This is another one of those things on the internet that has gotten popular in the last year. It’s big brands trying to be funny like they are your friend. And it has become a really popular marketing strategy. It’s not being funny in a ‘let’s make funny commercials’ kind of way, although to me it seems to be an offshoot of this. It’s just being funny and having this positive association with their company.

Two quick examples that come to mind are Groupon and JetBlue. A large part of Groupon is having very funny and goofy descriptions of products and website text. They also set up a new “dating site” called Grouspawn to help send Groupon babies to college. It sounds like a joke, and it is a joke. The fact that it is real does not mean it’s not a joke.

If you meet Andrew Mason, you will see that he is a full out goof. But he runs a company which uses comedy as a major tool in cultivating a positive image.

Be on the lookout for comedy as a marketing tool, and let me know if you have any good examples.

Ok. Let me explain.

Knowing about new tech companies is like knowing about indie music. There is this sort of template conversation you hear over and over again and you can literally replace band with startup and it makes complete sense. When people talk about indie music, it’s cool to know about obscure bands. For many people, the more obscure the better. And there are an unlimited number of obscure bands for you to know. Knowledge of these obscure bands gives you a sort of street cred in the subject.

Just like it’s good to know the band, who is in it, and what other bands they’ve been in, it’s good to know the startup, its founders, and where they’ve worked before.

Tech startups are the same. If you follow tech news, you will read every day about a new startup with a silly name, the newer and sillier and more unknown they are, the more cred you have. And if you can name obscure database systems, and strange web frameworks, and antiquated programming languages, that makes you even cooler. It’s weird.

“Ah have you heard of Klout? Or YouCalc, or Zynga, TripTrace, AirBnB? What about RockYou, Square or Groupon?” This mishmash of names is only the smallest slice of startup jargon.

“Ah have you heard of the Late BP Helium? Or The Antlers? Los Campesinos or Frightened Rabbit? What about Magnetic Fields, Badly Drawn Boy and Drive Like Jehu?”

It may be just me, but these conversations sound very similar.