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 Are the myriad gobbledygook terms that so many B2B writers warn against really just “imaginary bogeyman punching bags”? Is compiling a list of words that are overused and vague akin to burning books? Do the people who make those lists simply want to look smarter than everyone else?
In an article that is long on indignation and short on specifics, Steven Parker this week made just those claims. Writing on B2Bbloggers.com, he argued that “one person’s gobbledygook is another person’s precise, and often technical or professional term.” Moreover, he said, the people who speak out against jargon are driven not by a desire for better writing, but by elitism and political correctness: “while people are forgiving of imprecise terms if they are current slang or very popular, they’re unforgiving if the words are politically incorrect, not socially ‘cool’ or out of favor. They want to ‘ban’ them, or whine about them.”
Oddly, Parker never specifies a single word incorrectly labeled as gobbledygook, and only indirectly suggests what list makers he is targeting.
Clearly the most prominent of such list makers in the B2B world is David Meerman Scott, who published The Gobbledygook Manifesto in 2006. As ranked by frequency of use in press releases, his top-ten offenders that year (he’s since updated it) included the terms next generation, flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use, cutting edge, well positioned, mission critical, and market leading. A rebuttal to Scott’s view that these words are marred by overuse and imprecision might be possible, but Parker never attempts it.
More oddly still, after trashing lists of gobbledygook, Parker comes up with his own—the “real gobbledygook”. So perhaps his objection is not so much to the making of gobbledygook lists as it is to the particular words included. His list is OK, apparently, but the others constitute an “uppity, homogenized sniff test.”
I think we can be more generous. Whether or not you agree with the judgments of a list maker, you can still learn from them. Even if people like Scott did want to ban objectionable words (a claim Parker never substantiates), it wouldn’t matter. The value lies not in the judgments, but in making us think about our writing and about the specific words we use.
Even on this point, however, Parker demurs. He concludes his post by asking whether you should worry at all about using slang or jargon. No, he answers: “You should not waste one minute thinking about it.”
Though I don’t find his argument compelling or convincing, let alone supported by evidence, I’m glad that he made it. He got me to think yet again about the words I use and the ones I avoid, and why. And for that, I’m grateful.
In an article published last weekend on Mashable, Sarah Kessler asked the question, “Can Robots Run the News?” It’s an important question not just for journalists, but for anyone who creates or curates content on the Web.
The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of algorithms to identify news topics. There’s obvious value to automated content creation, and as Jeff Jarvis has declared, “Data is (are) journalism.” But we should be careful not to confuse computed content with communication.
Computed content is a set of data; communication is the expression of an attitude toward, or perspective on, those data. Without a point of view, content is just an audience speaking to itself.
Using Web analytics from a test period to automatically choose between two headlines, as we’re told the Huffington Post does for its stories, can make sense—if both versions are true to the content. If you balance crowd-sourced feedback with the content creator’s point of view, you’ll have a productive conversation. But if the crowd takes precedence, it may simply replace content’s individual vitality with the bland mean.
Take, for instance, the English title for Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It may not have been crowd sourced, but it certainly plays to a corporate idea of the crowd. Is it really better than the literally translated original title, Men Who Hate Women? (That’s a rhetorical question. The original title nails the book’s central concern; the English version just wraps it in a pulp-fiction cover.)
Even in content marketing, where knowing what people want is critical to the content provider’s success, a one-sided conversation dominated by the audience won’t fly. For a conversation to work, there must be differences between the participants. The power of new media is the way it enables the audience to challenge the creator. That doesn’t mean, though, that the creator should stop challenging the audience.
This balance seems to be what Yahoo VP of Media Jimmy Pitaro is after in the company’s news blog, The Upshot. In her interview with him last week on All Things D, Kara Swisher noted that while some see computational journalism as a “‘democratizing’ of the news, others are more concerned about relying on algorithms to determine the best coverage and the implications for a society guided by its own searches.”
But as Pitaro noted in his video interview, “data and audience insights” constitute just one component of the content. In addition, Yahoo uses the “old-school” methods of “manually identifying topics” through its team of editors and writers.
Similarly, as Kessler mentioned in Mashable and as Claire Cain Miller explored at greater length in yesterday’s New York Times, the tech-news site Techmeme uses both algorithms and editors to produce its content. Why? Because “humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.”
If readers didn’t care about such things, algorithms alone might be enough. But they do care. The same audience whose searches drive the algorithms also want the human touch in their content. Until computers can pass the Turing Test, it isn’t likely that they will replace people in content creation.
A post today from Josh Gordon on words to avoid in content marketing gets to the heart of what content marketers must do: think like journalists.
In his post, he reports on an effort by PR strategist Adam Sherk to enumerate the frequency of 98 marketing buzzwords in current press releases. As Sherk acknowledges, he is building upon a list David Meerman Scott compiled last year of “top gobbledygook phrases used in 2008.”
Here are the top 12 offenders:
- leader
- leading
- best
- top
- unique
- great
- solution
- largest
- innovative
- innovator
- award winning
- exclusive
Now as Gordon notes, such words are bad enough when they appear in press releases. But in content marketing, they are disastrous. As he says, “when content marketing looks like a product promotion it gets ignored like a product promotion.”
For anyone trained in B2B journalism, the terms in the above list (and the remaining 86 in Shirk’s list) are obvious no-nos. Many B2B editors cut their teeth rewriting press releases for their publication’s product and services section. Their first lesson was almost always to remove any form of endorsement language. It might not be practical to personally review products, but it was an absolute obligation to remove any promotional overtones and stick to the facts in the release, even in supplier quotes. (Sadly, as advertising has gotten scarcer, editorial standards have gotten laxer, resulting in such over-the-top quotes as—really, I did not make this up—“the outstanding part quality produced is outstanding—just awesome.”)
Though it’s been said here before, it’s worth repeating: If content marketing is to fulfill its promise, it must adopt a journalistic ethos. That can be done through PR or marketing people learning to think like journalists, or by hiring journalists. But one way or another, it must be done.
Until very recently, Safari, Apple’s Web browser, has for me always come in a distant second to Firefox. But with the latest update to Safari, that may change. A new feature in Safari 5.0, Reader, is a compelling tool for reducing an article on the Web to its essence: the words.
That such a tool is necessary underscores just how unfriendly to readers most Web sites have become. Why is it that online publications make it so hard to read the articles that are their main reason for existence?
Granted, a certain amount of clutter is inevitable. Without devices like logos, in-line links, and navigational aids, the Web isn’t the Web. (Witness the debate Nicholas Carr set off when, weary of those “little textual gnats buzzing around your head,” he modestly proposed trading inline links for footnoted ones.)
But as sites start to accrete banner and text ads, e-book downloads, affiliation badges, boxes highlighting related and popular articles, and far too much more, the story gets increasingly hard to find, and difficult to read when you do find it.
Take, for example, a recent article on Forbes.com, “The Fifth Wave of Computing” by Trevor Butterworth. If you set out to make an article unreadable, you couldn’t do much better than this.
It doesn’t get better as you go further down the page, either (especially considering that when you get to the bottom, you have to click a “next” link to read the remainder of the story).
To our rescue comes Safari’s Reader.
Instead of heaps of distracting clutter, we get nothing but the essential article content, and all in one page—no page jumps to deal with.
Safari’s Reader is not perfect. It may leave off by-lines or author photos, as in the above example, or struggle to place images correctly. That’s one reason why, if you value your Web content and hope for meaningful engagement with site visitors, it’s in your interest to reduce clutter to a minimum. Your goal should be to design your site for real readers, not Safari’s.
Nerd-note: Safari’s Reader has its roots in a browser bookmarklet called Readability, which works in almost all browsers. Though it produces equally readable text, it doesn’t integrate into the browsing experience as smoothly as Reader. In addition, it seems not to load all the pages in a multipage article, as Reader does.
This morning, the Los Angeles Times passed yet another milestone on the road to ruin of what was once a great newspaper. When I opened it to section two (the awkwardly named “LATEXTRA”), I experienced the following sequence of thoughts:
- Wow, Universal Studios burned down yesterday.
- Hold on, it says “ADVERTISEMENT” above the photo.
- Oh, this whole thing is just an ad for Universal Studio’s new King Kong attraction.
- Unseemly expletive.
As explained in detail on Charles Apple’s blog, what I mistook for a real newspaper was in fact a four-page advertising wrap. In other words, an advertorial.
When I was in traditional publishing, I fought to set limits to advertorials, but ultimately had to tolerate them. In my liberated state, though, I can finally say it: Advertorials are evil.
When I say advertorial, I’m not talking about all sponsored content that appears in a publication. Rather, I’m referring to any sponsored content that attempts to deceive the reader, even briefly, into mistaking it for something it’s not.
I’ve talked here before about how publishing and content marketing exist on a continuum, not distinctly separate, but more like siblings. Well, advertorial is like an evil twin, lurking in a vague netherworld between or above or below journalism and content marketing.
Its modus operandi is deception, not transparency. Both publishers and content marketers should disavow it, now and forever.
 Last night I happened to watch Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.
My mistake. It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made nearly 50 years ago, it remains remarkably relevant, not just for its treatment of addiction, but also, surprisingly, for its critique of corporate marketing and PR.
It’s no coincidence that Jack Lemmon’s character works in public relations. In his career, as in his personal life, he papers over the ugly truth until it’s too late. The parallel becomes clear when Lee Remick takes Lemmon to introduce him to her father, played by Charles Bickford. When Bickford asks what Lemmon does for a living, things go rapidly downhill. Watching the exchange, it’s hard not to think of British Petroleum’s disastrous handling of the Gulf oil spill.
Charles Bickford: What kind of work you do?
Jack Lemmon: Um, uh, public relations.
CB: Public relations?
Lee Remick: Uh, you know, Daddy, um, well, uh, it’s hard to explain.
JL: Well, err, I, I suppose you might say my job is, uh, to sort of help my client, uh, create a public image, uh, by—well, for an example, um, let’s say my client—Corporation X!—uh, does some good. Or something of, uh, benefit to the public, or something that could conceivably be conceived as, uh …. benefit to the uh… Well, my job is to see that the public, uh, knows it.
CB: And what if this X Corporation does something bad?
JL: Well . . . . [chuckles nervously] Well, theoretically they don’t . . . um, theoretically. Well, uh, part of my job is to, uh, help my client to, um, to think of ways to operate, uh, in a way that the public would, you know, approve.
CB: But if your X Corporation makes a mistake, and the thing turns out bad?
JL: Well, uh, haha! I guess I try to make it look not quite so bad. [chuckles nervously] Well, there’s more to it than that, sir, actually—
LR: It’s terrifically complicated, Daddy.
CB: I don’t understand that kind of work.
The movie holds out hope for alcoholics through the intercession of Alcoholics Anonymous. It offers no similar shot at redemption for corporate PR. This was, after all, the 1960s, the zenith of corporate marketing and advertising (think Mad Men). PR was about controlling the message, not addressing the truth.
Now, though, in the era of social media and content marketing, corporate communications is increasingly less about “control over your messaging,” as Frank Reed put it recently, and more about “telling the truth and being accountable.”
As the movie shows, and as, one hopes, corporations are learning, the failure to face up to the truth and acknowledge your mistakes only compounds and delays your day of reckoning.
In a comment today on a recent B2B Memes blog post, “Content Marketing’s PR Problem,” a reader by the dubious name of Ant Miles raises an interesting point about content marketing and journalism. As Miles notes, journalism is often biased in hidden ways by PR and marketing. In content marketing, that bias tends to be more transparent. So in the latter case, “cynical audiences will see overly biased content for what it is—PR by another name—and treat it as such.”
In this view, transparency is not in itself a guarantee of ethical content. Rather, by disclosing the potential for conflict, it raises the bar for content creators. And by giving readers a reason to distrust them, it requires them to work that much harder to produce ethical content that will earn back that trust. As Miles puts it, “the art to great content marketing must then be, through the very act of providing neutral, targeted content . . . to position the company as a trusted information source for the future, to earn the respect of the audience through truthful content.”
What interests me in this comment is the way transparency, volitional or not, is viewed as the starting point of ethical content, not the end point. That distinction isn’t always clear.
Not much has been written yet on ethics in content marketing, but what has focuses largely on transparency. For Rex Hammock, for instance, transparency is the only constant of ethics:
“Transparency—a clear explanation of the sponsorships and relationships involved in the development and presentation of any media—is the foundation (or high ground) that must be adhered to whenever determining whether or not something is ethical. Frankly, beyond that, ethical standards are a negotiation between media creator and media receiver.”
To old-media minds, the idea that ethical standards are negotiable is offensive. Content creators, they would say, should not shirk their ethical responsibility by transferring it to the reader.
From the new-media perspective, however, that is a paternalistic argument aimed at maintaining control of the medium. The interactivity inherent in conversational media means the reader is not simply a passive recipient of information, but shares ethical responsibility.
While I agree with the new-media perspective as Hammock expresses it, there’s a danger to it. It’s too easy to leap to the conclusion that you don’t need anything more than transparency to guarantee ethical content.
As Mitch Joel says, and as I think Hammock would agree, it’s not true that you can do whatever it takes to get your point across as long as you are transparent about your intent:
“That is, simply, not the case. All cannot be forgiven by just waving your hand over a piece of advertising posed as real content and saying, “paid,” “sponsored” or “advertising” on it.”
Without specifying what it takes to get there, Joel says that credibility is the ultimate goal, and that’s much harder to achieve than transparency. As he puts it, “if you can build your brand by starting off with a foundation of transparency and then think about what you can do to create those real interactions between real human beings—understanding that this is a long road—you are well on your way.”
We might say then that transparency is the foundation of ethical content, but there must be a superstructure of walls and roof beams as well. Building that superstructure involves a lot of work and interaction with the audience.
Whether the architecture is always negotiable or involves some other constant principles is up for debate. But this much is clear: Transparency is not all.
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