Words connote, emote, describe, communicate …and build business. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone on the street what companies inspire us to Just Do It, Think Different, or Have It Your Way? Even a string of seemingly nonsensical words like the onomatopoeic Plop Plop Fizz Fizz have meant big business for companies selling little more than sodium bicarbonate.

Finding the perfect word, or string of words in traditional marketing was typically left in the hands of the creatives whose manipulation of the poetics of language could sway even the most unfavorable of arguments in support of their pitch.

But for the countless “power words” that drive enterprise, there are many more that have become so ingrained in the established lexicon of business that they have lost all meaning …and influence.

In the words of marketing strategist and author, David Meerman Scott, these cliched terms are nothing more than “Gobbledygook“.

And let me tell you, as a writer, Gobbledygook is what business leaders are conditioned to look for when determining “good”, “quality” content. The more hyperbole, the more professional and “business-like” the content sounds …or at least that’s how it used to be.

The problem with Business Gobbledygook, of course, is that it’s generic, bland, overused and speaks at the customer …not with them, in the terms that they use and value.

Dow Jones Analysis Of Gobbledygook

“The folks at the Factiva Reputation Lab used text mining tools to analyze news releases sent by companies in North America. Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes. The news release wires included in the analysis were Business Wire, Canada newsWire, CCnMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR newswire, and Primezone Media network.”

~ The Gobbledygook Manifesto

The Top 10 Gobbledygook Words and Phrases in 2008

Dow Jones Insight Ranks Most Used Gobbledygook Terms

“Another major drawback of the generic gobbledygook approach is that it doesn’t make your company stand out from the crowd. Here’s a test: take the language that the marketers at your company dreamed up and substitute the name of a competitor and the competitor’s product for your own. Does it still make sense to you? Marketing language that can be substituted for another company’s isn’t effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice.”

~ David Meerman Scott, The Gobbledygook Manifesto

While the business community continues to speak “gobbledygook” offline, there is no value in puffing up websites with language that does nothing to connect with target audiences online. If you only have 150 words to work with on a web page before users click the back button, that leaves little room for “angel food fluff”.

Search Engines Put The Words Back Into Customer’s Mouths

Search engine optimization changed the rules of the game a number of years ago when businesses fought for page rank using search engine results for keywords and keyword phrases. Except what search engine marketers did was the opposite of what traditional marketers do – they looked to the vocabulary of their target audience (not the gobbledygook of corporate speak) to saturate their content with the very words they knew their customers used to find the products and services they were selling.

Keywords Are Big Business

“Around half the companies (49%) are reallocating budgets to search engine marketing from print advertising. More than a third (36%) are shifting money away from direct mail, and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions (24%) and web display advertising (23%)”

~ 2010 State of Search Engine Marketing Report, BusinessWire

Until Search Engine Optimization came along, it was very hard to place a dollar value on words alone. While SEO was good for writers to finally be able to justify the importance of their role to the business community, the downside was in compromising the readability (i.e. usability) of content at the expense of optimization (i.e. keywords).

A Fine Balance

“SEO copywriting ‘techniques’ – as they are commonly understood today – represent a bastardized version of copywriting that’s not good for customers, not good for users and serves up pure schlock… Sadly, most people never talk about the second half of the SEO copywriting equation – the half that’s even more important than keywords. And that’s writing compelling, interesting and persuasive content designed to communicate with your customers.”

~ SEO Copywriting is Dead, Long Live SEO Content Marketing

The bygone era of Madison Avenue and martini lunches may have set corporate America on the path to respecting the influence of words, but the information age has solidified that relationship with the need to provide quality content using the researched vocabulary of an intended target audience.