek speak article somewhere and have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. On the other hand, some potential clients have too much knowledge for their own good. We like leaving these for the Geek speaker SEO’s to deal with not us.

In closing, here’s two simple examples.

Geek Speak: Your site is coded in Dream Weaver using tables and we need to transition it to CSS and XHTML while limiting the use of Javascript. We suggest doing a new PSD Mock for you to review in order for us to put a new skin on your website. We’d also like to change your pages from .htm to .php and potentialy need to set up a MySql database to dynamically generate data. Oh, and by the way your URL query strings are all screwed up and we need to rename them to something more SEO friendly with 301 or 302 redirects. With the redirects, we need to speak with our Geek speak programmers on using a 301 or 302. In addition to all this, we need to update your meta tags, provide more internal and external linking using anchor text while balancing the optimization of the on page content. It’s really important that your on page SEO and off page SEO be completed properly. We’ll be able to give you a better idea of all this after doing a site command in Google, running a backlink analysis on your site and your competitors sites.  We will also check the anchor text of the backlinks. Finally, Mr. Totally Lost by Now Client, we’ll do an XML sitemap for the major search engines.

Translation: Us: “Here’s what we will do in KINDERGARTEN ENGLISH.” Client: “Oh, I get it. When can you start?”

If you own a business, you’ve no doubt had some crazy brainstorming sessions trying to think up new ways to promote your products or services. Here are 3 companies that didn’t stop with just the ideas:

Sheep-vertising

A Dutch horse breeder looked out at the sprawling land and herds of livestock around and saw a huge blank advertising canvas. The progressive company Hotels.nl was the first to try his idea of branded shirts for sheep, paying 1 euro per shirt, per sheep. What happened next couldn’t have been better. The authorities demanded the advertisements had to go and fined Hotels.nl 1000 Euro per day. Hotels.nl decided to pay the fines, refuse to remove the ads, and take the city to court as the dispute escalated into news. As a result, sales at Hotels.nl increase by 15%.

Alien Marketing

In a boardroom somewhere, a group of KFC execs decided that what they absolutely needed was to build a KFC logo that could be seen from space. KFC hired a team that spent 3,000 hours painstakingly designing, creating, and positioning 65,000 1 foot by 1 foot tiles to create an 87,500 square foot logo that is visible from space.

Watch the video of it’s creation and ultimate destruction:

Bumvertising

This is my personal favorite. A big thanks to Jonathan who linked to this post on Small Business Branding who introducing me to bumvertising! Bumvertising’s president Benjamin Rogovy recognized that “bums use a business model that takes advantage of high volume traffic,” and “imagined that there had to be some value that was not being utilized.” A lot of people are in a frenzy over Bumvertising, claiming that it exploits bums. I disagree! As someone who has hitchhiked across the country and met bums and vagrants and train hoppers from coast to coast (and even held up a sign myself once or twice) I can’t think of one person I’ve ever met who would have been offended to get paid for taping an advertisement to their sign. No matter what you think, Benjamin’s Bumvertising site is getting a lot of links and generating a lot of exposure for PokerFaceBook.com!

We close out each week with our Who Said That?, where we give some link love to bloggers who have really captured our attention with their inspiring and thought provoking posts.

Let’s get started!

One Simple Way to Generate More Comments on Your Blog

First off, I’d like to give a shout out to James Chartrand who tackled the subject of ‘how to get more comments’ in his first guest post on Copyblogger. I’m sure that even the most confident person around could still feel a bit hesitant to push that publish button on a post like this… I mean – what if no one commented!?! But of they did – as of this moment, there are 86 thought-provoking comments that add to the discussion of this insightful and well-written post.

The Business of Fiction – 5 Ways to Help Your Business by Reading a Novel

While working on my degree in Writing from Cal State San Marcos, there was one piece of advice that just about all professors preached – if you want to become better at writing, you’ve got to read – A LOT. If you’ve been looking for a reason to do more enjoyment reading vs. business reading, Joshua Clanton offers a great argument about why reading more fiction can improve your blogging and business writing.

Confidence: The Networking Strategy That Works Every Time

Why is it that most of us refuse to step out of our comfort zone to network with people that have achieved what we desire to achieve? In my opinion, if there is one thing that will get you to where you want to go faster than anything else, it is becoming skilled at networking with the right people. Think about the people you hang around with – do you share a common way of thinking or economic profile? What would happen if you learned to think like someone who was much more successful than you? What would happen if you had connections with some of the most influential people in your industry? What is holding you back from making these connections? This post caused me to take action and initiate a dialog with someone that I very much want to learn from.

I’m A Blogging Failure

I absolutely love this post and if you’re a human being that has ever not lived up to your own expectations, you will probably appreciate it too. I greatly respect anyone who will come right out and say what the rest of us are thinking. Erik analyzes his own experiences with blogging and why he has not been as successful as he’d like to have been. Best of all, he offers some lessons learned from these experiences. Posts about how people have achieved great things are useful, but there is perhaps even more valuable information to be learned from a ‘failure.’ I don’t think Erik is a failure at all. His ability to write honestly about his own experiences and take lessons from his mistakes makes him a success in my book.

Taking Your Show On The Road: 10 Tips To Help You Escape the Office

I often get really irritated with myself for not being more mobile with my work. I mean, I work for myself. My job is not tied to a physical location. I have a laptop. Why am I not traveling around the world and taking my work with me? This guest post by Mark Hayward written on Skellie’s new blog Anywired really kicked my butt. What captured my attention immediately was realizing that Mark was writing this post from the Caribbean where he now lives. Mark is living the dream – this post and his blog are definitely something to read if you have a dream of living free.

Have a great weekend!

**who**