The AWS Blog

Remember the Nick Burns skit from Saturday Night Live, where Jimmy Fallon played the condescending corporate computer support guy? It was funny because it was true.

Before this whole web marketing revolution started off, I grew up in the tech world, and running into people like Nick wasn’t a rare occasion. I always thought of the condescension as a defense mechanism for people who weren’t as knowledgeable as they wanted to appear.

Organizational transparency and cooperation among practitioners are two things that exist in the search and web marketing world that makes it so attractive to me.

Attend a conference like Search Engine Strategies, and you’ll encounter hundreds of people in the same industry. The vast majority of them are especially willing to not only share their tricks and tips, but most of them are also willing to ask for help from each other (therefore admitting that they don’t really know everything).

This cooperation and transparency makes sense to me. Our web marketing business has grown because we do what we do best for our customers, and if they need anything else, we’ll find a partner to refer them to. Anyone who knows business will tell you that this is usually the only way to be successful. Attracting customers that you won’t be able to provide good service to will create all kinds of problems (poor retention, bad word-of-mouth, etc).

We embrace the transparency concept. When we recently launched the new Mobile Website Development service at our company, I posted on the AWS Blog about the challenges we were facing, and how we planned to get around them. I also started and participated on a number of public discussions on different forums around the net. When we finally formulated our development plan, I posted a sample of the site on the blog. Low-and-behold, a design company on the other side of the globe liked our approach and adopted it as as well!

It’s not going to lose me business. It’s going to strengthen my industry. Most likely they’ll even improve on our ideas, and share them as well.

I was snapped back to the tech world earlier this week when I had a run-in with someone from the old school. One of our customers approached us to do something that we don’t have a lot of experience doing. I sent my dev team off to find out how complicated it would be. At the same time that my team got back to me with some information, my customer told me that he knew someone else that specialized in the service, and asked that we work with them.

The news was not a bad thing in my opinion. I thought that we had an opportunity to work with this company to provide a solid solution to our customer, and hopefully form a mutually beneficial relationship with this new organization.

I was wrong.

When I called to find out more about the solution, I was met with unbelievable aggression. My questions along the lines of, “can you help me understand roughly how the solution works,” and “what method are we using to transport the data to and from the web front-end,” were met with responses like, “you obviously know more than I do, so why don’t you tell me.”

Needless to say, the project manager and the software engineer from my team that were on the call with me were shocked, and I chose to end the call quickly.

The point is, the part of me that grew up in the tech world has learned a lot from the search world. I think the technology industry has grown up quite a bit, largely because of the open-source movement, but this week was a reminder that we may still have a little way to go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is in some way my superior; and in that I can learn of him.” Words that most web marketing people embrace and that some tech people can still learn a lot from.