Writing for your audience

I found out today that Touch Clarity was acquired by Omniture, the news was posted on Omniture’s website. Sounded kinda sorta interesting so I clicked through to Touch Clarity’s website and began reading what they were about. Here’s an excerpt from one of their press releases:

Touch Clarity, named in the Forrester report, provides a highly automated on-site behavioral targeting solution that optimizes web visitor interaction on an individual level by fully considering the current visitor’s behavior and context, as well as all previous visitor behavior in making its decisions for serving the optimal content, promotions, or merchandising recommendations.

It makes perfect sense — on the 2nd or 3rd read through.

A lot of marketers talk about writing for one’s grandmother, a test that says if she “gets it” so will everyone else. While it sounds good in theory, I don’t think works in practice, at least not for enterprise technology-related work. One word that comes up a lot in technology marketing is “extensibility,” a word that sets off sirens and bells in my head when I see it because it showed up so frequently in dot.com bubble (ie, Web 1.0) language, and occasionally reappears in today’s Web 2.0 writing (highly recommend the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator). However, even though extensibility may not be the perfect word, it makes sense in certain contexts.

(a small aside here… is it just me or do many Wikipedia articles come across as content by experts for experts? While I think Wikipedia is just awesome for how its changed the web landscape and what it offers, it gets slammed here, and I think appropriately so, for its reading-level)

The reality is that you need to write to your audience, while striving to write in plain English. Simpler is better. If it smells of bullshit, it probably is. It’s not that Touch Clarity uses the occasional industry term (behavioral targeting), which is fine, it’s that those terms are placed in a sea of marketing-speak. Funny thing is, I am the audience for marketing solutions like Touch Clarity offers, but I don’t get it. What are they offering? What’s the value? Why should I care? Maybe those questions are answered, but I couldn’t get past the second paragraph.