
For Immediate Relief: Speaking Like a Human - blasdel
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/217529969/humans
======
tptacek
This would have been more compelling if speaking like a human didn't involve
putting the words "bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass" and "hold me" into a press
release, and if his press release actually contained the keywords (CRM, HRM,
KM) the original used to catch the filters of the trade press, which is, you
know, _the target of a press release_.

By the time I got to "Here's the thing", I was looking for the rounded corners
and the Flash intro, because this thing was clearly reading like the front
page of a stealth-mode video sharing startup from 2003.

It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's
another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-
speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the
audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words
"auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as
"Customer Relations Management".

~~~
tel
Sure, except that Mann isn't trying to write a replacement press release for
NewsGator, not really. He's really just trying to turn up some ears toward
just how utterly opaque the previous one was. "Bullshit", "douchey",
"dumbass", and "hold me" are great words for the intended audience, _viz._
those of us curious about why the hell the first one was so dense.

In the end, don't you just want to rewrite the goddamn thing yourself? Take
out the buzz and the sass, put in the keywords. You're practically working for
NewsGator already, and you're definitely caught in the wave Mann stirred up
and tossed up to his internet call box.

~~~
tptacek
There are two things about this article that made me want to say something
about it.

First, in his zeal to deflate the original, he killed the original business
value of the piece, which is to get picked up when someone in the trade press
needs to fill inches with material on CRMs or HRMs or enterprise social
software.

Second, the big problem he sees this release demonstrating is a sort of
Orwellian perversion of the English language by business functionaries. But
that's not really the problem at all, is it? NewsGator has a problem no
copyeditor can solve: they have nothing to announce, but they have a full-time
PR staff that needs to fill a press release quota, so you have a pre-
announcement of a partnership program, partnership programs being the thing
that every enterprise software company announces when they have nothing to
announce.

If he wanted to talk to "people like us", Merlin could have written a
"translation from PR-speak into English" post just like Gruber always does.
Instead, Merlin used this other device of "what a press release written for
humans should look like", and it missed the mark.

~~~
tel
I'll admit that he took this pretty far out of context. He only tossed the
very leanest of bones to the business sense of the article and totally dropped
the visceral reality of PR you invoke. Worse, once he deflated this ecosystem
where this kind of writing can and does exist, he used that censored point of
view to fuel a snarky diatribe against the practice as a whole.

So, yeah, judgements made out of context hold less water.

But Merlin's audience isn't sweatshop PR workers. It's techy blogreaders with
too much time on their hands and a sense of humor. He's not offering this as
criticism to NewsGator, but more wants to just burn it at the stake and point.
If it were something more then I'd hope for more consideration of the actual
audience and environment.

As it stands it's a calling. By writing something that hyperbolically
demonstrates his point, perhaps he just hopes to incrementally move the actual
practice that direction.

------
ugh
The original press release is horrible. Just horrible. The new version is much
better and would be good for sending to blogs. But journalists will hate you
if you send them something like this. They want the plain facts as neutral as
possible. That‘s easier to process for them. Well, a neutral text they can
copy and paste, anything else they have to put work in :)

(Working in PR makes you fear for the future of journalism. It’s so sad,
really.)

~~~
derefr
That cuts to the heart of this: Mann took a piece that _should_ be subjective,
but was written to be artificially objective, and gave it its subjectivity
back. From the perspective of some in this thread, this is _bad_ , because
it's impractical—the blurb can't get printed this way.

However, from a higher-up perspective (which I believe is the one Mann is
implicitly taking), _it's bad that it's getting printed_ either _way_. If a
Journalist wouldn't print the bald-faced subjective version (even after
editing to make it more "professional") then they shouldn't allow the
"objectivized" derivative either. _Assuming_ that [journalistic integrity],
removing the words that dance around the subjectivity is an obvious win, for
the reader and journalist both—it makes it immediately apparent who's talking,
what they're selling, and whether you want [to buy it/to put it in your paper]
or not.

------
dtf
Press releases are for the investor market. They have to sound like this,
because all press releases sound like this - it's the language of investors.
It's the same way that all agency job descriptions sound the same, and certain
types of resumes sound the same, and all detergent commercials sound the same.
This is the conservative option, so if you rewrite it in an more "human"
style, you're actively telling your potential investors that "we're a bit
kooky" - which may be your intention, but you're taking a risk. [Having said
all this, I wouldn't be seen dead with a press release like that! All depends
on what you're into.]

