David Meerman Scott on gobbleydygook

A few weeks ago, I participated in a client’s marketing off-site, and social media expert David Meerman Scott was on the agenda.

Mostly, he focused on viral marketing, the subject of his recent book, World Wide Rave, which I posted about here. But he also spent a few minutes on another topic: the gobbledygook that most of us marketers tend to fall back on in our collateral, web copy, and press releases. I came across my scribbled down notes the other day, and wanted to air them here as a reminder to folks (including myself) that there are just some words that are so over-used and so tired that they have become meaningless.

Here’s David’s list of the 25 most commonly used gobbledygood words, compiled from an analysis of over 700,000 press releases that went out over a number of different distribution mechanisms during 2008. (The releases were analyzed against a set of 325 words that David developed from a number of sources, which are detailed in his April post on the topic, which is linked below). Here goes:

1. Innovate
2. Pleased to
3. Unique
4. Focused on
5. Leading provider
6. Commitment
7. Partnership
8. New and improved
9. Leveraged
10. 120 percent
11. Cost effective
12. Next generation
13. 110 percent
14. Flexible
15. World class
16. Robust
17. High performance
18. Scalability
19. Proud to
20. Optimize
21. Outcomes
22. In terms of
23. Value added
24. Easy to use
25. Metrics

I certainly have to fess up that I have used quite a few (although not, I’m relieved to say, all) of these terms. I’d say my most frequent “offenses” have been leading provider, cost effective, next generation, world class, robust, high performance, and easy to use.

This is a pretty good list - although my personal (although never personally used) favorite - “most unique” - failed to make the cut. Perhaps marketing folks have finally come to appreciate that there’s no such thing as “most unique.” Alas, one less thing to make fun of someone else for using!

As a tech marketer from way back, I would also like to note that “robust” is a code word for “brutal to use”, and back in the day, was never used in the same release as “easy to use”, since we would have viewed a product as being both “robust” and “easy to use” as a logical and physically impossibility. (Any product that could be both would be “most unique.”)

Some of these I had to pause on - what’s so wrong with scalability and high performance? Sometimes products can have those attributes.

Then it occurred to me that those words contain exactly zero information unless they’re supported by some facts - as in, “scales to 1,000 users before you need a new server” (”Ah! that will work for my organization.”) or “can perform 2 gazillion transactions per second” (That’s some performance, but may be overkill for what we need.”)

Anyway, in terms of my becoming a leading provider of value added to David’s original work, I’m proud to leverage his world-class work by this flexible link to his post on this topic.

And here’s a link to HubSpot’s Gobbledygood Grader (a post for another day).

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