Geek guide: Speaking geek to customers
As an early Christmas present, I offer you the first official debabblog geek guide. What's a geek guide? It's like a white paper, only not as boring. It's a bit long for a typical debabblog entry, though, so I've included an excerpt below, or here's a link to the full geek guide.Technology is complicated. We geeks are hard-wired to never admit that fact, but even the best of us struggle to stay ahead of the constant avalanche of new products, trends, and technobabble. Unfortunately, we're so wrapped up in our own paranoia of falling behind that we surround ourselves with other geeks, often to the point that we completely forget how to talk to regular folk. That's a problem, because it's ultimately regular folk who buy that technology and keep us all gainfully employed.
Whether you're a geek yourself, sell the stuff that geeks make, or help fix that stuff when it's broken, this guide is for you. Let me start by saying that I'm a geek. I started coding on a TRS-80 at age nine (just for the fun of it) and have been a paid techie in one form or another since I was fifteen. Flash forward a couple of decades, a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, ten years working with customers in the internet industry, and several metaphorical boots to the head, and I've finally, painfully, learned the value of translating technology for the people who ultimately use it. So, to save you a few boot-induced headaches, here's what I've learned, in a nutshell.
Read "Speaking geek to customers" · Download "Speaking geek" as a PDF (150K)
