So Brendan, our CEO, is down in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the next few days he’ll be meeting with our friends and new partners at UBL. We’ll let you know if anything interesting comes out of that meeting.

On the plane he was reading the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, and he came across this article by Jason Fried called Why Is Business Writing So Awful?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet – the marketplace?

I can tell you why so many writers clutter up websites with boring, jargon-filled, imitative marketing clichés. It’s because they don’t really know what their companies do. I know from experience that there’s nothing harder than trying to write a marketing message when you don’t really know what you’re marketing. You need to be able to answer the questions:

What are we selling?

Why buy it from us rather than them?

If you can’t answer these questions clearly to yourself, you’re not going to be able to put the answers into words for your readers. Then you can forget about making your writing lively or interesting; you’ll be lucky to string together two coherent sentences.

Luckily you can always spread buzzwords and clichés over your bad writing like mortar over faulty brickwork. It helps cover the gaps where you’re not really sure what you’re trying to say. Very likely the page will be so boring that no-one will ever read it and realize how little sense it makes.

I don’t offer these observations from a position of superiority. I’ve done this kind of bad writing myself, consciously as well as unconsciously. I’m sure you can find examples all over the StepRep site. The only defense I can offer is that writing well is difficult, while writing badly is…not exactly easy, but easier.

In the same email where he drew my attention to the article by Jason Fried, Brendan made an attempt to clearly define what separates StepRep from its competitors in the reputation management biz. Here’s what he came up with. I think it’s good enough to share unedited:

  • We might not be the best yet, but we will be.
  • We will relentlessly improve our product.
  • We will listen, learn, and make changes to StepRep, just as StepRep will help you do for your business.
  • We are a development company, not a sales and marketing company.
  • We care more about real value and performance than flashy stuff.
  • We like to have fun, but we like to win. We will never stop until we win.