Stating the obvious
The best analogy I can make is with HR.
Anyone who has ever worked for a large organisation will have gone through an on-boarding process. For me, it was with a university in the East Midlands. I was given a bunch of forms to sign, and a kind member of staff explained to naive, trusting little me exactly what each of them was for. It was the first time I heard the following sentence:
“…and that’s for HR. If you have any problems with your manager or other members of staff, you can go to HR and they’ll help you solve everything”.
Most people will smile at this sentence, because if you’ve worked in a large organisation for a while you realise that HR doesn’t actually exist to help you, but to make sure the organisation doesn’t get sued into oblivion. Which, fundamentally, is fine. Places don’t like to get sued — but I think most people feel their heart break a little when they realise… “oh, I’ve been lied to”.
Which brings me to the subject of Communications.
I didn’t start working in Comms. I’d written for years for a range of groups and publications, but I only ended up working in Comms as a sideline. It turns out that many academics — while incredibly intelligent — cannot write for toffee. This is especially the case when trying to appeal to teenagers who might want to study at their university. It turned out that I was very good at translating from academic jargon into understandable, normal-person, language. I learned how to use Adobe programs, how to work a camera and shoot and edit film, and how to handle a department’s social media. Pretty soon, I ended up working in Communications and Marketing. I was looking forward to writing documents, talking to people, and sharing the good work that we’d been doing.
Turns out that Comms has about as much to do with communication as HR has to do with treating people like humans.
There was no writing, just copying and pasting approved text. Nobody cared about writing words that human beings would read, just making sure that everything was SEO-friendly. If a random string of buzzwords got you more clicks, you went with the buzzwords. It didn’t matter if it annoyed your potential customers (because students are customers now, remember!) because everyone else was doing the same thing.
Nobody actually cared about conveying information to people. What mattered was that we didn’t get sued. I lost count of the number of times academics suggested reasonable ideas, only to be told “No”. What was the reason for the No? Somebody might get offended. Somebody might misunderstand. Somebody might choose to take something out of context, so let’s just say nothing. I spent more time shutting down interesting, successful ideas than I ever did creating anything, because Comms and Marketing had nothing to do with appealing to others, only to make everything into varied shades of beige.
I took some courses from reputable providers, trying to see if I could increase my knowledge, and it just frustrated me more. One course was fixated on the ideas in Kahnemann and Tversky’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”. Unfortunately for them, I’d already read the book, and could see that they were misinterpreting the findings within. They ignored the complexities and intricacies of the work, and boiled it down into a simple set of instructions that they claimed would always work. Of course, these instructions don’t always work — but by the time you find that out, you’ve already paid.
I started to see this kind of approach everywhere in life. News articles that don’t actually tell you anything. Websites that seem to be designed purely to irritate you. I started to realise that they weren’t made that way specifically to annoy you, but because someone, somewhere, was following a rule that was ‘how you were supposed to do it’. I’ve read countless strategy documents that don’t seem to know what they’re for. Stakeholder maps that consider random idiots to be more important than regular users. Designers being paid money to make websites less usable. Paragraphs of text that convey NOTHING.
Ever looked up a recipe, only to spend ten minutes removing pop-ups, scrolling up and down looking for the ingredients, only to accidentally click an advert and lose your space? Someone, somewhere, has decided that getting random advertising clicks is more important than making a usable web page.
Unfortunately, as far as I can see, I can’t change this. I certainly can’t make management see the error of their ways, as nobody wants to be the one person who steps out of line. So, in order to try and save what little sanity I have left, I’m setting up this blog.
Here, I’ll be posting the most egregious examples of idiotic comms-speak. Unnecessary language that doesn’t convey what it thinks it does. SEO-garbage that gets in the way. Expensive-looking websites that didn’t bother to check their main headings for spelling mistakes. Hopefully, there might even be the odd example of someone doing something well that I can bring to people’s attention.
There’s a twitter account — @commsisawful — and if you want to share some poor examples you can email them to me at commsruinseverything@gmail.com.
My first post will follow soon. It’s about 9/11, and not thinking things through.
