The author (Laura Fitton, who is AWESOME), has an interview with the two guys that developed a service for Best Buy called Mix. Mix is an initiative to get Best Buy’s employees micro-sharing and micro-blogging. This is absurd.

We’re all a bunch of geeks. Those of us on Twitter have adopted this way of communicating as a means to fool ourselves into thinking we’re interacting with people. For “micro-sharing” to be thrust onto an army of retail workers seems like an inherently bad idea. Now, I’ll be even more self conscious when I check out, wondering what they’re going to post about the 6′8″ guy that just bought a Wii.

But I’ll Twitter that, so you’ll find out I guess.

The other issue I have with this is the productivity suck these services are. Think about this. I work in a small office. But in a given day, I will email, call, Skype, IM and maybe have a Twitter conversation with people in my company. Now, compound this by expecting me to participate in a micro-sharing thing makes me wonder when any actual “work” will get done.

Am I completely wrong?

Now, I know this isn’t a unique post and I know my ideas are shared by many, but I felt like this would be a good introductory topic to this place and The Geek Giant.

Let’s look at this Press Release from Bungee Labs:

Bungee Labs ™ today announced federated hosting to expand adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) among enterprises and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Organizations developing highly interactive applications on the Bungee Connect ™ PaaS can now elect to host those applications on self-managed infrastructure running the new Bungee Application Server ™, or on the multi-tenant Bungee Grid ™ at datacenters in the United States, Europe, and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Umm, huh? Let’s try a simple exercise in MarCom translation:

Bungee Labs announced that you can host your apps on their servers.

Seems simple enough. For naïve businesses and developers, this is great. Simply code your app in whatever language Bungee supports and they’ll host it for you.

Moving beyond words

One of my issues with public relations, marketing, social marketing, social media or whatever the buzz word du jour is, is that it’s so much more effective to just convey your message with plain and simple words.

Try this exercise the next time you’re thinking about drafting a press release or blog post: Take what you’ve written and re-write it using half the words. It sounds difficult, but it’s not, I promise.