Clear PR and Gobbledygook warning signal.

The Scotsman newspaper carried an article the other day on communications in business. It said,

"....good communication is more important than ever.
While corporate communications was once seen as a post-strategy delivery of information process, best practice communication is now firmly focused at the sharp end of business strategy development."

The above was written by a communications professional whose blushes I spare here because this wording seems laced with management speak. I can only imagine how any 'strategic target audience' a company has in mind would react to being an unwitting part of "a post-strategy delivery of information process." It sounds painful.

I assume it means something like: "the tail end of strategic communications" or "simple information delivery." But I'm not sure, and frankly,I don't care as I feel the will to love ebbing away...

But the article confirms a long-held suspicion that the word 'strategy' is a good "potential gobbledygook ahead warning signal." There are a few of them around and I'll no doubt return to the theme.

I also suspect that many people spray the word 'strategic' around with only a hazy notion of what their organisation's strategy actually is and how it differs from the vision, the mission and the goals, but that's another story.

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...

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