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It started with a little tweet about alot. Soon after, I tried to get through a post from a respected blogger and marketer who lost me with “impactful”. Not realising I was starting something, I asked the Twitterverse if “impactful” bugged anyone else and what non-words did they find annoying. It turns out I’m not the only one harbouring a few pet peeves about the English language.

Passionate Opinion
I’m a writer and a word nerd. I recently bought Peter E. Meltzer’s The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words to keep myself entertained and inspired. It’s full of fancy-pants words I would never use in normal communication, but they are all legitimate members of the English language. The respondents to my informal poll bombarded me with examples of words, phrases, common misspellings and errors in usage driving them nuts and, in some cases, spitting mad.

Public Service Announcement
As a service to anyone interested in evading the ire attached to the usage of these words, I’m providing a list. Use them at your peril. The overriding sentiment about non-word usage is it demonstrates lack of intelligence, education or attention to detail. If these words are appearing in your normal business communications and marketing collateral, my advice is to get rid of them and do it quickly.

The Top Offenders
Two words were submitted repeatedly. Obliterate these from your vocabulary:

• incentivise
• agreeance

Other non-words peeving the pets
In no particular order:

•  supposably
• onboarding
• de-train
• de-plane
• onforward
• verbally facilitate
• unpacking (as in “unpacking the issues”)
• disaggregations
• misunderestimated
• conversating
• embiggened
• learnings
• irregardless
• anonymize
• operationalize
• Westralia

Errors in Usage
Plenty of people complained about real words being used at the wrong time or in the wrong context.

• enormousness vs. enormity
• thankyou vs. thank you
• round vs. around
• penultimate vs. ultimate
• hone vs. home
• momentary vs. momentarily
• phenomena vs. phenomenon

The evergreens in this category:

• lose vs. loose
• chose vs. choose
• there vs. they’re vs. their
• its vs. it’s

The Crux of the Matter
Arguing the validity of a word or its modern usage is pointless. When you write or say something distracting to your audience, you’ve lost your ability to inform and influence. While military jargon and business-speak easily invade our lexicon, it’s best to stick to straight talk and common words to express yourself. (Don’t get me started on SMS text.) The best way to impress is to speak and write in a way that reaches everyone and offends no one.

What words annoy you? What would you add to this list?

*Image courtesy of Topgold at www.flickr.com

Related posts:

3 Things Anyone Can Do To Improve Their Writing
How One Wrong Word Can Ruin Your Message
Isn’t it Time to Ungook Your Gobbledy?
8 Website Compliments You’d Rather Not Hear

Today is a public holiday in Western Australia. As I pottered with the breakfast dishes, the sounds of “Play School” kept me company. If you’re not familiar with the program, Play School is a half hour children’s program aimed at encouraging a child to wonder, to think, to feel and to imagine. That’s not much different from the goal of most blogs. As I listened, it occurred to me bloggers could learn a lot from the Play School presenters. They certainly know how to hold a captive audience. Here are some of their tricks that easily translate into great blogging techniques.

Ask Questions
The Play School presenters start each segment with a question. It draws the children in and gets them interested in what’s happening. I often start and end a blog post with a question. The initial query engages the audience and the final one encourages people to leave a comment.

Focus on “How” not “Why”
The Play School audience isn’t much interested in theory. They’re at the stage in life when they’re starting to exercise some independence. Play School keeps things simple and focuses on a specific task. Whether they’re scrambling eggs or building a puppet stage, the directions are instructional and concise. Your blog readers want the same.

Stay Positive
No one at Play School ever has a bad day. Nothing is ever too difficult. All obstacles are easily removed. Blogs that keep a positive tone and solve problems are much more attractive to readers than the whingeing posts.

Repeat your Message
While going over the same shapes, colours, letters and numbers may seem dreadfully boring, the audience laps it up because it’s all new to them. Remember, your readers are looking to you for expertise. Reinforcing your ideas and repeating concepts is a great way to build trust and authority. Just because you said something in a blog post last year doesn’t mean your readers wouldn’t benefit from hearing it again in a different context. Your new readers may not have heard it at all.

Know Your Audience
Play School knows their target market pre-schoolers and focuses their energy on making them happy. The children keep coming back because they know what to expect. Remember who your readers are and why they’re coming to your blog. Provide them with the content they want and you’ll continue to have the traffic you desire.

Keep it Moving
Children tend to have short attention spans so the Play School segments are brief to keep them interested. Modern business people are easily distracted due to the vast quantity of information they need to decipher. Make your posts short and use headings and sub-headings to keep the skimmers moving down your page.

Play School has been around since 1966 and is the second longest-running children’s television program in the English-speaking world. Their longevity can be attributed to classic marketing techniques and consistent execution. The same winning formula can be applied to your blog. I’m all for adopting techniques that result in over 44 years of success. How about you?

What lessons have you learned?

Do you know where your customers need help? It sounds like a simple question but I’m always surprised how often we, as marketing people, don’t really know. In another life, I managed salespeople. To test the quality of a forecast, I would ask the sales rep, “Why would they buy our product?” It wasn’t unusual to get a blank stare in return. I had banned the “Because they want it” answer. I wanted to know why they needed it.

In a recent post at M4BMarketing, How to Improve Your Key Communication Message, Susan Oakes counsels us to find out what is important to our customers. She says it’s “one of the key factors where many businesses still fall down. They assume they know without actually finding out.” Susan is right. While it may seem like a big mandate, one simple question will take you a long way to finding out the answer.

The Obvious Question
Yes, people buy things they want. But they don’t make investments in products or services just because they want them. They spend real money for things they need – things that will help them solve a problem or improve their business. Have you ever asked a prospect or client, “What problems do you face in your job?” I used to ask that question a lot. I always got the same answer. In many different variations, it boiled down to “Nothing”. I knew that wasn’t true, but people don’t like to reveal difficulties or weaknesses.

The Magic Question
But here’s the thing. People do like to speak about their work. They like to portray themselves in a positive light. How do you get people to tell you what they need? Tell you what pain they’re experiencing in their work? Tell you where they need help if they don’t want to tell you? Ask them what challenges them. A wonderfully simple question that produces magical results, “What are your challenges?”, will have your clients revealing their biggest problems and their most difficult goals. Once you know about their pain, it’s much easier to provide a solution.

The Takeaway
People are willing to tell you what they need as long as you’ve given them a safe way to start the discussion. When people are challenged, it means they’re in solution mode. They’re positioned as a problem-solver. They also speak more openly about their issues. If you’re asking about problems, they likely feel vulnerable or under attack. Ask one question “What are your challenges” and start taking notes. You’ll be amazed at how much people will tell you.

Do you have a sure-fire technique to get people talking?

*Image courtesy of Horia Varian at www.flickr.com

Let’s take a little quiz. Can you identify the pair that doesn’t belong in the group listed below?

a. Bacon and eggs

b. Hamish and Andy

c. Greg Norman and golf

d. Thought leadership and practical advice

e. Beer and pizza

If you picked letter “d” – and I can’t help you if you didn’t – you understand all too well that the world is full of opinion, strategy and master planning that often doesn’t translate into anything you can put to use in your own business. If you’re like me, your desk and office are littered with books, ebooks and manuals. Your inbox and Google reader have loads of unread items just waiting for the day you have nothing to do. Unfortunately, for most small business owners, that day never comes. And, if it does, you’re probably out of business anyway.

The Big Fat Marketing Day

When you work in the marketing space, it’s difficult to describe something you’re truly enthusiastic about. We’re all deluged with idiotic announcements holding little promise. I get “exciting” news delivered to me every single day. Frankly, the only thing exciting about it is how much the sponsors are going to make on the event. I want to tell you about something happening in Perth that is truly different, The Big Fat Marketing Day.

What’s the Big Deal About the Big Fat Marketing Day?
The Big Fat Marketing Day is not like other conferences or forums. There are three reasons why:

1) It isn’t theoretical. It’s practical.

2) The speakers are some of the best brains in Australian business.

      3) The day is focused entirely on small business owners.

According to event organiser Bambi Gordon, “We want every person to leave with knowledge that they can immediately apply to their business; with realistic techniques, with achievable and sustainable plans, and with the confidence that they do know how to market their business.”

For What it’s Worth
I’ve worked with Bambi before. I’m speaking on the topic of Content Marketing. I also plan to be part of the captive audience simply because I know of no other event where I can hear the calibre of speakers Bambi has lined up. As a small business owner myself, I’m most interested in knowing “how” to do something. There aren’t many affordable opportunities to get practical advice from both local and national thought leaders.

The Nitty Gritty
The Program will address:

1. Strategy: A template of how to create one for your business

2. Tactics such as Search Engine Optimisation: What can you do straight away to improve your rank?

3. Publicity: How do you attract media attention to your business

4. Branding: How do you go about creating a sustainable brand that helps market your business?

5. Social Media: What to use…What to ignore?

6.Content Marketing: How to share your knowledge to bring in business

7. Customer Service: The ultimate marketing tool.

8 hours of quality advice from professional marketing practitioners including cuppas & lunch for only $125 for the whole day.

A Final Thought
The Woo provides unlimited email support for 2 weeks after the event. That’s right. Where else does your investment keep working two weeks afterward? If you still need convincing, take a look at video from The Big Fat Marketing Day Melbourne held in March.

The Big Fat Marketing Day is at the Cambridge Conference Centre, Wembley, on Tuesday June 15 – only 2 weeks away. Registrations will close in the next few days so please register at www.thewoo.com.au/marketing_day_Perth or call 1300 55 32 35

What’s the best advice you ever got?

My friend and fellow copywriter, Michele Linn, wrote an excellent article for the Savvy B2B Marketing blog called 5 Reasons to Include FAQs in Your Content Marketing Strategy. I wish I’d written it myself.

Throw Away Page?
The FAQ is one of the most powerful pages you can have on your website. Many people overlook it or feel like it’s wasted information. One client told me FAQs were the same for every website, so there was no point including them. I suppose that’s true if your content really contains FAQs. But why not make the page do some heavy lifting for you?

Competitive Advantage
A well-written list of FAQs can knock your competition on the head. Imagine you’re educating your prospective customers. Aaron Sice from Aaron Sice Residential and Commercial embraced this idea and positioned his drafting services on his FAQ page. Not only did he differentiate his company from other drafting services, he also established a valid reason to hire a draftsman independent of builders and developers.

The Take-Away
Craft a list of 10-12 questions showing the strengths of your company and include it on your website. The FAQ page is a terrific place to address competitive advantage. No website should be without one.