Smartlogic and SmartLogic: Brand Clash
February 26, 2015
I am a simple person, gliding slowly into the assisted living facility. I know I cannot keep up with the management wizards in the search and content processing sectors. (I do bristle when “experts” address parental instructions toward me in their LinkedIn posts.)
I ran a query for SmartLogic. The Smartlogic I know a bit about is an outfit that performs automated indexing. The company’s hook is “the content intelligence company.” The idea is that if a document is indexed, then the content becomes smarter. This is a claim I have heard repeated from prescient thinkers like Dr. Ron Sacks Davis, the person making possible the TeraText system. Dr. Sacks Davis floated this idea in 1975. Down the line, CALS and then SMGL advocates pitched the advantages of tagging structural elements, stuffing the components and the tags into a database, and discovering the joys of scripted content slicing and dicing. In the modern era, many companies, including Smartlogic, have dusted off the intelligent content moniker as a way to generate interest in automated index, the joys of taxonomies, and slipping a data management system into a company under the cover of metadata. LinkedIn experts are thrashing about this Trojan Horse maneuver as I write this blog item.
Run a query for Smartlogic, however, and one sees that there are two Smartlogics. One uses a lower case “l” in its spelling; the other, an upper case “L.” When I run the query for “smartlogic” on Google, this is what the GOOG displays:
Yep, two Smartlogics. One has a dot com domain and the other a dot io domain. The big “L” outfit is doing a much better job of getting its brand into the various electronic media. When i run the query “smartlogic Baltimore”, the heavens open and rain links to helping other companies, writing software, and making the Baltimore business scene vibrant.
Here’s the newer (upper case “L”) SmartLogic.io. Pretty snappy design I would suggest.
About one year ago, the content intelligence flavor of Smartlogic was the Big Dog in the Google index. Today, not so much. Here’s what the indexing Smartlogic’s Web site (lower case “l”) looks like on February 25, 2015:
Understated in comparison to the upper case “L” outfit I perceive.
Questions I formulated are:
- How has Smartlogic marketing squandered its grip on the name “smartlogic”?
- How is the SmartLogic.io company dominating social media?
- What happens to Web site traffic and over the transom questions from potential customers who want indexing and end up looking at a services firm in Baltimore?
When search vendors lose control of their brand, I often hear, as I did from Brainware before it was acquired by Lexmark, “You cannot provide links to videos via the keyword “brainware.” The videos are inappropriate.” Mismanaging a company name is my fault?
Get real, Brainware.
I see this erosion when I search for Connotate, Thunderstone, and now Smartlogic and others. I track this via my public Overflight pages.
Fascinating insight into what content processing executives perceive as important.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2015
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