Need to cut costs? Hit delete.

The rate of profit is falling for USA corporates (see EUI: 40% risk of recession in the United States by Robin Bew).

It doesn’t take a genius to predict there will be a (further) spending squeeze for most companies.

How will that translate to online channels?

George Orwell on corporate communications…

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

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The tagline is still (always) important

“Let me save you 100,000 dollars,” says Guy Kawasaki, ex-Apple guy, and leads his audience to the Dilbert mission statement generator where you can find exactly the kind of buzzword bingo that we’ve all come to love to hate. At that point in his (55minute) presentation on the “Art of Innovation”, he’s talking about how companies generate their mission statements. His argument is that companies need three words to describe what they do (tagline), not 60.

Running corporate websites: the main issues

The same topics keep coming up:

1. Content creation and control

2. Globalization and localization: processes and procedures

3. Brand and message consistency: inside a single site and across country sites (and sometimes product sites)

4. Technical: content management systems or not (read: Dreamweaver)

5. Business case and how to make one (how do you demonstrate return on investment when your site isn’t actually selling anything?)

6. Search engine optimization and/versus paid-placement

7. User generated content, Web 2.0, social networking …

How to be different…or not

The online world makes companies easy to compare: you just open several browser tabs and find the product or company websites you want to compare and flick from one to another.

That’s hard to do with magazine articles, or TV and billboard advertising.

I’ve done a very basic and sweeping comparison of 21 websites belonging to pharmaceuticals and medical device companies to show how easy it is to do this kind of comparison.

A passion for education…

The Ridings school in Halifax is in the news today, having been put into “special measures” for the second time in 10 years following a bad report from Ofsted inspectors.

Here are few highlights from the Ofsted report:

“The headteacher and the senior leaders share a clear vision and passion for providing the best education for the students.”

“Managers have been caring and industrious in their attempts to drive forward plans intended to benefit students. Unfortunately, they have not moved swiftly enough or with sufficient rigour.”

“The senior leadership team identifies a barrier to progress as being a minority of teachers who do not cooperate with senior managers and refuse to take on board new ideas.”

“This has slowed the introduction of initiatives designed to help students learn more effectively.”

Hmmm.

“Clear vision and passion”; “drive forward plans”; “rigour”; “senior leadership team”…

See, that’s the problem with the education system in Britain: teachers just aren’t using enough corporate language.

Classic

This job ad is as sure an example of corporate just-add-water-and-mix copy writing as I’ve ever seen. Someone said that it’s “proof that all you need to do is randomly re-arrange the words “passion”, “values”, “commitment”, “solutions”, “implement” and “strategy” and voila: you have brand new copy. Who needs writers?”

If you can’t be bothered to enlarge the image it opens with: “We passionately create enthusiastic customers and build a better future! In doing so we live our values: integrity, courage, teamwork and commitment.”

Say what the company does. A hard task, well worth it

In theory, it should be easy to talk about the company. In practice, it’s hard work.

It’s common for corporate websites to seem “loose”. What I mean by that is, as a user and a company outsider, I go from site section to site section and I find myself confused about the company: what does it do? what holds it together?

That confusion is in the website itself, it’s not me as a user being dim.

Why being “passionate” doesn’t make you different

Every company seems to be passionate these days: passionate about customer service, passionate about delivery, passionate about solutions. Not to mention passionate about creating passionate users.

The trouble is, when being “passionate about” everything from selling woodscrews to building user interfaces becomes a must-have core value, then everyone starts to look, well, pretty much the same. And I stop believing what they’re telling me.

Is your company really that “passionate” about direct marketing, new-generation cleaning products, central-heating solutions or whatever it is you do? Or are you just saying it because everyone else is? And if everyone else is saying it, shouldn’t you be saying something that makes you different?

You’d think companies that specialize in communications – companies that are supposed to know how words work, after all – would avoid falling into this trap. But no.

I just typed the phrase “passionate about communications” into Google.

On the first two pages of the search results I got there were no fewer than eight communications companies with that same phrase on their websites (including “the largest independent media agency in the UK”).

If they can’t even make their own sites stand out from the crowd, how are they going to help you with yours?

Corporate language: speaking out yet facing in

People writing corporate copy for online publication have good intentions. It’s their reliance on inward-looking terminology that can make their copy sound obscure, even when the underlying message is simple.

At some point in the development or maintenance of a corporate website an editor or writer will face the command to publish information about the company using the company’s own internal language.

If you don’t know what I mean, then you’re lucky. If you do, you might recognise a “cluster” or “business unit” to describe a company’s departments…