You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away.
The Bee Gees, 1966
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of words ever since I came back from the Content Strategy Forum in early September. (I’ve also had this song as a soundtrack I can’t seem to get rid of, thanks for Forum speaker Eric Reiss.) But in fact, that’s all I’ve been doing: thinking about it, mulling it through.
Then, this weekend, I came across a post in my twitter feed: On writing simply and saving the world economy (sub-head: Is corporate gobbledygook the cause of the economic apocalypse?). Two hours later, on public transport, I came across an older post by @krismausser on the Business value of words, where gobbledygook is once more singled out, maybe not for the economic crisis, but for undermining our ability to communicate with our customers.
It struck me that this was a recurring theme at conferences and seminars I’ve attended recently – regardless of the subject. It started with the CS Forum, where raconteur extraordinaire Gerry McGovern made his case: it’s not content, not even sentences, but words—individual, single words– that make or break our websites or our apps.
The single biggest thing that prevents users from doing the tasks they need to do, says McGovern, is poor choice of words in website labeling. It’s the proliferation of words that aren’t clear, that are approximate, which could provide answers – but then again, maybe not—that trip us up. Our sites have too many words that compete with each other. And this is terribly confusing for our users. Not convinced? Watch the video, this man is persuasive!
A few weeks later, I attended a session organized by IABC France on trends in corporate communications. Assaël Assary, head of French research institute Occurrence, spoke about the increasingly low trust levels French employees have in the public discourse of their country’s corporations. It’s not that people aren’t listening or being reached, it’s worse, he said: they hear our messages, but don’t believe them. Gobbledygook may be one reason, but spin is another. This relentless effort to portray even the most disheartening of news in a positive light has contributed to the ambient distrust of corporate ‘messaging’.
Could it be that the two are linked? That the corporate propensity for gobbledygook and spin has made it difficult for anyone to believe that the choice of one word or another might actually have an impact on the success of our websites?
I recently had someone ask me why we needed a writer to write a login page, because there really wasn’t anything to write but a set of simple instructions. But when you listen to Gerry McGovern explain how some invest in testing the exact wording on their calls to action (Donate vs Donate Now vs Please donate vs Why donate? Vs Donate and get a free gift – this from the Obama campaign) because they have a real impact on conversion rates, you wonder why all companies don’t take this as seriously.
We in the corporate world have legacy of developing content that no one believes will ever really be read and taken at face value. We’ve been doing this for so long that it’s hard for people to believe that words count. But they do. Enterprises need more than content owners, they need ‘word’ owners; people who will be accountable for the performance of words, not only on their websites but in their communications at large.
As enterprise communicators, we may not take anyone’s heart away; but, words are indeed all we have to help us lead the way, so we better mean it, and we better invest and take the time to choose those words carefully and thoughtfully.
PS. You can always listen the Bee Gees song — it’s a classic — but I invite you to listen to a cover performed by one of my favourite singers.
This is an excellent and thought provoking post. Too much content is still being written by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. (Yes, I mean you, SEO-content-sweatshops!)
We desperately need to create an enterprise culture that respects the professionalism of the writer as much as it respects the professionalism of the engineer or the accountant.
Glad you enjoyed it, David. It’s not only SEO sweatshops; it’s also subject matter experts who can make the process harder than it needs to be. Editors aren’t given enough credit for the value they bring. And, to be fair, we’re not going back to content owners performance indicators, either. We need to do this.
In reading your post, the old adage comes to mind – « the pen is mightier than the sword ». Words do yield power.. they always have and they always will. I think the difference today is that the reader now holds just as much power as the writer. In making the choice about what to read, it is the reader who assigns meaning to content, not, as in the past, the organizations. Content engagement is about what is meaningful to them. To carry the metaphor one step further, the reader is the one who is « en garde » against words that are trite, contrived, and just plain gobbledygook. Within business, words still do matter… a great deal. It’s just that we now have to spend more time researching those words so that we are speaking the same language as our target audience, using their vocabulary. The paradigm shift in this comes from the fact that messaging is no longer a broadcast, top-down model, but one of true conversation where both parties can benefit.
You’re absolutely right, Kristina. Thanks for your thoughtful comment; keyword research, testing our labels and site content, these are tools we need to use to make our words more effective.