Doing away with corpspeak/ cut out the BS (updated)

Found this site from Lee Hopkins’ blog, Better Communication Results
which features the extremely refreshing and brilliant way one company seeks to engage their customers via telling the whole truth and nothing but.

Here’s an excerpt from their website:

Cool job titles make us sound smarter and more clever.

Welcome to the world’s most dynamic eBusiness marketing, design and consulting agency. We provide distinct clients with groundbreaking business strategies and cutting-edge designs to aggressively and creatively compete in a changing economy.

Our consulting ideas will entice and excite you. Our professional design solutions will give you the confidence to succeed. And our web site will make you think we know what we’re doing.

And now our cutting edge consulting and design solutions include New Web 2.0 Technology™. That means we’re not only better than everyone else, but smarter too.

Our name will confuse you, but, you have to admit, the logo design is pretty cool. That’s because it was designed with New Web 2.0 Technology™ and the New Web 2.0 Shiny Table-Top Thing™. And we’re good at turning regular words into “eWords,” such as “eBusiness” or “eSexual harassment.”

Our office is really modern and we’ve got nice computers and stuff. If you ever saw it, you’d say “Wow, cool office. These guys are legit.”

And this:

We have really smart people who are always thinking up totally cool shit. We have a meeting room with a big, round, expensive table. When you hire us for marketing and consulting projects, we spend lots of time sitting around the table having meetings.

Our female staff members are all hot, so, even if there’s nothing to meet about, we’ll sit and flirt with them, and charge you for the time. When one of our new-age marketing gurus or design experts or consultants has an idea, the rest of us look at him or her with serious expressions and write stuff down on paper.

We also have one of those dry-erase boards on the wall, and we take turns making flow-charts and brain-storming and talking about “injecting creativity into market positioning,” and cool stuff like that.

How’s that for honesty! I love the wit! This puts them in a class of their own against companies still doing things the old way (ie. treating customers like chumps by talking at them, as opposed to talking to them).

Edit: After thinking more about the topic, I think that huhcorp gets it right because more than just trying to talk to their customers, they’re nudging their customers in the ribs, sharing a joke based on mutual understanding. Having a sense of humour makes them more human too.

Another company that does not take itself so seriously is Puma (found on Seth Godin’s blog. Thanks Seth!) Also note the sneaky aside on research findings. Love it!

yes, I am a book nerd

Came across this blog post at Dan Santow’s blog Word Wise, where he talks about how reading can help unlock the meaning of life. I totally agree with him.

I feel that a truly great book makes you think even greater thoughts about life, which is why I like to write down quotes that I find thought-provoking. And I almost always feel sad when a book ends, because while reading I find that I get very attached to the characters.

I also like what he says about trying something new. If you’re always going for fiction, try a little non-fiction and vice versa.

As a former Literature student (although I will always be one at heart), I read a great many literature classics (Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath). Some were hard to get into, but I always found the effort rewarding at the end, and I found them to be extremely relevant in spite of their publishing dates.

Then I moved on to more humorous books (David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim, Marc Acito’s How I Paid My Way Through College, Douglas Adam’s The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) which made many a bus journey that much easier to bear.

In more recent times, I’ve had a wave of tragic fiction books (Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife, Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog) whose brilliance I think will stand the test of time.

Now I’m moving more towards science-fiction and fantasy (Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery) and am currently reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (and really liking it). Reading these books really shine light on so many issues worth thinking about, which I had never thought about before.

Other new genres that I have yet to try (but will when I have the time):

Marketing books. High on my list are those by Seth Godin, a man with the simplest, yet most profound ideas about marketing and life.

Graphic Novels. I read The Wake (final collection of issues in the The Sandman series) by Neil Gaiman in the library and surprisingly liked it. Up till that point I had avoided graphic novels for the longest time.

Economics books. Steven Levitt & Stephen J Dubner’s Freakonomics (everyone keeps raving about it) and Tim Harford’s The Underground Economist, amongst others.

I really wish I had all the time in the world to read all the books I want to read.

So that’s my book journey. What’s yours? What books are you reading now?

Also, do look out for my post on Bookcheating.

[Image of Morpheus from The Sandman taken from http://distraction.february-rains.net/wps/dreamwp1_1024.jpg]