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February 23, 2005

Jarbarish in the News

Matt Branaugh from Boulder's Daily Camera newspaper emailed me tonight to say that his February 24th Tech Range column will reference one of my blog posts about Jarbarish.  Jarbarish is a word my wife Cindy and I coined that comes from the words "Jargon" and "Gibberish".  I get so tired of hearing people say things that have little or no meaning.  I hear jarbarish at trade shows, in sales presentations and I see it in almost every press release. 

Matt and I talked about jarbarish a couple of weeks ago, and he's tired of it too.  He gets countless press releases from entrepreneurs and marketing people hoping to get his attention.  We laughed about how almost every single company claims to be "The Leader" at something, even if they haven't sold their first dollar's worth of product.  Then they dress up what they do with words like "upside opportunity", "value-add", "touch-points" and "paradigm shifts." I suspect these press releases are written by people who love to “think out of the box” and go for the “low hanging fruit.”

Here are a couple of hints.  If your press release causes your newspaper columnist to laugh out loud at the absurdity of your claims or your choice of words, you're not going to get the best coverage of your new product.  If you load your press release down with words that only your engineering staff could understand, your newspaper columnist is just going to toss your release in the trash because they never have enough time, the deadline is always looming, and they just can't take the time to dig out what it is you really do.

If you want good press, speak plainly, return their calls quickly and give them your home phone number, your cell phone number and your email address so that it is easy for them to do any last minute fact-checking.

To read Matt's article, go to www.dailycamera.com and look for Columnists in the Business section.  The direct link is here and you may need to do a free sign-in process with the newspaper website.  If this is your first encounter with a blog, I hope you'll check out the rest of my blog and some of the blogs that I read on a regular basis.  I'm the CEO and co-founder of Gold Systems and I write this blog to help other entrepreneurs.  It is also a place where I can write informally about speech recognition and other technologies that I'm interested in.  Thanks for reading!

Terry

February 23, 2005 in Entrepreneurship | Permalink

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Tracked on Mar 20, 2005 5:45:59 PM

Comments

Terry,

Very interesting ideas especially about the use of Blogs (a different term for sure). I agree with the web/internet as expanding not limiting our ability to connect and communicate with others.

Steve

Posted by: Steve Durgin | Feb 25, 2005 2:55:19 PM

What gets me is when corporate job descriptions are jarbarized beyond understanding: "We need someone to leverage productized fuctionalities..." etc. Just tell me what you NEED already!

Corporate jarbarish is skewered here on this very funny page:

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

-Laura

Posted by: Laura | Mar 18, 2005 12:17:17 PM