My groundbreaking, market leading, cutting edge posting on gobbledygook

23Jan08

I’ve been reading David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR upon the suggestion of Joseph Thornley and his social media bookshelf. It’s very readable with some good info.The chapter that has me nodding my head repeatedly is his section on good writing…or the lack thereof…in business communications. He advises against using jargon-laden phrases. This sort of thing tends to happen in the technology business and he refers to this language as goobledygook. Having done some work in business-to-business PR, I knew exactly what he was talking about. These words and phrases include groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge and let’s not forget the ever-popular next generation.

In a study he conducted of North American news releases over a nine month period, there were 388,000 news releases distributed and over 74,000 mentioned at least one gobbledygook phrase. The winner was next generation with 9,895 uses and there were over 5,000 uses of the following terms: flexible, robust, world class, scalable and easy to use. Other phrases of note were cutting edge, mission critical (never saw that one before), market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking.

I have to admit that in the past I have used a few of these phrases. They are extremely tempting to use. I had my face slapped (figuratively, of course) by a senior consultant who reviewed a news release I wrote caught one of these words and quizzed me on what I meant. The reality was I didn’t really know.

It can be very difficult to describe how a technology works but what’s even more important is describing why the technology is important in the first place. What difference does it make and to whom? Why should I care? Why should the person on the street care? This can be one of the challenges when working with engineers and others who are deep into the inner working of devices. It’s a question of being to close to see the forest through the trees. It’s the job of PR practitioners to take a step back and really think what this means for the given audience and write in language that is easily understood.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so it’s good to get back on the keyboard. My wife recently had surgery to have her thyroid removed and I took some time off to be with her. The surgery went well although she’s still recovering and can’t pick up our 3 month old son. All I can say is…Thank goodness for grandmas!

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Tags: business-to-business, cliches, David Meerman Scott, grammar, jargon, technology