What does it take to show customers, partners, investors and competitors that your company fits in, gets it and is a force to reckon with? For marketers, one among many is the way your company talks about itself. Do you understand the marketplace? Do you use the right terminology? Are you solving customer pain points?

All this is fine, but where you lose me is when you start talking in junk words because you can’t think of anything else to say. I find this particularly troublesome on overview pages where companies often find it difficult to think of something to say. What happens (as on this page from IBM) is it isn’t readable. Its just a long verbose mess of big words strung together in the hope of getting someone to click somewhere else. Ack! This is where the use of junk words comes in — when there is nothing really to say, these marketers resort to junk words to fill up a page and sound important. The end result is it sounds forced and boring. Remember, web site visitors aren’t going to stick around and read your junk words, so don’t bother. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it.

I don’t necessarily mean to pick on IBM — the same junk words can be found in so many other places on the web, they were just the first site I went to today. Go to Oracle, Sun, HP, Mercury, pretty much most any firm that sells into the IT space and you will find some of my all time favorite marketing junk words:

• enable: Used universally by all the above and many others, this has to be the weakest verb in use. Whenever I hear it, I think of the spouse of an alcoholic. Why IT firms think that being an enabler is a good thing is beyond me — too many negative associations. Besides, there are so many better verbs out there!
• solutions: Used when you can’t do a good enough job being clear about what it is you’re selling. This word wore out its welcome in the late 90’s.
• best of breed: This pains me. I mean, what, is this a replacement for the useless word quality? To me this reeks of “I don’t know how to differentiate myself from my competition, so I will just say I am the greatest and hope it sticks.”

Whenever I work with new clients that use these words, I quietly rush to get rid of them and move to explain their benefits in friendly plain language that people will read without the glaze over effect. It forces people to really be clear in how they stack up to their competition.
So what are your favorite junk words? There are many others that could go here, but I hate to beat on something for too long, so here I am stepping down from the soapbox…Your turn to step up.