Is David Brent sabotaging your PR?

Jargon and abbreviations are a handy shortcut when communicating with fellow specialists, but it excludes others. That's why jargon is a serious barrier to general communications and PR.

In a world where budgets need to be signed off by a variety of specialists, including finance departments, we would argue that jargon is an expensive liability, not an asset.

Clients sometimes say they have to prove to clients that they can speak the technical lingo. That's fine. But please don't hit people with incomprehensible jargon on the main web pages. There's a place for technical language and it's in technical papers and reports.

The Internet gives us the ability to layer information, so those needing more detail can click through to increasingly denser layers.

Even when speaking to technical specialists, nowadays there are so many narrow specialisms. It's quite likely that two similarly qualified engineers could baffle each other with jargon. But would they admit that? Or gloss over the point?
Why risk it?

Jargon simply doesn't foster useful or productive business relationships.

In general business areas, jargon has crept in as a form of one-up-man-ship. People use ridiculous jargon to signal they're up with the latest management fads, as satirised so mercilessly by the David Brent character in 'The Office' TV series a few years ago.

Since that programme, many people associate 'management-speak' with idiots who may harbour a penchant for bad break-dancing!

A recent Accountemps survey of 150 top US executives listed the following top annoying jargon words:

Leverage
Reach out
It is what it is
Viral
Game changer
Disconnect
Value-add
Circle back
Socialise
Interface

Words on the list that also appeared in their earlier (2004) survey were:

At the end of the day
Synergy
Solution
Think outside the box
On the same page
Customer-centric

Sad to say, almost of all of these words have been suggested to us for inclusion in web copy.

The David Brents live on...

Environmental Legislation Over-view

Thank you Business Environment Partnership (www.thebep.org.uk) and Edinburgh Council for today's workshop for smaller businesses on environmental legislation. With good input from SEPA on their advisory and monitoring roles.

Since 1990, enviro requirements on business have been mounting, thanks to European legislation. But exactly how that affects individual businesses can be tricky to work out. There's certainly no shortage of paid-for services to subscribe to, and consultants to lead you through the maze.

I'm very pleased to discover the excellent free resources at http://ping.fm/FwvKv which includes a questionnaire they created (http://ping.fm/iaVafnetregs/links/97472.aspx) where you can get a bespoke answer as to your environmental compliance requirements. It's apparently the same questionnaire that appears on the Business Link site (www.businesslink.gov.uk/), just in case you've been through that particular hoop already.

Once you have your legislation list, that's the foundation for your Environmental Management System (EMS). Then you need to to dig deeper to find out what you need to do about each individual piece of legislation by searching www.netregs.gov.uk. There's a free text box at the top right, but you can also run searches by business type, enviro topic, or go through current & future legislation. Netregs streams info according to location as the Scottish Parliament have their own variants, as do England & Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The Netregs site has been recently re-vamped so it's worth re-visiting if you haven't been there for a while.

You can sign up for their updates so you stay up-to-date.

There's enough info there to help you create your own Environmental Management System (EMS).
I'm told they are going to expand their e-learning tools for specific sectors. These currently cover agriculture plus food and drink.

Another way to get help with planning your EMS is to go in for the VIBES awards, Scotland's top environmental awards for business, which feed into the European environmental awards, with seriously good international publicity exposure and networking opportunities.

The VIBES application form covers the main building blocks you need and the feedback from the judges (free to all award applicants) will give you an expert steer. I used that to move our long-standing environment policy (first written in 1986, based on reduce, re-use and re-cycle) to a more sophisticated level encompassing carbon offsetting for necessary business energy use and travel. We got our expert feedback and followed the judges' advice. We entered again last year, to be rewarded with a place on the shortlist.

Once shortlisted, you receive an intensive visit from the judges, to prove you have demonstrated exceptional environmental performance, and of course, it's a great opportunity to get further bespoke advice. And we got serious new business enquiries at the awards ceremony itself, which was a welcome bonus.

One of the key messages I took away from today's workshop is that it's not enough to assume a waste contractor has the full range of licences they need for both transporting and disposing of different types of waste. You need to check this and be able to stream your waste for the most cost-effective disposal.

You also need to make sure that the paper trail is properly signed off when you hand over the responsibility for your waste to a contractor.

Otherwise, if your stuff is found dumped illegally, you can't prove you were not responsible and you will be held liable. That could mean a fine of several thousands of pounds.

Useful free PDF creation software

Free enterprise-level PDF & XPS creation software from Global Graphics called gDoc Creator: http://ping.fm/V1DM9

Online complaints do more damage

Convergys survey shows negative posts by-pass complaints departments, costing companies c30 customers per complaint and putting off others. Shows the need for monitoring and managing feedback and keeping tabs on what's happening to your reputation both offline and online.

Techno Babble

As we're a B2B PR specialist agency, we deal with a lot of technical clients and have had to deal with a fair amount of techno babble.

Reducing stuff down to initials is fine in a close-knit technical community, but specialisms are so narrow these days that even well qualified people can encounter terms that are meaningless. So why carry this stuff over to press releases and websites where people of real influence lose the will to live after the first sentence? Not to mention potential clients' procurement officers and finance people who have to sign off the purchase decision?

A few clients have argued they need to demonstrate they have the technical know-how and that's fine. It just doesn't need to be visible at the first glance of the home page. And surely the line up of second and third degrees on their people page does signal more than a smattering of knowledge?

This is where the Internet really scores: enabling hierarchical information to be arranged so that visitors can chose to click through to well signposted complexity as they travel through the information avenues on a website. And White Papers or Reports can underline your technical abilities without baffling those site visitors that need more general information. Not everyone needs to see all the branches, twigs, leaves and roots of the tree to know they're in a birch wood.

If you find yourself in such a wood, surrounding by numbers and letters, there's a techno-babble translation tool here: http://ping.fm/O40mZ

Edinburgh on Google Logo

Good to see Edinburgh Castle on Google for St Andrew's day

PHPR collect VIBES awards 2009 certificate at Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

Being good PR people, we spun our VIBES news round our contacts and have ended up seven positive results: several of which are really promising meeting requests.

There is also another agency wanting to know how to get the VIBES, so we've pointed them to the VIBES site where it's easy to download the entry forms and all the practical notes on the different award categories: http://www.vibes.org.uk/enter.htm

Plus Margot Grantham, the Scottish director of the excellent Athena network for women sent me a flyer with useful info regarding free recession-busting workshops in Edinburgh for small businesses run by the Business Environment Partnership alongside the City of Edinburgh Council. We are more than happy to pass this info on. The leaflet says:

As part of their Economic Resilience Action Plan the City of Edinburgh Council are working with the Business Environment Partnership to run a series of free workshops at the City of Edinburgh Council Chambers. Upcoming workshops are designed to give practical ideas to cut utility bill costs and understand current & future environmental legislation that may have a financial impact on your business.

Demystifying environmental legislation. What SME’s need to know to ensure compliance – 26th January 2010

Understand your utility bills to cut costs – 25th February 2010

They point out that a 20% cut in energy costs represents the same bottom line benefit as a 5% increase in sales....

The ‘One-Stop-Shop’ provides free tailored advice to any Edinburgh-based company from a microsized start-up to a larger SME. Advice ranges from Government funded grants & loans, resource efficiency, green marketing opportunities to legislation with the aim of identifying cost saving or new sales opportunities for businesses.

Find out more about the workshops or their free advisory service at http://www.thebep.org.uk/ The lady dealing with registrations is called Amy.