If you keep an eye on @theplanet on Twitter, you know that last week, a few of us were repping The Planet in Washington, D.C., at the Fall 2010 Channel Partners Conference and Expo. The weather was perfect, the expo hall was packed with people, and our booth got great traffic … pretty much all you can hope for at a trade show.

As my title would suggest, I love talking about all the good stuff happening at The Planet, and in a trade show setting, I have plenty of opportunities. I get to share a little about our company and hear some of the cool things the booth’s visitors are doing in their businesses.

Sometimes, attendees know what they need and why they should talk to us. Other times, we’re the next booth in the aisle, and they want to try and talk to everyone while ‘trick or treating’ for cool swag. Counterintuitively, I get to share the most about what we do with that second group of folks, and I’ve noticed those conversations can get pretty adventuresome.

We’re surrounded by the world of hosting day-in and day-out, so it’s easy to forget that it’s still a pretty foreign concept to some folks … even to businesspeople and entrepreneurs in other areas of technology. At Channel Partners, I had to step back a few times and restart from a higher “hosting in general” place before diving into how The Planet meets our customers’ needs as a hosting provider. The interaction might look like this:

The Planet: We do hosting.
Attendee: Oh, so do you have a cloud?
The Planet: Absolutely. Our cloud is designed for production with *insert Server Cloud differentiators*
Attendee: What kinds of servers do you have in the cloud?
The Planet: Let’s back up a second … What do you mean when you talk about “the cloud?”
Attendee: You know … I send all the data off and I don’t have to mess with any of the hardware.

At that point, we’re on the same page. We can talk about the The Planet as a very general “cloud” by the attendee’s definition and how our specific cloud product is a specialized product that abstracts the hardware at the next level. From there, we can talk about what their business needs, the products we have that will meet those needs, and what they can do to learn more.

Success in the those kinds of interactions requires establishing a level foundation that we can build upon. Terms like “hosting,” “cloud” and “virtualization,” are loaded with buzz these days, so more often than not, the best way to talk about them is to lay out a definition and move forward from there.

Are there any other buzz words you don’t understand or that you think have too many definitions?

-Kevin