Riffs, Tiffs and What Ifs

We've moved to a new site - WritingRiffs.com. Appreciate you checking this article out at WritingRiffs.com . We'll be deleting all the content on this site over the next few weeks. Thanks! Steve DaDonkey Disasterpieces Corporate boilerplates are boring. A waste of words. Horribly obtuse. Garbled, befuddled, perplexing, muddled obfuscatory nightmares. If they were paintings, they'd be called "DaDonkey Disasterpieces." They're written to give you an idea, a snapshot, of who the company is, what they do and basic contact info . They're typically found at the end of company news releases. The "About the Company" section. Have You Read Any? Have you read any corporate boilerplates lately? Ever? If you can, don't. If you don't, smile. You're blessed. Why? Because they're real snooze-fests. Full of taradiddle twittle-twattle. Written in a language decipherable by only two types of people. The "writer" - and aliens (sometimes o...

We've moved to a new site - WritingRiffs.com Appreciate you checking this article out at WritingRiffs.com . We'll be deleting all the content on this site over the next few weeks. Thanks! Steve Twitter A simple micro-blogging service. Nothing more. Nothing less. HA! That's what THEY'D like you to believe. But professional purveyors of corporate gobbledygook know, yes they know, Twitter is a tool straight from hell. Demon dalliance. Seed of Satan. Fathered to challenge sesquipedalian pontifications that mean nothing to no one. What's it Mean Steve? Death to long copy. Death to words drained of meaning. Twitter imperils wordsmithereen evil-ese at it's basest, non-productive non-valuable essence. National Security Threat Twitter threatens ... National Security. Job Security. Retro-strategic de-innovation. Professional obfuscation. Wall Street Panic Those in the know, know, the Wall Street collapse and panic can be laid directly at the Tweet of Twitter. Why? Becaus...

We've moved to a new site - WritingRiffs.com Appreciate you checking this article out at WritingRiffs.com . We'll be deleting all the content on this site over the next few weeks. Thanks! Steve From personal experience and conversations with many experts in the business -to-business field, there is reasonable agreement that most corporate sales, marketing and PR lingo suffers from ... "The Four Too’s." Too wordy Too complex Too confusing Too valueless Agree or Disagree? Why is that? Essentially it boils down to: Trying to be all things to all people at all times Not knowing you can’t be all things to all people at all times Trying to sound really sophisticated, cool, intelligent, intricate and inclusive And finally, the biggie, not understanding your customer/buyer. They only want one thing. Understand this. You exist to solve a problem for them. In a recent technology ana...

Why Can’t New Marketing and PR People Write? T his article was in response ( or supplement ) to "When It Comes to PR Writing, Only One Thing Beats Talent... and there ain't much talent around," written by Don Bates, director of the Master's Degree in Strategic Public Relations program at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management . It was originally posted on the Media Bullseye site . I’ve had Marketing and PR employees work for me right out of college, and found most were woefully unprepared for the real-world new PR environment. Not because of any inherent deficiency in the school they came from, but more from the frenetic pace of change in the PR industry. Blogs, Vlogs, Podcasts, Social Media, SEO, SEO PR, Tags, and on and on and on. The technology changes alone can be daunting or intimidating. But the writing … the writing, that’s now part skill, part science and part art. It is the absolute foundation o...