Innovation! Solutions! Integrated stuff!

Someone forwarded me this piece of buzzword-addled blather, which had arrived in his inbox:

It continued:

The person who sent this to me wasn’t sure what VCE did. Or how he came to be on the receiving end of assertions that we’re all talking about how VCE just keeps innovating. Or why he should care.

And I’m sure he wasn’t the only person on VCE’s mailing list who was more bewildered than bewitched by this piece of tick-box marketing. By which I mean content-for-the-sake-of-it created by someone rewarded more for activity than achievement.

Here are five pieces of advice to the sender of this mail:

1. If innovation really is the way you roll, ditch tired abstractions about integrated solutions, driving value and converged infrastructures. No amount of gussying up with bold, colour and italics can resuscitate a lexis like this.

2. Try again with a little book called Words That Sell, which is a thesaurus for people who need to write persuasively. It’s not cheating, I promise - the book has a permanent place on my desk.

3. Avoid customer testimonials that sound suspiciously like they were written by the same person who wrote the rest of your marketing. Actually, avoid testimonials that sound like they were written full stop.

4. Never write, then link repeatedly to, a press release that has the following headline:

VCE DRIVES EVEN GREATER LEVELS OF CONVERGENCE WITH NEW VCE SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS TO FURTHER SIMPLIFY AND ACCELERATE THE JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD

(Shouty caps VCE’s)

It’s just not the sort of thing that’s going to grab a journalist. Even an IT journalist.

5. Never send an email whose two opening sentences alone require your busy reader to take in 76 words. Read them back to yourself now. Be honest - by the time you'd got to the end of each sentence, you'd got lost hadn't you?