LECHTANSKI.NET

Let’s start with this. I am connected. I have a Blackberry. I blog. I tweet. I’m on Facebook. I’m LinkedIn. I have my own domain. This is all for both work and personal reasons.

I’ve found myself opening my Blackberry RSS reader at red traffic lights. I’ve had my lovely wife pull the Blackberry from my hands during dinner with friends. I’ve found myself watching TV while being logged onto Facebook, clicking through emails on my Blackberry and talking on the phone.

Frankly, I’ve hit a wall. It’s OK to be connected, but I have made the decision to not live my life connected moment to moment. Two things led to this decision.

1. A few years ago I was on a whale watching boat ride. Camera in hand, and hearing the oohs and ahhs of other passengers, I would swing around trying to capture the jumping whale on a memory stick. I was not very successful. And I didn’t get to actually see many of the whales because I was too busy staring at the LCD screen of my camera. Finally, I gave up on the camera and just started watching nature.
2. More recently I went to a marketing automation seminar a couple of weeks ago. Participants were encouraged to tweet the event in real time… during presentations. This seemed like a good idea, but I noticed that in order to tweet I needed to stop paying attention to the speaker. And then to follow the Twitter event feed, I was staring at my Blackberry, not paying much attention to the event itself. And to top that, most of the tweets were simple regurgitations of some of the key points of the person currently speaking.

I’m done. It’s over. I check my email when I have a second. I’ll tweet when something comes up (usually when I’m traveling).

As a marketer, I’ve been curious how these hyper-connected tools will be monetized. There is more to think about here. I’ve had my toe dipped in this water from a business perspective for a couple of years, but still, I’ve got to marinate a bit more on this.

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Sure, there are only so many words in the English language. And being concerned with Branding myself, I understand the desire for a memorable and original organization name. But I have recently come upon a few company names that confuse me.

The late 90s brought us wacky, non sequitur company names. Ostensibly this was because of the quest for a unique .com url. So we got Monster.com, instead of jobs.com. Instead of Search.com we get Google.

But in some cases, I think we’ve gone round the bend. A few I’ve been seeing lately include:

• Survey Monkey – I would never send a survey to a customer that had the word Monkey anywhere near it. And I like monkeys as much as the next guy.
• Silverpop – This makes me think of either a metallic candy or being the first loser at the Olympics.
• Meltwater – If water is already melted, doesn’t that imply this company wants to charge me for something that has already been done?
• e{insert word] – To of course signify that your using electricity in your technological innovation.
• i[insert word] – Thank you, iPod.

I work for a rather conservative private company. As well, I get regular cold calls from company wanting to sell us services. To me the best names are ones that capture the essence of the product or service. And from a potential vendor perspective, I’d recommend using words that your potential customers will want to be associated with.

All this being said Survey Monkey is out there and doing fine, but I’ll stick with Constant Contact.

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