10 horrible words & phrases that consultants need to cut out
There are plenty of these lists around but as a writer with a scientific education I feel well qualified to create my own.
20 banned words from the Econsultancy blog and their alternatives
This week you may have seen our list of banned words and phrases shared across Twitter.
This list forms a part of the Econsultancy style guide, issued to all new writers in the office, along with a set of Econsultancy temporary tattoos and a nightstick.
Econsultancy’s colossal digital marketing jargon-buster
We have a simple goal here at Econsultancy, to make the digital world a better place.
We do this is by helping every visitor, client and delegate sort through the clutter of digital marketing, and our role here on the blog however is to help on a more day-to-day basis.
We aim to provide useful tips, guidance and best practice advice in a manner that we hope is as jargon-free as possible, to make digital marketing easy to understand for everyone at any level.
Which is why I’m very proud to present Econsultancy’s Colossal Jargon-Buster, a handy A-Z guide to the most useful and common terms that you’ll come across in the digital marketing world.
Why I hate webinars, and the importance of copywriting for UX
Webinars are annoying, ultimately, because we are designed for face to face communication. However, they are extremely useful if your colleagues and customers are ‘global’.
There are many annoying things about webinar tech, but most of them centre on UX. And central to UX is getting your language right.
Webex, as my chosen example, simply didn’t work with a good copywriter when laying out its back-end and webinar UI. I can’t speak for others such as Adobe Connect, as I haven’t used them myself.
I don’t think Webex is attempting to appear natty or complex, using slightly mystifying words or combinations of words. It’s just badly written.
Here are some examples:
Users prefer facts to marketing jargon: Nielsen
Nobody likes reading marketing jargon, yet all corporate websites rely on a certain amount of fluffy language to fill their pages and sell their services.
However two studies from the Nielsen Norman Group indicate that content that’s rich with facts and short on jargon is actually a more effective way of attracting people to your website.
It should be pointed out from the start that these studies tested journalists and people using investor relation (IR) pages on corporate websites, so it’s difficult to draw any direct parallels with consumer copywriting.
But even so, I would suggest that the findings still give a useful indicator of the kind of content that web users are interested in.
20 heinous examples of PR and social media jargon
We’re not big fans of jargon and PR speak on this blog, and we did round up some of our least favourite words and phrases a few years ago.
We also have a banned words and phrases section in our blog style guide, which aims to keep godawful phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ and synergies’ off the pages of this blog.
People keep coming up with this guff though, so I’ve listed some further crimes against the English language…
How gobbledygook clichés make your web copy invisible
Every copywriter and marketer faces the challenge of writing web copy that connects with their readers. Engaging copy encourages visitors to find out more, spread the news to colleagues and make return visits.
Ten terrible terms used in online marketing
The best and worst thing about being present at the dawn of the internet is watching the new language that has been developed to cope with it.
With the news that ‘noob’ may be about to make it into the dictionary, I gave some thought to the language we online marketers are responsible for and, I have to admit, we have created our fair share of terrible terminology. We also routinely use some horrible generic marketing terms.
Bobbie Johnson is sick of ‘social media’, and who can blame him?
The Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson has penned a savage missive lambasting Mashable for overhyping the ‘social media bubble’.
Turns out that Bobbie is sick of hearing about ‘social media’, and I can understand why. It is a catch-all term that is losing a lot of meaning. And it’s a term that many people are using with increasing frequency, as highlighted by Google Trends:
Leveraging the synergies: death to PRspeak
I have recently been working on a style guide for Econsultancy, to help internal and external writers achieve a measure of consistency.
As part of the style guide I’ve compiled a ‘Common Words’ section (because ’email’ has no hyphen, but ‘e-commerce’ does), and an ‘Acronyms’ section (because if you don’t know your SEO from your WTF then people tend to LOL).
I am also assembling a ‘Banned Words and Phrases’ section, to try to rid our pages of the meaningless guff typically found in press releases and Powerpoint slideshows. There is no room for ‘bleeding-edge solutions’ at this inn.