Media Speak News

Plain Speaking
In an effort to cut down on jargon, the Local Government Association (LGA) has just issued a list of 200 words which councils should avoid when communicating with the public.  The list includes such horrors as predictors of beaconicity and re-baselining, although the seemingly innocuous customer and ambassador also come under fire.
In a digital world we are bombarded with information during every waking moment and it’s often a struggle to sift through the sales and marketing-speak to find the people and services we really need.  An unlikely ally, though, in the war on jargon comes from Twitter, the social networking service launched back in 2006.  This blogging phenomenon was used to devastating effect by Barack Obama’s campaign team in the lead-up to last year’s presidential election.  And celebrity users, such as Stephen Fry, Demi Moore and Puff Daddy, have put Twitter on track to become the third largest social network after Facebook and MySpace.
Twitter encourages brevity by restricting users to only 140 characters per ‘tweet’.  An ingenious application of this constraint was invented by US business strategy and IT consultant, Stow Boyd.  During a recent industry conference he only accepted meetings with start-up companies who could tweet him a one-line summary of what they were offering.  He found this a speedy and useful way to make contact with the right people.  Dubbed the twitpitch, if forces companies vying for business to focus on what they do and reduce their message down to its key points. 
The LGA would approve.  No room for provider vehicle or gateway review in a successful twitpitch.  If you can make your point simply and fast you won’t only be more interesting, you’ll also save everyone’s time and money.