This would have been more compelling if speaking like a human didn't involve putting the words "bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass" and "hold me" into a press release, and if his press release actually contained the keywords (CRM, HRM, KM) the original used to catch the filters of the trade press, which is, you know, the target of a press release.
By the time I got to "Here's the thing", I was looking for the rounded corners and the Flash intro, because this thing was clearly reading like the front page of a stealth-mode video sharing startup from 2003.
It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words "auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as "Customer Relations Management".
Sure, except that Mann isn't trying to write a replacement press release for NewsGator, not really. He's really just trying to turn up some ears toward just how utterly opaque the previous one was. "Bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass", and "hold me" are great words for the intended audience, viz. those of us curious about why the hell the first one was so dense.
In the end, don't you just want to rewrite the goddamn thing yourself? Take out the buzz and the sass, put in the keywords. You're practically working for NewsGator already, and you're definitely caught in the wave Mann stirred up and tossed up to his internet call box.
There are two things about this article that made me want to say something about it.
First, in his zeal to deflate the original, he killed the original business value of the piece, which is to get picked up when someone in the trade press needs to fill inches with material on CRMs or HRMs or enterprise social software.
Second, the big problem he sees this release demonstrating is a sort of Orwellian perversion of the English language by business functionaries. But that's not really the problem at all, is it? NewsGator has a problem no copyeditor can solve: they have nothing to announce, but they have a full-time PR staff that needs to fill a press release quota, so you have a pre-announcement of a partnership program, partnership programs being the thing that every enterprise software company announces when they have nothing to announce.
If he wanted to talk to "people like us", Merlin could have written a "translation from PR-speak into English" post just like Gruber always does. Instead, Merlin used this other device of "what a press release written for humans should look like", and it missed the mark.
I'll admit that he took this pretty far out of context. He only tossed the very leanest of bones to the business sense of the article and totally dropped the visceral reality of PR you invoke. Worse, once he deflated this ecosystem where this kind of writing can and does exist, he used that censored point of view to fuel a snarky diatribe against the practice as a whole.
So, yeah, judgements made out of context hold less water.
But Merlin's audience isn't sweatshop PR workers. It's techy blogreaders with too much time on their hands and a sense of humor. He's not offering this as criticism to NewsGator, but more wants to just burn it at the stake and point. If it were something more then I'd hope for more consideration of the actual audience and environment.
As it stands it's a calling. By writing something that hyperbolically demonstrates his point, perhaps he just hopes to incrementally move the actual practice that direction.
I don't get the hostility against words like "bullshit" in formal pieces. Bullshit is a good word that many people understand. It means something. Properly used, it takes the place of a dozen shittier words.
Social customer relationship management (CRM), social human resources management (HRM), social knowledge management (KM), social innovation management; collaborative customer service and support; social document management; and enhanced expertise discovery
That sounds like a load of horse puckey to me. I don't like to think it's necessary to use overwrought nonsense like that to get attention.
It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words "auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as "Customer Relations Management".
It's not a good thing, either, to make "why Zappos works" into a complex issue. Zappos does a lot of things, but the core of what makes people like them is that they don't get the feeling that Zappos is a soulless bullshit company. It's a really simple step with enormous impact, and it works on virtually everybody. Secretly, even the people who use bullshit dislike it.
Bullshit is a perfectly fine word. It simply had no place in this announcement. It's true that there isn't much to the original press release. NewsGator simply doesn't have much to say. Ginning up fake controversy about most "social" tech being "bullshit" wasn't a valid strategy to solve that.
Merlin was trying to convey everything in the press release without coming across as stiff. He succeeded. I didn't get a "fake controversy" vibe from his writing—what exactly did you mean by that?
The original press release is horrible. Just horrible. The new version is much better and would be good for sending to blogs. But journalists will hate you if you send them something like this. They want the plain facts as neutral as possible. That‘s easier to process for them. Well, a neutral text they can copy and paste, anything else they have to put work in :)
(Working in PR makes you fear for the future of journalism. It’s so sad, really.)
That cuts to the heart of this: Mann took a piece that should be subjective, but was written to be artificially objective, and gave it its subjectivity back. From the perspective of some in this thread, this is bad, because it's impractical—the blurb can't get printed this way.
However, from a higher-up perspective (which I believe is the one Mann is implicitly taking), it's bad that it's getting printed either way. If a Journalist wouldn't print the bald-faced subjective version (even after editing to make it more "professional") then they shouldn't allow the "objectivized" derivative either. Assuming that [journalistic integrity], removing the words that dance around the subjectivity is an obvious win, for the reader and journalist both—it makes it immediately apparent who's talking, what they're selling, and whether you want [to buy it/to put it in your paper] or not.
Press releases are for the investor market. They have to sound like this, because all press releases sound like this - it's the language of investors. It's the same way that all agency job descriptions sound the same, and certain types of resumes sound the same, and all detergent commercials sound the same. This is the conservative option, so if you rewrite it in an more "human" style, you're actively telling your potential investors that "we're a bit kooky" - which may be your intention, but you're taking a risk. [Having said all this, I wouldn't be seen dead with a press release like that! All depends on what you're into.]
By the time I got to "Here's the thing", I was looking for the rounded corners and the Flash intro, because this thing was clearly reading like the front page of a stealth-mode video sharing startup from 2003.
It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words "auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as "Customer Relations Management".