Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
Summary: Why do companies present their messages using their own, non-standard, industry jargon to present a new idea?
From time to time, I receive a message from a company's PR agency that is so full of company-specific acronyms presented as if they were industry standard terms that I can not make any sense of it. Since there are a number of sites offering human language translations for industry jargon, I usually am able to decipher the PR person's message and decide whether I'd like to speak with a company representative.
On occasion, however, I find that the self-chosen acronym or catch-phrase abbreviation collides with many others. The end result is that I can't make any sense of the message. Rather than take the time to discover what the company intended to say, I gently escort that message to the trash folder and say a fond farewell to it.
This means, of course, that the company failed in its mission to communicate to create industry awareness, interest, desire for their product or service or get potential customers to take action to acquire the product or service.
What puzzles me the most is a company would send out such a message in the first place. I guess that the PR firm was unable to persuade the company's marketing people to present marketing messages in a clear, understandable and persuasive way. In the end, they both failed.
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RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
About 18 months ago, I joined a new company and was bombarded with documentation meant to help me "get up to speed" with what my new company was up to. But most of this documentation was so filled with acronyms and local buzz words that the documents were essentially useless without a glossary, which did not exist.
I felt foolish, at first, assuming these must be terms everyone knew but me. But, I swallowed my pride and decided to learn. Since the authors of most of the documents were not identified (another pet peeve), I started asking around the office and was surprised to find that people who had worked with this company for two, four even ten years had no idea what many of the terms meant. Some terms had as many as FOUR accepted meanings, all of which were totally unrelated.
I'm not in favor of freezing the standards of communication in the distant past or failing to adapt to the times. We all need to learn new terms and new TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms). But let's take the time to spell out the meaning of our acronyms the first time we use them. And if a term has several possible meanings ("tier n" is a favorite of mine) clarify your intended meaning on first use so that your readers don't get lost.
Those who craft written messages must stop to ask themselves "is what I've just written LIKELY to be quickly and easily understood by the people who read it?" If not, either give your message another edit or delegate ... ask for some help from your local friendly technical writer or executive secretary.
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
They want to rank higher.
Instead it kills their ranking, as Google have algorithms implemented as software in place to look for suspicious behaviour and 'adjust' their Web rankings accordingly.
Using common acronyms and trying to re-brand them is what they are told to do at paid sessions of 'secret marketing techniques'.
It's just more #fail and Social Media garbage.
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything
The truth is that small companies don't have the budget or bandwidth to create a new category. Most big companies can't do it either, but that is for other reasons.
EMC has been pretty good at it, but they have thousands of people, several major trade shows branded to them (VMworld, RSA conference, and EMC world to name a few) and hundreds of millions of dollars they can throw at a new idea.
Small companies, not so much. The difference is that an EMC is like a wurlitzer pipe organ and smaller companies are playing a one note instrument.
The result is they use terms nobody else uses, that the industry hasn't adopted, and that virtually nobody understands.
RE: Alphabet soup that fails to communicate anything