“Online communities, enabled by social media tools, are having a transformational effect on enterprise communication, enabling stakeholders to access multiple information points on demand, choose their influencers and build global communities of engagement quickly and simply, and outside traditional corporate boundaries.”

Or as a normal person would say it . . .

“Increasingly, companies are talking to people online.”

“Better information exchange mechanisms will be implemented and cross borough working encouraged in order to ensure better coordination of security activities, such as security patrolling and the effective collation of information relating to crime and any potential security threats to the area.”

In other words . . .

“We will work together to tackle crime.”

1. Exciting news!!!!!! (Snore . . .)

The perpetrator: The author of the email entitled “Exciting news from Waterstone’s, Clare”.

You might want to sit down and take a deep breath before I reveal to you the precise details of the knee-tremblingly thrilling bulletin contained in this missive – namely that: “You’ll notice some changes in our shops including a new look that’s as bold and exciting as the books you love to read.”

Who they think they’re talking to: Someone who cares about the colour of the carpets in a bookstore. And who hasn’t just finished a highly technical, statistics-heavy, graph-filled history of sovereign debt crises. (Actually, it was quite “bold and exciting” in a scary kind of way – this financial crisis could get a whole lot nastier if previous crises are anything to go by).

Who they’re really talking to: The design-conscious executive who’s spent the last 18 months comparing the relative “Waterstone’s on-brandness” of various wallpaper swatches. Have you any idea how difficult it is to get board-level buy-in for stuff this important?

2. Sorry seems to be the hardest word

The perpetrator: The bank that, having lost numerous paid-in cheques, apologised with the words: “We are disappointed that you felt you did not receive our normal high levels of customer service” and “we regret any inconvenience this may have caused”.

Who they think they’re talking to: The customer who didn’t merely feel (she was) extremely inconvenienced by breathtakingly bad service. The customer who is slightly to the completely peeved end of the “disappointed” spectrum. And the customer who “regrets” expecting even passable levels of customer service from the writer’s employer.

Who they’re really talking to: The company CEO, whose motto is “never say sorry”.

3. Please delete me

The perpetrator: The government organisation whose email to all its suppliers opened with the friendly, but seemingly ignorable words “WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!” and ended, after four paragraphs of bureaucratic spiel, with words to the effect of “you will be struck off our supplier list if you don’t fill in the attached form by 12pm on Monday”.

Who they think they’re talking to: Company executives with the time and attention spans to read every non-essential looking email to the very end, despite having to devote a third of their working life to jumping through numerous hoops to get on the approved supplier lists of their clients.

Who they’re really talking to: Their local government colleagues who have as much time and inclination to wade through inches of bureaucratic spiel as they do.

4. Everyone loves me (so how come nobody’s following me?)

The perpetrator: The business owner who tweets incessantly about how busy they are, how much their clients appreciate their work, the amount of new business they’ve won, what makes them so much better than their competitors etc, etc.

Who they think they’re talking to: Potential clients, who they think will be impressively impressed by their impressive impressiveness.

Who they’re really talking to: Their own, rather fragile, ego by the sounds of it.

5. Sorry, I can’t hear you above the sound of my own voice

The perpetrator: The writer of the page entitled “Our success is based on listening to customers” on the Talking Tesco website, which comprises 1,017 words about how Tesco’s success is founded on its “strategy of listening and responding” to customers.

Who they think they’re talking to: Talking to? Don’t you mean talking at? For more, see my previous post, Too much talking, and not enough listening).

Who they’re really talking to: The line manager responsible for awarding the end-of-year bonus to the person in charge of Tesco’s “strategy of listening and responding”.

What matters is understanding what makes your reader tick – knowing what it is that gets her up in the morning or keeps her awake at night.

But if you’re a comms professional working in a large organisation, turning this knowledge into compelling copy can be a real struggle, because there’s so much pressure on you to write for the wrong reader.

Let me give you an example – an extreme one, and invented by me – but fairly typical of the sort of thing you’ll find in many a large corporation’s staff magazine:

In response to the firm’s long-term growth plans, the Talent Recruitment team, which plays a key role within the Global HR team, is delighted to announce that, in a major step forward for its ambitious 2010 strategy for attracting the very best talent into the organisation, a brand-new programme launches today, which will provide a cash reward to all employees who successfully refer a friend or family member to the organisation.

That the sentence is 71 words longs rings immediate alarm bells – most of the time you should be aiming for maximum of 25 words. Worse still, it’s clear that the writer is trying to cram too many ideas into one sentence. Let’s look at those ideas in the order in which they appear:

1. The Talent Recruitment team is responding to the firm’s long-term growth plans
2. The Talent Recruitment team is part of HR
3. The Talent Recruitment team is announcing something
4. The Talent Recruitment team has a strategy for attracting employees
5. The company will give you dosh if it recruits someone you recommend

Looking at this, it’s obvious which audience the author under is pressure to write for: the Talent Recruitment team. Who else cares about the team’s strategy, its position in the organisation and its contribution to the long-term goals of the company?

The interests of the other audience – the staff member who stands to benefit from the new reward scheme – have been relegated to an afterthought. Here’s what that reader’s interested in:

I’ll get cash for getting my mates jobs.
How much can I earn?
Where do I sign up?
Er, that’s it. The stuff about the Talent Recruitment team is irrelevant to me.

Whenever you find news buried under contextual preamble in this way, it’s a sign of a writer under pressure to please the wrong audience. And while, in this instance, the Talent Recruitment team may be delighted to have their trumpet blown in such a way, they’re not being terribly well served by said trumpet blowing. How successful will their recruitment strategy be if no one bothers to read to the end of the torturously tortuous paragraphs they force their comms colleagues to write?

In future posts I’ll explore more examples of this all-too-common phenomenon of writing for the wrong audience – and offer some strategies for preventing it.

The unfinished, upside-down, wrong-way-round F clef in “Guitar”, I can just about live with.

But that back-to-front semiquaver-minim hybrid standing in for the “v” is an affront to anyone with even a passing knowledge of music.

Unless, of course, this symbol is far too advanced to be unveiled in part one of The Associated Board Guide To Music Theory, which is sitting on my desk as I type.

Perhaps its complexities are explained in part two, where no doubt we’re also treated to a detailed exegesis of the use of umlauted letters in musical scores?

You might call me a pedant, but the point is this: if you’re trying to connect with a particular audience – in this case would-be musicians – show them the courtesy of pretending you know what you’re talking about.

Looks to me like the only one being paid to be confused.com is the design agency that came up with this nonsense.

They should have stuck with the copywriter who came up with “Spray & Wipe”.

In fact, it seems that every other company is committed to something – whether it’s quality, excellence, innovation, success or, in the case of PepsiCo, “Performance with a Purpose”.

What’s clever about the “C” word is that it’s a pledge about where you’d like to be, not a statement of where you are. To the delight of your Legal & Compliance team, it has an element of postponement that gets you off the hook from actually being what you claim to be.

Actually, the commitment cliché has become such a staple of the corporate lexicon that I don’t think people really know they’re doing it. I urge you to think twice next time you’re tempted to pledge your to commitment to some spurious corporate value.

Below are my top three offenders – do you recognise your company here?

We’re committed to diversity

(If your Legal & Compliance colleagues are particularly twitchy, insert another layer of prevarication into the formula by saying “we’re committed to valuing diversity”).

Sounds like you mean: These days, we employ people from every Oxbridge college – even that one founded in the seventies that allows its students to walk on the grass in the college gardens (how outré!). After all, someone’s got to do the grunt work around here – you don’t seal a multi-billion M&A deal without having talent you can trust with the strip-club bookings.

Better to say: Everyone’s welcome!

We’re committed to transparency

Sounds like you mean: Yeah, well. Once we’ve quietly paid off that employee who we suspect had dinner with a senior member of the SEC last night. And cleansed our balance sheet of all those NASTIs (Non-profitable, Acronym-Steeped Toxic Investments) that we invented during a drunken game of strip Scrabble at that offsite in Hawaii in 2004 (happy days!). Oh, and the SZICs (Special Zombie Investment Companies) that we created to mop up the NASTIs even our clients wouldn’t buy don’t count, right?

Better to say: We’ve got nothing to hide.

We’re committed to customer satisfaction

Sounds like you mean: The only one who’s likely to be committed around here is the customer driven to the brink of insanity by endless tinny repetitions of the first 16 bars of Morning Mood, punctuated by the chirpily voiced assurance that “your call is important to us”.

Better to say: How can I help?

Senior Solutions Designer, City of London – London City and West End, London

My client is currently recruiting for a Senior Solutions Designer. This is a senior position in the Solution Design team, working closely with external clients and all internal teams. Key requirements: Key to this role is the ability to quickly understand, analyse and document business and user needs across industries and functions. Applying your experience and attention to detail, you will be required to design innovative user centric solutions to these problems, working closely with internal application development teams in an agile environment. You will be able to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of Microsoft based Web 2.0, SOA and OLAP technologies in large scale deployments.

The last line makes me think it’s something a bit computery, but I’m still not sure what the person they hope to employ will be expected to do. Are they looking for a chemist? A mathematician? A professional cruciverbalist? What do you think?

1. Ultimate
Modern life is fraught with danger, courtesy of the “ultimate burger”, the “ultimate rollercoaster”, the “ultimate flooring”, the “ultimate detox” and the “ultimate ethical meal” (to cite just a handful). I’m particularly intrigued by the the progressive approach to population control that is the “Ultimate Day” – “an exciting competition exclusively for 16 and 17 year olds – to win an Ultimate Day!”

2. Unprecedented
I’m willing to bet that most business people use “unprecedented” when what they really mean is “quite good”. Before drawing on this word ask yourself if what you’re describing really has never happened before. I’m only willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the US mortgage broker that claims to have “demonstrated unprecedented professionalism” when creating home loans for hundreds of clients. Presumably, all their competitors were sub-prime sharks.

3. Innovative
It’s not enough to be merely competent these days. To stand out, your product or service has to be the ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, edge-cutting child of your (no doubt unprecedented) creative thinking. Estate agents, bankers and lawyers all now claim to be innovative. Still like the sound of it?

4. Iconic
What do an overpriced lip gloss, an impractically tall lemon squeezer and a squeaky voiced, not terribly bright footballer have in common? Yep, they’ve all been labelled “iconic”. Thinking about elevating your product to the status of icon? Just to let you know: since Melanie C took on the “iconic” role of Mrs Johnstone in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, the word has been equated with a fictional woman you’ve never heard of, from a musical you’ve never seen, played by the least-famous former Spice Girl, whose existence you’d forgotten about until now.

5. Stunning
Stunning food. Stunning cars. Stunning houses with stunning wallpaper. It’s time to replace this hyperbole with a synonym whose meaning hasn’t been eroded by overuse. I vote for “stupefying”.

6. Exclusive
A label invariably attached to the overpriced tat proffered in Sunday magazines by exploitative “collectables” firms. Use it if you want to be associated with such distinctly unexclusive items as the Kitten Dreams Fabergé-inspired Jewelled Musical Egg, which features over 125 hand-set ‘gems’ (inverted commas theirs) and the inscription ‘Kittens Leave Paw Prints On Our Hearts’.

7. Designer
Want to part from their money the people who are middle-class enough to sneer at the people who buy Kitten Dreams Fabergé-inspired Jewelled Musical Eggs, but who are still insecure enough to want to fill their houses with overpriced tat? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “designer radiators”, “designer sponges”, “designer cleaning fluid”, “designer water” and, yes, “designer tampons”. All paid for with a “designer mortgage”, no doubt.

What would you add to the list?

Your Turnkey Source For Highly Customized Internet Marketing Solutions

Plug into a proven source of interactive success through xxxxx, your dedicated partner on the Web. Rely on us to provide a full spectrum of Internet marketing solutions, precisely engineered to meet your needs. At xxxxx, we treat each and every phase of your interactive marketing program as a meticulous science – leveraging the latest technology, resource tools, and consumer trends to maximize your return on investment. Because the success of our clients is so pivotal to our own continued growth and vitality, we strive to deliver the highest level of service at every touch point.

Whatever they do, I think I’ll pass on the invitation to be part of their continued growth and vitality. Because impressed as I am with their meticulously scientific, precisely engineered, full-spectrum, solution-filled, resource-tooled and highly leveraged approach, I’m quite choosy about who I let near my touch points.