It is best not to use jargon. You may think otherwise, but it makes your writing harder to understand.

After writing about the virtues of snappy, easy-to-read writing, I re-read earlier stories on this site and found shocking examples of mangement jargon.

For example, in Managing change: keeping a lid on panic I wrote about 'participative management'.

Are these jargon terms avoidable?

They should be. 'Participative management' is a horrid term.

Ambiguous language is bad language

It is ambiguous – it could mean a number of things. And the five syllable word 'participative' is troublesome on a number of fronts.

The phrase is typical of the highfalutin jargon-laden nonsense empty-headed bosses puff themselves up with.

Yes, I confess it is bad. Yet I don't think it would be possible to write about the subject without using the term.

I thought of going back and changing the term to 'open management'. The term is still a tad wanky and ambiguous, but 'open' is miles better than 'participative'.

Let me be understood

The problem is, nobody understands what the term 'open management' means. You could almost say the same about 'participative management'. But the term is understood by management experts and academics.

Google lists 170,000 entries for 'participative management'. They mainly refer to the same thing.

There are 73,000 Google entries for 'open management'. One look at the first page of entries shows the term is used in a variety of different ways – in some cases for complicated information technology things.

So, it looks as if we are stuck with 'participative management' and hundreds of other management terms. In my next post we'll look at how to use them and not lose our readers.

Businesses wanting to grab people's attention have two options: advertising and publicity. They are not the same.

Advertising is a commercial deal between your business and the media.

You buy a fixed amount of print space, billboards, radio or TV airtime, or web traffic. You take responsibility for providing the advertising material – called copy in the industry – at your cost.

If you've got the budget, you can hire creative specialists to prepare the copy for you. It's usually worth the cost. Advertising professionals know how to get results.

As an advertiser you are in control. You decide when and where your adverts run. You have the last say over the message.

Advertising is expensive. Publicity is often cheaper. It is also riskier.

Publicity is when you grab people's attention in other ways. If you hire a publicist, a public relations expert or a press officer, those people will attempt to place stories in the media on your behalf. They can't usually guarantee anyone will sit up and take notice.

You have far less control with publicity. It works best when you have something newsworthy or interesting to say. If it isn't interesting then the media will ignore it. And your story can be crowded out on days when there are other more interesting stories.

Editors and journalists' first responsibility is to their readers. It's not their job to sell your business. It is their job to keep readers informed and interested.

Publicity is a scattergun. It can work. It might not. Use advertising to make certain your message reaches your target audience. It acts like a guided missile and costs about as much.

Keeping workers motivated when a company goes through a major business change is a challenge. There are many factors to juggle. Tinkering in one area may unbalance matters elsewhere. Workers worry about losing control during change.

And then there's uncertainty.

Each person has an uncertainty threshold. Your threshold may be high; someone else may have a lower threshold. When extra uncertainty pushes people above their threshold, they feel uncomfortable.

Most workers – particularly those in knowledge-based industries – take everyday uncertainty in their stride. External events, like a terrorist attack or economic downturn lift background uncertainty levels and reduce people’s capacity to deal with workplace uncertainty. Yet most workers cope well during normal times.

Instability

What we once knew as normal times are now fewer and further between. Even so, when a business goes through change, uncertainty levels rise dramatically. You can rest assured change will push a lot of people over their uncertainty threshold.

The first reaction of workers pushed over their uncertainty threshold is to redress the balance and look for certainty. This is understandable. What happens next is a simple knee jerk reaction to resist further change.

Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes this as the “Walking off a cliff blindfolded problem”: for many people change looks too dangerous. They prefer to stay with the devil they know than commit to the devil they don’t know.

Worker communication

Not surprisingly managers have little trouble understanding how to deal with this problem, they open up lines of communication to the workforce to articulate the plans for change.

Large organisations hire communications professionals or even PR companies to help. I’ve seen staff meetings, PowerPoint presentations, company newsletters, glossy magazines and fancy videos used. Twenty years ago I briefly edited a weekly tabloid newspaper designed to sell a major corporate change programme to employees so I know this from the inside.

Communications can fall flat for three reasons.

1. No amount of spin can sugar a frightening message. If an organisation plans to layoff workers – words aren’t going to help.
   People aren’t stupid – that’s why you hired them. They recognise official flim-flam when they see it. Anyone with sense will either be preparing their own escape route or doing all they can to stall the kind of change which will destroy their job.
2. Internal company propaganda lacks credibility. Many of us have worked in corporations where, if the message coming down from high is “don’t worry yours jobs are safe” know the real story is sackings are coming.
   Ultimately it is about trust, but it is also about common sense – if you work for a company that hypes its products to customers, you might well be wary of internal communications.
   Another credibility point is corporate propaganda is more about selling the benefits of change than outlining the process. Employees need information – this is distinctly different from the kind of material most companies produce.
   People want to know exactly what will happen, which departments will close, which jobs are moving to Tasmania, who is redesignated and so on. Feeding them motherhood statements might make you feel important, nobody else will fall for it.
3. Communication fails when senior managers forget it is a two-way street. There’s little point in articulating a vision if you don’t listen to people’s legitimate fears and deal with them.

The best way for senior managers to communicate is in person – even in a large organisation.

And it's not just about words, it’s also about action. Leaders – remember that word? – lead from the front.

If there’s a cliff to leap off, workers will be much more willing to leap if they are following their managers.

From the Rut – a site well worth investigating.

This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall. « the rut..

Here are some of the stories I've had published over the years during my time as a writer, journalist, editor and publisher. I'll be updating and expanding this list as time and resources permit.

Will smart phones bury PDAs?
Making eCRM work for your business
This content is classified
Computers – an encyclopedia entry
File-sharing networks
Preparing the ground for highfaluting applications
Australian Net Guide
CRM: Big bang theory explodes
Web hosting: Asian market ripe for harvesting
Who are the MBAs?
Games technology degree passport to a great career
Book Review: The Constant Gardener by John le Carre

Experiment

Download a PDF of a story on outdoor gadgets I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald's Sydney Magazine. There's also a PDF version of a story I wrote for the paper's Next section 'Knocking on the right opportunities' about CRM.

I'd be grateful for any feedback from readers using these downloads.

My name  Bill Bennett. I'm a freelance writer.

I've worked as a journalist, a writer, as an editor and a publisher. Now I'm available to help you get your message to your audience.

I can improve your communications and;

* Raise your company’s profile,
* Increase sales,
* Project a better image,
* Increase your influence and
* Help you steal a march on your rivals.

Free consultation

For a free, no-obligation consultation call me, Bill Bennett on +64 9 418 2445 or email bill@billbennett.co.nz.

I'm based in Auckland, New Zealand, but I have freelance writing clients in Australia and internationally.

What can a freelance writer do for you?

I know how to grab people’s attention and communicate messages. You can apply my writing skills to your:

* Websites — writing snappy copy that quickly turns visitors into customers and clicks
* Newsletters — driving traffic to your web site
* Advertising — using words to sell
* Brochures — developing tempting offers
* Case studies — showing customers how it is done
* Press releases — getting the word out to a wider audience
* Presentations — keeping audiences engaged and avoiding ‘death by Powerpoint’
* Reports — making convincing arguments

find out more:

There's a short biography, a portfolio and examples of my writing. I've also written a page of writing tips.

Kowledge workers who combine technical expertise with professional communications or writing skills are in demand.

Employers need writers to produce words for company web sites. The jobs fall into two distinct categories: working for online information providers and working for the web operations of more traditional firms.

Both are hungry for fresh talent.

It is not enough just knowing how to create good-looking web pages. To get this work you'll be expected to write compelling content that keeps customers coming back.

These jobs are not necessarily suitable for journalists and others moving over from old media.

Keeping copy flowing through a site and making sure all the clicks work is more important than worrying whether a site is well-written or not. If you're a hard-bitten news hound you might be expected to swallow your instinct for high levels of accuracy and checking.

And then there's search engine optimization — writing copy that ensures your company features at the top of Google searches.

As The New York Times points out this can mean waving goodbye to elegant, well-crafted prose and witty eye-catching headlines.

These two aspects of online writing probably explain why poor grammar and readability standards feature on many web sites. Inside the online business it i an open secret ex-newspaper journalists are good at delivering readable material that scores well with search engines.

If you're interested, you'll find online communications jobs advertised under I for Internet or M for marketing and not J for journalism.

It’s a great opportunity for out-of-work journalists—and there are a lot of them these days—as the supply of jobs is greater than the supply of talent.

Many journalists think they can’t do this kind of work because online production tools are difficult to use and it involves scary things like databases and programming. In fact, most content production is not at the hard-core code-cutting level. That's usually all done by more geeky, backroom types. And today's content management systems are no harder than editorial systems. I'd argue they are simpler.

Junior content producers and editors earn salaries in line with people of the same age working in other industries. In other words, you won't get much of a pay rise if you sign up. However, while the basic salaries are not exciting — the opportunities are fantastic. Some employers offer options, equity or profit share schemes — which puts an entirely different perspective on the offered salaries.

Many online editorial-oriented jobs are in companies with only a few employees. They offer a chance to get in on the ground floor. There’s always a good chance that options will be worthless, equity minimal and any profit share doesn't amount to much. In a small organisation you'll have plenty of scope to make sure there are profits.

Even if the promises of on-top-of-base-salary income never materialise, you’ll get to learn how a small company at the sharp end operates. And you’ll see the mistakes. You can take that experience to another start-up or use it to form your own business.

Disclosure: I should come clean here and admit I do a lot of web writing and editing in my communications business. If you're in business and looking for an experienced publishing professional to handle an online editorial project contact me.

Read: This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact.

Writing one that fails requires more work. There are people who have mastered the art. As an editor I've seen some great efforts over the years. I'd like to share them with you.

Here are my top ten tips for making sure press releases get minimum attention:

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots.

To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience, try putting some of these clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you're lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.

Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your release so it won't squeeze through email gateways. If you're  clever you can put high-resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add  nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.

A further reason for a sending press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be extremely difficult to find.

2. Minimize relevance

One of the best ways to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor's recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.

3. Send it out whenever

Timeliness is everything. So by sending out releases when you feel like it, you can boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications wait until the story has already broken elsewhere.

4. Organize schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview

Good journalists are such annoying creatures. Rather than printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases. A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn't good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.

5. Use poor writing skills

Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can't understand your message you'll kill two birds with one stone.

First, you'll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.

But second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn't worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.

6. Try bullying

Sadly this powerful technique is underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist's editor, or an editor's boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).

Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising thus triggering their professional editorial independence.

7. Don't bother with photographs

Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you'll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as totally useless. If you think that's taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around a totally unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.

8. Send it to everyone regardless

This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.

9. Keep things as dull as possible

Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.

In house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you're worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.

10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message

Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.

The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that's too simple try important press release or important press release from Company Name.

A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here.