Digital Landfill

I'm a big fan of the MarketingProfs web site and am currently reading the book Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

Content Rules is well worth reading for anyone who cares about web and social content.  

The book contains a list that caught my eye (and per the authors, was influenced by one of my favorite books from high school days , Strunk & White's The Elements of Style). The list is 18 words or phrases that should be banned from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs, and boardrooms.

(In the interests of true confession, I am personally not entirely innocent in the use of these words; but I will be now on.)

Here are the 18...

1. Impactful
2. Leverage
3. Learnings
4. Synergy
5. Revolutionary
6. Email blast
7. Proactive
8. Drill down
9. 30,000 feet
10. Incentivizing
11. Almost any word ending in -ize
12. Solution
13. Users
14. Almost any word rooted in technology but applied to humans (e.g.,ping, bandwidth, offline)
15. Previously good but now overused words (e.g., robust, granular, strategic, traction)
16. Mashed together words (e.g., buy-in, mission-critical, best-of-breed)
17. Silly phrases (e.g., "run it up the flagpole," "eat our own dog food," "out of pocket")
18. Offensive combo phrases (e.g., "brand Nazi," "drinking the kool-aid")

Which got me thinking about the world of content, records, and document management marketing, certainly an area that is not bereft of jargon.

So let's have a bit of a competition? What marketing terms should be banned in the ECM space? Get your ideas in by posting a comment here or by tweeting on the hashtag #ecmbanned, and we'll put together a master list.