Has there ever been a list of words that “thou shalt not use” that was taken seriously? Other than George Carlin’s “seven deadly words that you can’t say on television“?  And even those get a free pass lately. The once stodgy and bureaucratic FCC now looks the other way even for those words, if the hour is late enough or your cable channel obscure enough.

Much has been said, written, tweeted and blogged lately about the dangers of using “gobbledygook” terms. Lists have been generated, counted, measured, flagged and flogged and everyone (almost) feels the wiser for it.

Except for one thing. (OK two.)

The first is easy to explain: one person’s gobbledygook is another person’s precise, and often technical or professional term. It can be a term that the intended audience is actually expecting and who believe it’s the most accurate one. The biggest fallacy with the gobbledygook complaint is the idea that all language must be plain language that a single, giant mass “public”, with a lowest common denominator of perhaps an 8th grade education, accepts. (Hmm, sounds kind of “mass media,” don’t you think?)

The second problem is that 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. This is braindead dumb. Vocabularies are not one size fits all. I know some think it’s all a big joke, but I think it’s about as funny as a book burning.

The real gobbledygook terms are those “social media-sanctioned” words that nearly everyone uses with great frequency and gusto (oops–I mean passion). These words are promiscuous, over-hyped terms that sleep around in a lot of sentences but never have a meaningful relationship with any reader–because they don’t convey meaning. This is highly ironic, of course, since the frequent users of these words often believe they’re on a mission to kill off hype.

Here’s a list of some of the REAL gobbledygook terms we are hearing every day. You might detect an Orwellian, 1984-ish trend in the below list. Most if not all are disingenuous and really mean the opposite of their surface definition:

Authentic.

(A code word for “popular and fake as all get-out.”)

Relevant.

(This has nothing to do with asking an individual person what they specifically want, and everything to do with jumping off cliffs of assumption and gross generalization with the help of a search engine.)

Remarkable.

(The trendy, all-purpose superlative, when unique just isn’t good enough. It’s also a chameleon. Since no one can define it, it becomes whatever you want it to be, which is handy for going viral.)

Thought leader.

(The highly popular badge of wannabes who are mostly followers. Bona fide thought leaders have no need to make the claim.)

Pivot.

(Born in the VC community, this is putting a smiley face on your coffin. It means, “everything about your start-up sucks except this one tiny thing, which I’ll invest in if you kill and bury the rest of your lifelong dream.”)

Passionate.

(This is the new, dolled-up and more polite way of saying “this is the only thing I give a shit about.” That’s OK, it makes for nicer name badges at tweetups.)

Human.

(Everyone seems to want to say this, but why is a mystery to me … as opposed to what, exactly? I guess I don’t watch enough animal, vegetable or alien movies.)

Real.

(Do I even have to say it? Another code word for artificial.)

Old School.

(The contemporary fate worse than death … or think of it as “pre-death.” Earlier generations would have said “hell on earth.”) The extra-pejorative form is, “Old Skool,” inspired, apparently, by the need to intentionally misspell words to prove your revolutionary cred. Gotta follow the new rools!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

While hysterically funny, George Carlin’s monologues on the seven deadly words had a serious message that bears repeating today:

“There are no bad words … just bad thoughts … bad intentions … and WORDS.”

Whether you’re a B2B or consumer marketer, keep Carlin’s admonition in mind if you want to have any hope of being influential or persuasive.

We must speak in the language that the people we’d like to reach understand and expect–regardless of whether or not those words meet some uppity, homogenized sniff test.

If you’re trying to engage with a professional or technical audience–or any audience, really, whose interests have their own slang and jargon–WTH do you care if Suzy Creamcheese or Joe the Plumber (who’re NOT part of that audience) don’t like it or don’t get it?

You should not waste one minute thinking about it.

About The B2Bblogger:

During his award-winning career, Parker has provided strategy and consulting to everyone from two-person start-ups to major industry leaders including Lotus, IBM, Digital, Xerox and BBN. Thirty of his 160 clients have been acquired at a total combined value of more than $5 billion. He blogs at www.marketingdissector.com.

Marketing is not a zero sum game.  You don’t have to win 100% of the marbles to win.  It’s not all or nothing.  On the contrary, marketing is fundamentally relative and incremental.

Those who insist that high risk is the only “safe bet,” and that the opposite is also true (“safe” being the new high risk) take an extreme view that denies the middle ground.  They tell us to forget the parachute, just jump out of the plane.  Parachutes are for wimps, they say, and if you must use one, just sew it on your way down.

Unfortunately, social media parroting, which spreads good ideas quickly, also feeds this foggy mindset just as fast.  Pithy, ironic witticisms like “x is the new y,” where x and y are opposites, are hugely popular.  We seem to believe that the wittier or more ironic a statement is, the more truthful it is.

Wrong.  They are merely witty or ironic.  We like to be surprised, and sometimes we’re lulled into thinking we’re getting a present.

It’s not hard to disprove the high risk-as-the-only-safe-path theory, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming enormously popular.  I have to admit it sounds like fun to blow the marketing budget on one giant, frivolous binge of willful intent to gain attention.  Fun—but effective marketing? (There I go again—throwing cold water on the marketers-just-wanna-have-fun School of “B2B Revolution.” What a party pooper.)

For anyone interested in exploring life as a rational marketer (despite some of the bad reviews the idea gets lately) here’s a little exercise in set theory:

Please rate the following statements as true or false.

1. Today all traditional, old school marketing tactics will fail.
2. Today all new, digital/social marketing tactics will fail.
3. Today all traditional, old school marketing tactics will succeed.
4. Today all new, digital/social marketing tactics will succeed.

If your answer to all four questions was FALSE, then congratulations.  You’re mentally prepared to deal realistically with probability and risk.  You have knees that don’t jerk … at least, not all of the time.  You acknowledge the possible existence of shades of gray or medium ground.

This capacity can be very useful for understanding the highly-complex systems that are involved in the spreading of influence.

Sadly, these days this does not make you merely competent, but special.

And another thing.  Some of us are having trouble telling the difference between strategies of last resort vs. those of first resort.  Have you ever seen a football game in which the winning team starts pumping out hail mary passes in the first quarter, and all throughout the game?  On every play?  No?  Why is that?  Because coaches know the higher risk is justified only when it’s a last resort—as the clock runs out—and not when there are other, lower risk/higher probability ways to get it done.

As smart marketers, we have to know more than one way to win the game.  We must know all the ways, and all the tools, and when and how to use them to best advantage.  In that we really do have something in common with winning athletes and coaches.

When you think about taking risks in your marketing, consider:

• Yes, you will have to take risks.  Some of them might be big.  But there’s a huge difference between taking a single, well-calculated risk vs. habitually taking risks with casual disregard and little or no analysis.
• Reckless abandon is no more your friend than is analysis paralysis.  It simply doesn’t matter how popular risk-taking is or who says so.
• When gauging a risk, keep guts, glory and other tired clichés and emotions out of it.  Focus your passion on your business. Spend it on the times when you need to fire yourself up to take on that big, important risk.  Don’t squander it on trivia that doesn’t matter to prove entrepreneurial cred or massage your vanity.  No one else cares, and you shouldn’t either.
• Don’t forget probability: it’s the most important factor.  Ignoring probability is what allows poor people to throw away their precious dollars on lotteries.
• Regardless of which risks you take and which you don’t, and regardless of the outcomes, you’ll never regret having first done your homework so you can fully understand the risks.

So stop the swirling, and just do it.

About The B2Bblogger:

During his award-winning career, Parker has provided strategy and consulting to everyone from two-person start-ups to major industry leaders including Lotus, IBM, Digital, Xerox and BBN. Thirty of his 160 clients have been acquired at a total combined value of more than $5 billion. He blogs at www.marketingdissector.com.

If you repeat a tweet, and no one receives it more than once, is it still spam?

It’s time to take a closer look at Twitter spam. How is Twitter currently defining spam? Setting aside account hacks and DM spam that are clearly more about security than permission, the major area Twitter has chosen to regulate is repeat tweets. Violating Twitter’s spam policy can get you banned. In October they issued a statement clarifying the repeat/recurring tweet ban that said,

“We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever … They pollute Twitter.”

But there are many times in which a Twitter user might consider a repeat tweet not only non-offensive, but welcome. Twitter policy fails to acknowledge this or any exceptions or nuances. Apparently they’ve decided to deal with it on a case-by-case basis—at least for now.

Marketers using Twitter, both for ourselves and/or our clients, face a bit of uncertainty when we try to parse best practices vs. common ones vs. Twitter policy. We could do with a bit more specificity as to what is prohibited and why and a lot more discussion, user input and guidance in the gray areas.

For example:

• When I choose to follow someone, am I not granting permission for all their tweets?  If they repeat themselves, can’t I just unfollow them?  Isn’t that enough? I also have the further option to block them, so they don’t receive my tweets either.
• What if the repeat tweet is re-worded? Is it still a repeat, and banned?  What if the re-wording was for the purpose of clarification? What if I didn’t get the meaning the first time, but I did on the second try? And I respond to the second? Could the second in that case still be viewed as an unwanted, banned retweet? Doesn’t this policy hinder, rather than help, communication?
• What if a completely different tweet refers to the same topic, link or blog post, but makes a different point? Is it a repeat, or not?
• What if the same tweet goes out over two different accounts with no overlap in followers? In this case, what if no single user receives the message more than once?  Is it still a banned repeat?
• What if someone I follow repeats some tweets once in the morning and once at night? And what if I only use Twitter at night, and so I never receive a repeat?  Again, is it still a banned repeat—or is it a convenience to me, because I don’t want to have to log on in the morning or use a monitor?

By failing to crack down, Twitter’s kind of admitting (wink wink) the ban goes too far. Guy Kawasaki has posted more than once why and how he repeats some tweets because he “doesn’t assume that anyone follows him 24×7.” That sounds reasonable, and his account’s still working. So what motivates Twitter’s policy? Is it concern for their users, or fear of spammers and hackers, or simply a desire to minimize traffic on their overtaxed servers? Or all of the above?

This raises still more questions:

1. What are the new, more nuanced and granular types of permissions that Twitter users would like to be able to grant or withhold from the people/organizations they follow?
2. Can a tweet that’s literally not received in the live stream at the moment of occurrence–but which instead must be retrieved by proactively conducting a search or configuring a monitoring tool–ever be “unwanted spam”? Isn’t searching out something proof that it’s wanted?
   
3. Should Twitter allow repeat tweets under certain circumstances? For example, since it’s a live stream, could a “Twitter day” be divided into three 8-hour time slots, where the same tweet could be sent once in each time slot to those followers who designate their preferred time slot? If I only get on for the midnight shift, why do I care if the same tweet floated by in the AM or mid-day when I’m not paying attention?
4. A few people protest that recurring/repeat tweets do pollute the environment, so to speak, and half the information content, decrease the signal-to-noise ratio, reduce the value and worse would quite correctly be seen as generating spam. But is that true? Doesn’t a view of this as a signal-to-noise problem require one to pretend that it’s possible for one human to take in the entirety of the Twitter stream? And caring about disk space in their server farm? Why should we—it’s their nickel. As many commenters have noted, in the vast majority of cases no one notices the repeats … and the few that do still have unfollow and block.

Like it or not, Twitter’s in the plumbing business. Call it realtime community or lifestreams or fanbase management if you want. Whatever. But in the end they make pipes that connect people. The closer they get to regulating the content that moves through their pipes, the bigger the risk that one day they’ll be loathed with the same fervor that many save for giant broadband/content conglomerates. Why go there? They can be wildly successful without it.

As Twitter enhances its service and develops its commercial side, let’s hope that they see a richer, more subtle and nuanced permission capability as the potential boon that it is. For marketers, and really any user interested in best practices, a little more clarity to go along with new functionality would be most welcome.

About The B2Bblogger:

• Listen more, and learn what I can.
• Try to figure out how to apply what I learn, and share that knowledge.
• Be generous with my time, knowledge, advice and support of others, without regard to “what’s in it for me.”
• Not tweet about minor inconveniences only affecting me (or my flight status, menu options or location–except in emergencies).
• Always apply the “so what?” test to everything I read, say, think, believe and especially, advocate. (WARNING: This requires that skepticism and analysis be applied to all ideas, including those of people you know, respect and admire.)
• Not use social media to be a parrot.
• Occasionally take the opposite side, just to play devil’s advocate and tweak the know-it-alls.
• Approach whatever I have to sell from the point of view of making it easier for the buyers to find and buy.
• Embrace the ambiguity of everything that is happening around me even while I seek out insight and new ways to understand and learn from it.
• Never take offense when someone disagrees with me.  Disagreements are normal, helpful and necessary. I will only be offended if someone intentionally acts offensively to me.
• Never miss the opportunity to help connect the dots for someone who has not yet connected some dots that I already have.
• Resist the temptation to navel gaze.
• Try to walk the fine line between popular and proven, while remaining open to new ideas that are neither.
• Honor my fanbase if I have one, and if not, my potential fanbase.
• Try to be funny sometimes, and share a laugh, and try even harder not to be embarrassed if it flops.
• Try to tell the fads from the trends.
• Not resort to phony techniques to boost my social media box scores or metrics.
• Rely on science and math when conducting marketing experiments, to make them as rigorous as possible.
• Not abuse email subject lines with cheap tricks.
• Not exude inappropriate cheerfulness, nor suppress my inner Oscar the Grouch.
• Work to make 2010 the year that sales and marketing actually got aligned and the long war ended.
• Heed the words of the great author and humanist Kurt Vonnegut, and remember to “pity the poor reader” whenever I write anything.
• Try to underpromise and overdeliver in all things.
• Try to discover new ways that online communities can help us sell and help customers buy.
• Never use the “change or die” metaphor, but try not to hurl whenever someone else does.
• Not belabor the obvious.
• Be extra patient with anyone speaking, texting, emailing, chatting or tweeting with me in their second language. I will meet them more than halfway to ensure we understand each other.
• Not be jealous of anyone with more or different experiences than me, but instead seek out their opinions and appreciate them.
• Quickly embrace “new rules” when they’re useful, but just as quickly discard them if they’re not.
• Take everything with a grain of salt, and never be too lazy to scrutinize ideas regardless of origin.
• Try to only do marketing that matters, and measure it only with measurement that matters.

Whew, that’s a long list.  I guess I’m going to be busy.  What are your resolutions for 2010?

About The BtoBblogger: Steven H. Parker is founder and CEO of Parker Communications, a PR and marketing agency specializing in start-ups and fast growth technology companies. He has worked exclusively with tech companies in PR and marketing for the past 25 years. His prior agency, The Launch Company, for 10 years was one of the top 25 independently-owned agencies in the U.S. He’s also a former VP at Hill & Knowlton, and a former print journalist. During his award-winning career, Parker has provided strategy and consulting to everyone from two-person start-ups to major industry leaders including Lotus, IBM, Digital, Xerox and BBN. Thirty of his 160 clients have been acquired at a total combined value of more than $5 billion.  He blogs at www.marketingdissector.com.