A journalist’s pet peeves
Wondering why no blog posts of late? I’m still shaking off my annual post-HIMSS hangover. A conference that big means I come home with story ideas out the wazoo (with accompanying tight deadlines), a full notepad or two, dozens of unread e-mails and generally a big pile of stuff to take care of. Then the second wave of inundation from PR types comes, wondering if I am going to write nice things about their clients. (The first wave—more like a tsunami—of course, is the pre-HIMSS stampede of “meet with us because we have the one magic bullet that’s going to fix all the problems in healthcare” e-mails.)
For some reason, I am on the general HIMSS attendee list, so vendors send me all these postcards for their products as if I were a potential customer. The cards usually go right into the trash. I did save a few, however—the ones that were in my mailbox after I returned from HIMSS. To the folks at LifeScan, BearingPoint, OnBase Healthcare Solutions, QuadraMed, Hewlett-Packard and GE Healthcare, you might want to think about mailing your solicitations a bit earlier next year. Just not to me.
If I do agree to meet with you at a future conference, do us both a favor and avoid the marketing buzzwords. I just ain’t interested. I was just about ready to strangle the next person who told me about the “value proposition” their “solutions” provide while being “transformational,” and how their “passion” makes them the “market leader” in the healthcare “vertical” or “space.”
Speaking of which, the following paragraph is taken verbatim from a press release I got last week:
“Our innovative software solutions use leading-edge imaging software technologies that accelerate market delivery for our OEM customers, while our end-user solutions improve our customers’ productivity and enhance the quality of patient care they provide.”
YAWN!
Bad PR writing: It’s spreading like a hospital-acquired infection.
Neil: It’s great to know that there are others out there who are weary of the overused techno-business jargon. Ten years ago, when I was VP Marketing of a hospital communications systems company, I actually banned from all marketing materials, such phrases as, “information superhighway”, “state-of-the-art”, “information silos”, and “integrated systems.” It forced the sales and marketing team to be more concise about our products’ virtues.
Neil:As a longtime journalist, I appreciate your aversion to jargonese. And I can appreciate the way in which the term “solution” is overused to the point of meaningless.But in my experience within IBM’s healthcare business the last two years, I think I’ve begun to understand what marketeers and business folks are trying to convene when they call something a “solution.”That may not excuse the term’s use, but consider the communications challenge of selling something that isn’t a pure product, but typically a combination of software, services, implementation and management.I think we have a muddy term because the nature of products have changed themselves.The idea of a “solution” may have become bastardized, but I think it is rooted in the big shift from selling customers a thing, to understanding what kind of problem a customer may have and figuring out how to remedy it.So yes, I fully agree that the term “solution” should be taken out behind the barn and shot. But communications professionals should also try to solve the challenge of what to call something that isn’t a product, or a service, in the pure sense.