Erin Caldwell’s PRblog

It only took me an entire Sunday afternoon — ha! As you can imagine, I came across a lot of interesting discussion; some I was already aware of from the little reading I have been able to keep up with.

First up that caught my attention, more on gobbledygook! David Meerman Scott has a great post about the frequency of certain gobbledygook phrases in news releases. I think discussion of gobbledygook has always appealed to me because I identify wordy-ness as a weakness of my own — so I’m on the lookout for how to improve my professional writings. In his thorough post, David offers research that reveals “next generation” as the most-used phrase in new releases since the start of 2006. (Visit his post for more of the top-ranking phrases.) He also goes on to explain the issue more and give tips and solutions for avoiding such horrid and ineffective writing. One part that stood out to me:

Another major drawback of the generic gobbledygook approach is that it doesn’t make your company stand out from the crowd. Here’s a test: Take the language that the marketers at your company dreamed up and substitute the name of a competitor and the competitor’s product for your own. Does it still make sense to you? Marketing language that can be substituted for another company’s isn’t effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice.

Hmm. Handy exercise.

Next up, a post by Kami Huyse about anonymity. At the end of the post, she asks about a policy for online discourse … is anonymity OK? Personally, I think it depends on the objective of the blog. Certainly, a policy will be more lax when applying to a personal blog where the author writes about their own personal, day-to-day experiences. However, with any sort of professional or business blog where the participants are supposed to maintain any sense of authority or credibility — yes. A clear identity is absolutely necessary. (The discussion in the comments is interesting, too.)

And my third item for this evening … the big announcement from the Fantastic Four. (Hat tip to Ed Lee — very clever.) CC Chapman, Neville Hobson, Shel Holtz and Joseph Jaffe team up to create “crayon.”

From Shel: “What makes us different is that Joseph assembled us based on our passion for new media and the fact that we already live and breathe it. We sleep it. We eat it for lunch. And ultimately, that’s what motivated me to accept Joe’s offer and join crayon: the opportunity to work exclusively on these types of projects and the opportunity to work with this particular collection of people.”

And … they’re launching in Second Life on Thursday — apparently the first company to launch from within Second Life. www.crayonville.com will be live after the Oct. 26 launch, as well. And they’ve offered themselves up for info and interviews. Note to self: talk to Paull about possible Forward Podcast topic …

Now, the insane thing … is that while I was playing catch up with my PR feeds, which I have not done in a really long time, I was actively adding even more to my “PR” folder in Bloglines. I was coming across new folks I either hadn’t seen or hadn’t had a chance to add yet, which is great! But if it took me an entire afternoon to go through just one folder of my feeds … (sigh) … and I just added even more … (bigger sigh) …