Huddle Up, Stakeholders

We’re reaching out to you today so we can put a stake in the ground, grab for the low-hanging fruit, and think outside the box.

You may not have noticed, but there’s been this juggernaut of jargon that’s taken over the business lexicon.

Seems like a no-brainer now, but back when we started talking this way, we thought it was a game changer. A win-win proposition. We were speaking the same language, mangling the same metaphors, and we really thought every conversation would be value-added — bringing us more bang for the buck.

Well, it brought about a paradigm shift, all right. It moved the needle…but in the wrong direction. Turns out we’ve become parodies of ourselves. Irritating ones at that.

Drilling down into the problem, we find the stigma of cliché, and the way that the overuse of tired, misapplied jargon actually weakens our messaging. Dive deeper, and you see that talking like a rigidly programmed Business Bot destroys your differentiation. You become plain vanilla, just another face in the crowd.

You’ve got a lot on your plate, we know. This probably wasn’t even on your radar. We’re not asking you to reinvent the wheel, but going forward, maybe you can repurpose some of this drivel? Transition it into another role?

At the end of the day, your communications skills are seen by your customers, competitors and employees as key performance indicators, showing them just how much bandwidth you’ve got for your core competencies. If they think you’re just parroting the masses, well then you might as well be down the rabbit hole.

Death to jargon, is what we’re saying. Do we have your buy-in?

The C4

1. The definitive guide to effective communications, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style includes every rule of English usage you can imagine.
2. Seriously, read it. It’ll make you a better writer and speaker. (And it will turn you against insipid jargon, forever.)
3. Its most vital advice, which if we follow it will end jargoneering for all time (amen), can be summed up in one very short sentence…
4. “Omit needless words.”

Instagram v. Vine

Which is better for your business?

Oh, our love of drawing lines and taking sides. Mac v. PC, Ford v. Chevy, Elvis v. The Beatles.

Somehow the choices we make have become dichotomies — we’re expected to embrace one, eschew the other, and develop a steadfast loyalty that’ll last forever (or at least until the next big thing comes along).

It’s happening in the social-media sphere too, and until we see that Next Big Thing, the opposing teams seem to be Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, there’s not much of a dichotomy there. Because those two social powerhouses are different enough, with different usages and potential reach, that business and casual users tend to embrace them both. At the risk of oversimplifying, we use FB as our storefront and Twitter as our megaphone. They’re synergistic, and we’re using them that way.

But now comes Instagram and Vine, properties of Facebook and Twitter respectively, bringing back head-to-head competition, bringing back dichotomy, alas, to our social-media choices.

Instagram has been around for a while. It started as a photo-sharing tool, with a bit of a reputation for hipsterism. Recently, Instagram has added video sharing capabilities, hosting clips up to 15 seconds long.

Which intrudes directly into Vine’s wheelhouse. Vine was designed from the get-go as a video app, hewing tightly to Twitter’s penchant for short, pithy messaging. Six seconds: that’s all you get to make your splash on Vine.

These are still early days for both, so they’re both still the domain of the dabblers. Business and marketing professionals are taking notice, though, and strategies are being created to make the most of each.

So what kind of appeal can you pitch in just a handful of seconds? A pretty compelling one, by necessity. You don’t have time for a narrative arc — you must get to the point, unambiguously, with some kind of call to action. You turn on the camera, state your case quickly, then yell “cut” and get it posted.

You’ve got a tad longer to do so on Instagram, with the added bonus of tying your messaging in with its massively popular photo sharing (currently approaching 20 billion pics, shared by nearly 150 million users). You can also easily integrate your clips into your business Facebook presence.

On the Vine side, if you can’t say it in six seconds, then you might as well give up. But you know what? You totally can say it in six seconds. Vine users are remastering what Twitter already taught us: cut out the fluff and let the message speak for itself. In six seconds you can communicate one funny, scary, enticing, or intriguing statement. Do that with your URL flashing on the screen, and you’ll probably grab some traffic.

So how about that dichotomy? Do we really need to choose sides? Well as you surely know, we’re lovers, not fighters (ask anyone). So we love ’em both.

Down with dichotomies. Down with either/or. Vine and Instagram, much like Twitter and Facebook, each offer unique possibilities for building brands, reaching customers, and sharing the message of the market.

We know not which course others may take, but as for us, give us Instagram and Vine.

The C4

1. Choice is what makes the market work. We love choice.
2. But for some reason, choice has turned into an either/or thing. If you select the one, you must disdain the other.
3. Must it be so for Instagram and Vine? They’re similar enough, with their strict limit of either 15 or 6 seconds per video clip. Aficionados of each are probably already sneering and trash-talking each other.
4. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instagram and Vine are similar, but not identical. They integrate well with their parent platforms, Facebook and Twitter. They can host messaging that dovetails nicely with your overall social media strategy. You can use them both to reach different audiences, in different ways. So do you have to make a choice? Yes — you can choose to use them both.