Abandon corporate speak
The corporate blogs I’ve talked about generally do a good job of keeping the marketing speak to a minimum, but we do see a few sentences and phrases here and there that look like they’ve come out of a PR flack’s mouth. The best corporate blogs shed their corporate happy talk and speak to people in the same tone and manner as if reader and blogger were shooting the bull at a cocktail party. There’s a reason for that. People are exposed to plenty of marketing prose and hyperbole in your ads. They don’t need more.
"Wal-Mart is good for America's working communities. And not just because of Wal-Mart's famously low prices-- prices that help working families afford more of the things they need and want. That's only the beginning. Wal-Mart also brings much-needed jobs to America's communities, affordable health care to American families, and generous donations to charities across the country."
The quote above is taken from "Working Families for Wal-Mart," a poor excuse for a blog that is written in part by employees of Edelman, Wal-Mart’s PR agency. While the blog does an admirable job of linking to stories and facts that help support its position, it doesn’t do the best job of keeping the discussion around these stories interesting. One of the reasons for that is the flagrant corporate speak that dominates the site. Did you turn off when you read the quote above? Me, too.
Part of what makes blogs believable and, well, more real is their voice. Readers would immediately know it if any of the companies I’ve talked about in this article were to post press releases, and they’d immediately reject it. Think real human communication across a coffee table, not flowery PR speak.
Corporate speak can also be a dead giveaway that corporate bloggers aren’t really listening. Take, for instance, this post on a Verizon blog about text message spam. The post contains such PR speak gems as "[i]t takes the nation’s best wireless network to push those messages through fast," and "[b]uilding, growing and improving the Verizon Wireless network is at the core of our business." The same day the post went live, it received a comment from a customer that has gone unanswered, sitting there unaddressed for 12 days as of this writing.
Blog readers have a terrific knack for rooting out the fakers. If a site claiming to be an official corporate blog is populated with content written by a PR agency, readers quickly sniff this out. In a best case scenario, the blog is simply ignored. Worst case? Ask Wal-Mart about that one.
