In this new weekly column, Marco Greenberg, a long-time PR and marketing jedi specializing in venture-backed start-ups, will share his experience of the most common mistakes young entrepreneurs make that keep them from getting the love—and the buzz—they so justly deserve.
Chapter 2: Because No One Really Understands What You Do
Last week, I had the pleasure of taking some time off to have breakfast with a dear friend. He’s a celebrated writer for one of our better magazines, and so, naturally, the conversation turned to media. As I spoke, I noticed a thin grin spread across David’s face. Finally, the poor man couldn’t take it any longer: when I said something about branded content, he interrupted to ask if I meant good, old-fashioned writing. When I spoke about native advertising, he huffed cheerfully that he still remembered when they used to call them advertorials. By the time I started talking about SEO and SEM and ROI, David buried his face in his coffee cup and looked at me like one looks at a child desperately trying to recite the alphabet but repeatedly stumbling midway through.
He was right. I was speaking in jargon. And jargon is almost always the enemy: it is the antithesis of clear communication, it is anathema to passion and connection, and it can very well destroy your business.
I’m hardly being overly dramatic. As a PR guy who specializes, among other things, in launching tech companies, I can’t tell you how many great ideas and terrific products I’ve seen buried under an avalanche of acronyms and needlessly complicated technical terms. Afraid to sound overly simplistic, and used to speaking mainly to people who shared their very specific knowledge and skill sets, otherwise brilliant entrepreneurs would again and again find themselves unable to answer the most profoundly simple of questions: just what is it that you do?
I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you do. I’ve worked with brain surgeons and financial wizards and high tech geniuses, and the best of them had one key thing in common: if you asked them what they did for a living, they would give you a clear and concise answer you didn’t need a Ph.D. in their respective fields to understand. This doesn’t mean you should dumb anything down, but it does mean you should speak in the sort of language, and use the sort of visuals, that your audience can understand and is relevant to their interests.
Take Nick Percoco, for example, a friend, former client, and one of our nation’s greatest ethical hackers and information security specialists. Talk shop with Nick, and he’ll dish out about Pen Testing, DDoS attacks, and other complex things, but put him on TV and Nick will rely on analogies, anecdotes, and actual examples that explain his very complicated job even to someone like me who can hardly operate his smart phone.
So why are so many smart people still speaking in tongues instead of making an effort to communicate about their work and their passion in a compelling way? It could be peer pressure: Everyone’s doing it, and it’s easy, when you’re neck-deep in a certain industry, to adopt its rap. Or it could be top-down pressure, trying to interact quickly and efficiently with the engineers and the others in your company whose job often requires speaking in code rather than in English. And it may just be the perfectly understandable pressure to appear smart and sophisticated and appealing to potential investors. Resist the urge: the best way to tell your story is straight and to the point, and the only way to make a lasting impression—on potential customers, on partners, on employees, or on Wall Street—is to convey that passion and that curiosity and that spirit that got you into business in the first place.