I have always had the notion that some companies “Get It” when marketing to programmers, sysadmins, and hackers. A couple weeks ago I was in Silicon Valley at Tech Field Day listening to a lot of presentations with some fellow geeks. In some of these presentations they “got it”, in others they didn’t.

The fundamental difference is that the ones that get it tell me about their technology, and the ones that don’t tell me about their products. True geeks have one common trait, and that is that they like to learn how things work. We get excited about learning and news ideas. Exciting technologies solve problems in non-obvious ways. Since these are not obvious, we want to learn about them, and in as much detail as possible.

Products, on the other hand, are how these ideas are packaged. For the most part, we don’t care. If we do care, that comes later, only if it will solve a problem that we have will we start to care about implementation and packaging. The advantage of telling us about your technology is that we do care, even if we don’t have a use for it at the moment, because we are geeks – it is our nature. When done right, we will then associate your product with the technology and that will be enough.

This has some consequences that marketing should be aware of when targeting tech people. First, we generally don’t want to talk to you directly, at least, not for very long. This is not because you are not important or interesting, it is just that you probably can’t get us excited about your technology like your engineers can. You can enable your engineers to present your technology well, and that is what people who are good at geek marketing do. If you can’t get your actual engineers to present no mater how hard you try, your screwed. It’s not your fault, your company just sucks and you probably just need to move on. Lastly, everything targeted to tech people should be aimed at getting us excited about your technology, not your product.

With my recent experiences at tech field day there were some good examples of this done right. Pure Storage taught me about why I see SSDs fail and a new type of RAID they invented suited for SSDs. Arkeia educated me about various implementations of deduplication in backups. Data Direct Networks introduced me to the concept of object store filesystems. However, in that case I wanted to learn even more given that amount of time. How successful they were came down to how much time they all devoted to fulfilling my desire to learn more about technology vs. telling me about their products.