In a newspaper article about council refuse collection the other day, the featured council’s representative referred to employees as ‘operatives’. For me, this word represents all that is wrong with literary cleansing for political purposes.

I see the people who collect our refuse as ‘people’; operatives makes them sound like machines and dehumanises them. We used to call them dustmen or bin men, because they were predominantly men, but I see nothing wrong with using dustwoman.

Our dustmen are very helpful and cheery, as are our posties, both men and women, and I think of them as individuals: real people. ‘Operatives’ suggests they are cold, unthinking, mechanical, inhuman and unable to take pride in helping the community.

No doubt, many councils and public sector organisations trot out the old cliché that ‘our people are our most valuable asset’. Well, if that’s true, treat them like people and show them some respect when talking about them.

The dustmen and women and all the people who actually provide services are the public face of councils and public sector organisations and often create much better PR for them than any good-news glossy magazine, press release or damaging comment by a representative in a newspaper.

After our last blog, are you cutting out unnecessary words?

z2zine tomorrow: Prove it!

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When something happens in a business, a press release is often used to tell the world about it.

Fine.

Does the world listen?

Not everyone: perhaps 10, 100, 1,000 or a million, depending on how interesting the news is, how well the story is told and what else is happening that is newsworthy.

So what’s the point of a press release?

To tell an interesting story that people will want to hear.

Is that all?

To be of any use it should link back to you so that people make a note of your name and awareness of your business grows. Depending on the strength of the story, the press release could attract actual business through visits to a web site or real shop, telephone or mail orders, attendance at events or other responses.

But it’s too much to rely on a single press release to drive continuing sales. It’s a good idea to plan a whole public relations programme over a period of time, based on a number of press releases, articles, events and other activities and tied in to the rest of your marketing communications. Identifying an objective (eg getting a new product name known by your customers) and planning your press release can make the difference between it reaching hundreds or thousands of people or just reaching a couple of journalists on its way to the bin. And so can the way you tell your story: bare facts are likely to be as exciting as reading a tax return, while a real story, such as how you turned a near disaster into a success, can capture your target audience’s imagination.

Like everything else we do in business, we’re more likely to get the best out of a press release if we understand what we want from it and how it can achieve this for us.

After Friday’s blog, have you thought about your writing or blogging style and how you appear to others?

z2zine tomorrow: Does anyone know what you do?

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Once again, a news item focuses on how gobbledegook used by local government confuses people or, at worst, conceals the truth. Yet it’s not only councils that use jargon: businesses are often just as guilty.

It can be easy, when sitting in a room with colleagues or industry peers, to throw jargon and acronyms around. It saves time and can make us look good; it can also alienate people, make us look arrogant and block progress when others haven’t a clue what we mean.

It doesn’t take much to communicate clearly, using plain English instead of jargon, but the difference can be significant. If we rattle off an email that no one can understand, readers will either ignore it because they don’t know what we’re on about and don’t want to look stupid themselves or respond by seeking clarification from us. So that’s two unnecessary emails we’ll have generated. Confusion up, productivity down.

Acronyms and abbreviations do have their uses. Spelling out or saying ‘methylene diphenyl diisocyanate’ every time does get tedious, so following its first use with the initials MDI (so everyone knows what we’re talking about) can be useful, but inserting them into every document or conversation regardless of the intended audience should be avoided.

The answer, as usual, is in achieving balance through ensuring that our audience understands any technical or specialist terms we use. That’s how to keep both understanding and productivity up.