I completely agree about the direction of information flow – we should be getting more from our customers they get from us. The marketing material is one of the vehicles for getting info to them.

Oh – definitely high on the geek scale here too, but I get geeky about the what (determining the ‘what’ is sort of a ‘how’ for me).

I must admit that 10 sounds a little one-sided now, though. “Enlighten” is a word that scares me when we’re talking about our interactions with our customers. While there is a place for it – there’s also a lot of enlightening moving in the other direction as well!

I love your definition of a geek too! (I’m guilty of that myself – I’m not a tech geek – I’m a management geek – but all us geeks are cut from the same cloth regardless of our specialty!).

And thanks, John, for the original list and the link from your blog. Everyone should check out his site – there’s some good stuff going on there.

I went back to look at point 2 because I would totally stress the conversational aspect of marketing, but I see my wording could easily be taken as anti-jargon (which I addressed anyway in point 4). Although the post was entitled Geek Marketing, I believe the lessons apply to all sectors – marketing is marketing wherever it is applied and only snake-oil salesmen would try to convince you otherwise. For further reading, my more recent j train minifesto isa good follow-up.