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You gotta love Jared Spool. Only a child of the '60s would term the tremendous shift the Internet industry is now undergoing as the "dawning of the Age of Aquarius."

But retro references aside, Spool has a point. And a very good one at that.

As the online marketing industry has differentiated itself into many different disciplines, each speaking in its own tongue, what it's failed to do is align itself with the ultimate goals of doing business online: Speaking in the language of business, and producing results that can be measured with the same set of tools.

Referring to his own discipline, web site usability, at a San Francisco conference sponsored by his company earlier this month, Spool said, "We have to change our practices for the bottom line: To help businesses succeed.

"We have to start thinking differently to get past where we are and grow," he added during the keynote address of User Interface Engineering West.

Across the Internet, Spool's wisdom applies. With the evolution of online niches like usability, design, search engine optimization, programming, application services, and so on, has come the development of languages, processes and measurement unique to each.

As each discipline has evolved, so have the specific terms and conditions by which each measures its own excellence and effectiveness on the web. The jargon in the usability field, for example, doesn't jibe with the jargon of our email marketing friends. Are our customers users? Or are they a market segment?

Such jargon is really the words we experts have developed to describe our niche disciplines. But what's happened is that the expert-speak tends to flatter the discipline, rather than deliver a promise to a client.

Our "market segment" may well be a proportion of "users." But aren't they really simply paying customers?

The challenge for us now is to develop a common language that can be heard and understood across all disciplines, and to become accountable to the bottom-line goal of improving the way business gets done online.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Ann Handley

Ann Handley is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author who recently published Everybody Writes 2. She speaks worldwide about how businesses can escape marketing mediocrity to ignite tangible results. IBM named her one of the 7 people shaping modern marketing. Ann is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, a LinkedIn Influencer, a keynote speaker, mom, dog person, and writer.