What seems like somewhat of a harsh title is nothing more than a mantra every business owner, marketing professional and web designer needs to practice. What it means is very simple. Ideas are the easy (but complicated) part, making them simple for other people to learn and enjoy is the hard part. This applies most specifically to web design/engineering, but can be implemented just as effectively for any business owner or marketing professional.

First, let’s define a maven. A maven (also mavin) is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven “comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge. In the business world, these are the people that know a lot about everything. Malcolm Gladwell used it in his book The Tipping Point (Little Brown, 2000) to describe those who are intense gatherers of information and impressions, and so are often the first to pick up on new or nascent trends.

We’ll move past defining a moron. If you need a definition, don’t worry about the rest of this post.

Some of the most popular websites and businesses these days are very complex in their idea, but are simple to operate. Lets look at the abstract micro-blogging service Twitter as an example. Twitter does one thing extremely well (for those that have been on Twitter for longer than 10 months and remember the constant outages and crashes, please just agree that lately they have been very reliable) and make it painfully simple to operate. As a business, they let outside developers (mavens) make it as complicated as they wish by opening their API to anyone to build on. Another way to think about this is for a city to build a park with well manicured lawn, basic athletic equipment and unlimited access 24/7 to highly caffeinated athletes from around the world. In Twitter’s case the athletes are talented developers, the lawn is their powerful servers and the equipment is their API.

A fourth thing that makes Twitter so valuable is what attracts businesses. Twitter indexes everything written over their service and makes it searchable by keywords. Going back to the park example, it would be like having searchable video equipment on all the time for companies/schools/teams to scout athletic talent with ease and ability to contact them directly. It’s pretty powerful stuff if you think about it.

Another example of where the title is played out with a product is the Apple iPod. There are several mp3 players on the market. Many of them are better, last longer and are cheaper than the iPod. But they will never succeed because the iPod is so simple to use. The iPod unit is nothing more than a scroll wheel and software that is easy to use.

That’s it! Where the “maven” portion of the equation come in is the iTunes store. The sheer mass of selection trumps every music store out there. With over 10,000,000 songs on record to choose from, mavens can be satisfied with nearly any title.

As far as emerchants, there are few better to apply the title concept as Amazon.com. Amazon not only makes a one click shopping button that allows for instant purchases, they also remember all purchasing, browsing, and wish listing for an easier shopping experience. Mavens are satisfied by their customer service, open platform for partner emerchants and the enormous selection of goods. The largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles. Amazon in contrast has over 10,ooo,ooo SKUs in their database.

Hopefully this posting has been a little helpful analyzing your business, product and marketing. If you have any opinions, we would love to hear them.