Fluffy Words Are Bad, Mmmkay? (Or Are They?) | Brass Tack Thinking
Today’s post is a guest post from our friend and tack-minded cohort Matt Ridings, Founder of MSR Consulting, and a thought leader on integrating social media into the realm of Relationship Marketing. He blogs over at Techguerilla, and you can find him on Twitter at @techguerilla
Fluffervoidance
I have an aversion to “fluff”. I don’t mean that jar of creamy marshmallow awesomeness that sometimes sits in your pantry, I mean those words that get thrown around that sound great but rarely contain much actionable value.
Social Media gets far more than its fair share of this type of language, and that’s to be expected, after all a big part of social media is about relationship building. Where relationships are concerned words like “significance”, “harmony”, “trust”, “being real” are par for the course. But when I write them (and I do) a little shiver goes down my spine and I can feel the bile rise in my throat. My body reacts as if I’m a lifelong vegan who has decided to shove these words made of cow parts down my gullet.
Are these words really ‘bad’ however? Do they really only contain feel-good rainbows formed from the glitter ashes of old hippies? I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the issue isn’t the words, or even the meaning of the words, but rather how they are applied to an objective.
Businesses want control.
First off, realize that this isn’t a bad thing. The only way to predict and plan for something is if you maintain some control over the variables involved. And say what we will, but the consumer wants them to have that control.
Consumers want standardized experiences, they want to know that they can walk into a Starbucks in one city and get the same coffee, in the same cup, with the same familiar layout and product names. That only happens with a lot of carefully controlled variables. So when we start saying things like “all your employees should be in social media and represent your brand” what they hear is “dude, that drooling dork Jerry from IT could say some embarrassing stuff and there’s nothing you can do about it”.
And when we make the big statement “you’re not in control, your customers are”, well Mr. CEO needs a new change of underwear. That doesn’t make these statements more or less true, but they are snippets of a much broader conceptual discussion that are being provided without context. If you turn them into black and white statements they don’t hold up. “Should you put *everyone* in your company on social media in an *official* capacity? No”. “Is your customer in control of everything in your company? No.”
So why do we bring out all of these fluffy words that elicit the same visceral response in executives that they do in me? A company controls its own destiny. It either responds and shapes itself to a market demand, or it doesn’t. It just so happens that the market demand this time is about customers wanting to be made to *feel* in control, and to accomplish that requires some cultural change in companies that necessarily uses some ‘fluffy’ terms.
Methods are not Objectives
The social media world needs to learn that methods are not objectives. We’re still capitalists here. ...
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