What's all the Jargon About?

I've been listening to my latest download from Audible.com: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky. Admittedly, I chose it because I loved the title and it got great reviews. And I tend to like things that explore "thinking differently" - likely a tendency leftover from my creative, Mac addict days.

Just part way into it, I was thinking it was really going to be more about daily communication, email, voicemail, sales meetings and the like. While it's that, it's so much more. It's really about EVERYTHING we communicate with, including our marketing. The "simple is better" approach is very similar to strategies we employ with search engine marketing and optimization.

While we know one of the core components of marketing is to develop and deliver those unique messages to address a customers "wants and needs," sometimes in that effort to be "unique" we miss the part about serving the customers needs, getting lost in words that we think they should hear. You know them: cutting edge, feature rich, enterprise class...

Example: click here for a search in Google for the above terms. 12,700 RESULTS ARE RETURNED. Wow! And that's using "quotes" around the terms to ensure we are getting the actual phrases. That's a lot of business BS!

In an effort to stand out, make their stuff sound great, these companies - and note, they are BIG companies in those results - they have simply become one of about 13,000 indexed items in Google.

So "think different" should really be "think simple."

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Technorati tags: business jargon, search engine marketing, internet marketing, Marketing