Does the Hype Machine Help or Hurt Business Buyers?

Social media? Green IT? Unified communications? Cloud computing? You’ve heard the hype and we all help create it. Is is good, bad or neither?

Well, let’s get this out of the way. It’s not like we control hype. Hype has its own life cycle – kind of like a snowball going downhill fast. Maybe somebody started the darn thing but once it gets going, it has a life of its own. In other words, hype cycles are as much driven by human nature and reflex as they are by the calculation of any group of individuals. We all want to be part of the crowd and not left lying in the dust – that is of course except for my best friend from my Washington DC days – he ran from the crowd. That’s why he’s not in business and is now a scientist.

OK, so does the hype machine help business buyers? I’m speaking about your average small business or IT professional. A lot of folks would have us believe the hype helps businesses become aware of the need to buy a new technology or participate in a trend. In other words hype machines makes business professionals aware of trends and get them valuable information. Hello, business owner. Wake up. You need to purchase a new VoIP phone system. You need to get on Twitter and start marketing your business.

Of course, there is problem that most of these hyped technologies don’t deliver results or just aren’t ready for mass adoption – hence Gartner’s Hype Cycles or the classic “Crossing the Chasm” concepts first proposed by Geoffrey Moore – the eloquent view of the snowball.

All of these philosophical discussions and frameworks are great but here’s the thing with hype.  Especially in today’s world of fragmented media, hype makes it even more difficult for your average business professional to figure out what’s going on and to find a credible source of information. Don’t forget 99.9 percent of business aren’t cozy with your Gartner analyst. While I know that fellow researchers, analysts, consultants and vendors can make it through the quagmire and perhaps even relish the intellectual challenge of bringing order to chaos, I don’t think the purchasers of these technologies have the same experience. They actually have a day job that is only partly related to their purchase – whether it be a phone system, a CRM system or virtualization software. They have to make quick decision especially outside the world of the large enterprise.

My concern is that many small business and IT professionals think technologies are overrated because of the hype noise associated with those technologies create so much confusion. We recently asked Focus Users in our Focus polls: Which technologies are most overrated? As of this blog post 83 users responded. I was surprised by how close the results were:

• 11% selected virtualization
• 18% selected unified communications
• 18% selected green IT
• 22% selected cloud computing
• 27% selected social networking

Well, I know lots of really solid product and use cases across all of these technologies. And maybe the poll is faulty because we didn’t include “none of the above.” But my belief is that this hype is having collateral damage. “Overrated” means "I’m not buying that right now." Confusion over social networking gets quickly associated with CRM.  Confusion over cloud computing slows down making the decision over which hosting solution to use. Confusion over unified communications slows down the purchase of phone systems. And so on. Do vendors see this same problem? I’d be interested in knowing.

So what can vendors, analysts, researchers and consultant do to help? How do you compress the hype cycle?

1. Define things in very tangible ways with very specific use cases. We take it for granted that everybody knows what we’re talking about. That’s why it seems so much of the hype is geared to ourselves and not to the larger world of business buyers.
2. Leverage peer data and verbatims to communicate the value proposition. Professionals trust their peers more than anybody else for business input. I’ve also found peers speak a different language than the analyst and consultant gang.
3. Create remarkable content. We need more seminal, online content pieces that are clear, concise and extremely practical. Remember there’s content you use to promote your brand as an expert but then there’s content you use to speak to basic business buyers. Don’t confuse the two.