Month: August 2007

Yet another scalable, cutting-edge blog post from the industry standard for the next generation, delivered with full functionality

Any PR pro who eschews news release clutter will appreciate The Gobbledygook Manifesto, by David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Scott … says it best in introducing his manifesto: “Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I’m gonna puke!” In every company description, on websites, in press releases, in corporate pamphlets, the same adjectives get used over and over until they are meaningless. Scott analyzed thousands of these offerings and presents a collection of the most over-used and under-meaningful phrases…and strategies for making the most of these communication opportunities.

“The results,” Scott writes, “were staggering. The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period [of his study], and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was ‘next generation,’ with 9,895 uses.

There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: “flexible,” “robust,” “world class,” “scalable,” and “easy to use.” Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included “cutting edge,” “mission critical,” “market leading,” “industry standard,” “turnkey,” and “groundbreaking.” Oh and don’t forget “interoperable,” “best of breed,” and “user friendly,” each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.

Ack.

Something is horribly wrong here.

“Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers (and journalists),” Scott writes. “Here’s the rule: when you write, start with your buyers, not with your product.”

Good advice. Sometimes even the best of us get so caught up in our petty bureaucracies and clearance loops that we forget our audience. Some of us even forget that we are — or should be — commmunicators first, marketers second. Shame on us. Kudos to Scott for reminding us to keep our buyers in mind.

Via the ChangeThis Newsletter.

Another university name change in the works

Regular readers of this blog probably know all about the name change under way for my employer, the University of Missouri-Rolla, which will become Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) on Jan. 1. Now another campus of the University of Missouri — the University of Missouri-Columbia — is considering a name change of sorts.

The Columbia Tribune reported on Friday (Aug. 3) that the Columbia campus — more often referred to as MU or Mizzou than UMC — is considering dropping the “-Columbia” from its name. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also reports on the proposal, quoting MU Chancellor Brady Deaton as saying, “Our aim is to properly brand it as the major university in the state. It should be the University of Missouri, period.”

Deaton is calling the proposal a “name restoration,” rather than a name change. It’s a complicated argument that probably only makes sense to Missourians and graduates of any of the four University of Missouri campuses. If you’re really interested, you can read my brief explanation on the Name Change Conversations blog I maintain for UMR.