cluetrainplus10: The 27th thesis

Today we're celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto by blogging about each of the 95 theses. I chose #27:

"By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay."

OK, let's just admit the obvious: marketers use jargon. David Meerman Scott has written about what he calls "gobbledygook" on more than one occasion. He argues that gobbledygook happens when marketers write about their products instead of writing about why their products will help buyers. Mike Ferguson points out that jargon is a crutch that "keeps you from having to develop any real content." Scott Berkun says marketers and managers use jargon because they "want to be perceived as the best and the brightest, something they know they are not." Ouch. 

In defense of the marketing and public relations people who use jargon: so does everyone else. Here's part of a list from Nick Wright, "human resources-speak" for firing someone:

career alternative enhancement program

dehiring staff

employee reduction activities

implementing a skills mix adjustment

negative employee retention

rectification of a workforce imbalance

redundancy elimination

right-sizing employment

strategic downsizing

vocation relocation policy

I'll never forget the first time I used the term "Google juice" in class, and one of the students incredulously asked, "Wait. Did you just say 'Google juice'?!" So, yeah, we all do it.

But Cluetrain is about organizations and how they interact with people. Its authors argue that instead of companies talking to markets, people should talk to people. As individuals, we already know this: one study of product descriptions on eBay (where average people instead of trained marketers write ads) showed that readability was the most important factor in making a sale. "Buyers prefer a product description where the seller sounds knowledgeable but does not use abbreviations or jargon," the study concludes.*

So that advice I've been giving my public relations students -- "write as if you're talking to people you know" -- turns out to be pretty good. But companies that empower their employees to use social media have a chance to take that advice one step further: they can actually talk to people they really do know (or at least know online).

Will they use language that is "distant, uninviting, arrogant"? Sometimes they will, because we all use jargon sometimes. But I vote we give them a chance.

*Claudia Rawlins and Pamela Johnson, "Selling on EBay," Journal of Strategic E-Commerce, 5:2 (2007). 

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Great post. Yes, we all use jargon. But eliminating it makes you more human.

[Heather Yaxley]

I've noticed something when teaching PR practitioners to write for online is that many find it really hard not to write in PR-speak. By that I mean a really artificial type of language that you probably only ever see in press releases.

Indeed, this pseudo-communications is becoming more evident in the media - almost every news bulletin on television here in the UK starts with "he/she did xyz", with the "who" only revealed sometime in the next sentence.

So I definitely support writing that is human and relevant. But, I'd still like it to be grammatically correct without any spelling errors.

[Karen Russell]

Thanks, David. You and Heather are both right -- people are going to have to strike a balance between being natural (as Heather says, human and relevant) and being professional, in recognition of the fact that they represent an organization and not just themselves.