Once again it’s time to hunt down the jargon of the year. In the past twelve months, have you spotted an official document that made you gasp, laugh, or groan? Was there a government resolution you could understand only with a dictionary? Did some bureaucrat force you to wrestle with a badly-chosen neologism? Here’s your chance to fight back: send your suggestions for jargon of the year, along with your name or a pseudonym. Deadline is the end of May. You can submit your nominees via Twitter, Facebook or by e-mail to info@yksityinenkielitoimisto.net. From the nominees, we’ll select three to five finalists. On June 9th, participants at the Finnish Consulting Group’s annual forum will choose the winner. This playful contest is meant to focus attention on public sector language in general, not to bully the individual author who’s struggling with officialese. It’s going to be a tough competition–this has been a good year for gobbledygook!

Public officials need to be personally present in social media, using everyday language and responding quickly to the messages they receive. Doing so actually makes it easier for them to connect with the public—and for the public to connect with them.

Social media also changes the tone of communication. When officials and experts are in direct contact with the public, it’s hard to hide behind a wall of jargon. You have to learn to speak plainly.

Twitter in particular is a great tool that demands concise, accessible language. It’s well-suited to public dialogue and helps develop communication skill. Spokespersons learn quickly that truly following a conversation is as important a form of participation as tweeting. Indeed, tweets sent to or about the organization can offer quieter but more useful signals than the noisy stream of traditional media.

A public body may have an official online voice, but public officials can’t outsource their online presence: they need to speak in their own social media voice.

Last week in my course on the Expert in the Digital Reality we talked about blogs. For an expert, a blog is a natural social media channel, because writing is usually his main work. So you might think it wouldn’t take much to expand his publishing activities into the online world. However, obstacles exist. Maintaining a blog requires commitment: new entries should appear at least once every couple of weeks. How do you find time to develop ideas and compose posts along with your current work? The best solution is to choose a theme for which topics and posts will emerge as by-products of your work. However, don’t limit your freedom too much; you may later want a wider range of expression. And here’s another challenge: what can you write about if you’re the representative of an organization? Keep in mind that a blog post resembles a newspaper column: it deals with current issues and requires a personal tone. At the same time, a disclaimer can enlighten the ignorant, as one research blog does: “Our bloggers tackle current topics and hope for dialogue. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the organization’s official position.” A clear, even a strong perspective can invite readers to participate in the discussion. So, experts should start blogging boldly with their own voice, extending their expression and sharing their expertise in a more dynamic environment.

The European Union’s funds provide money for many good purposes. However, they don’t want to make access to money too easy; the applicant must first cope with the fund’s argot. Even the titles are daunting: “The Application Submission Period Related to ESF Nationwide Measures within the Administrative Sector of the FNBE”. The EU carefully avoids using common words and likes to repeat its own abstract constructs, such as the Structural Funds Program. Rather than bothering to explain expressions such as specific horizontal themes, readers are linked to multi-page strategic documents and program papers, which in turn will drag along their own load of leaden terminology. Such bureaucratic padding keeps the real world far away, although actual examples would bring the project-nonsense back to earth. The most important issue for those who order the creation of these documents is probably creating an image of conscientious professionalism, the development of innovation potential without interrupting the process with actual deeds. What’s worse, the outcome of a project’s being funded consists only of new publications and papers, not actual activity that addresses some issue. – Why is this so difficult? The multi-lingual EU environment is exceptionally demanding. If a writer is working with these difficult texts, he should get protective clothing and scheduled periods for recovery. Long-term exposure to the EU textual environment jeopardizes any sense of linguistic sensitivity. Or sensibility.

Sometimes you have to produce a newsletter even if there aren’t any topics worth discussing – or, sometimes, because you don’t want to draw attention to them. In such cases, the clever writer crafts a title that will lower the desire to read to zero. A good example is last week’s newsletter from Nordea Bank, entitled “Nordea simplifies the judiciary corporate structure”. The words “judiciary” and “structure” kill the zest to read, and “corporate” is an accomplice. If you want to master the creation of don’t-bother material, you’ll find excellent resources among EU projects. To prove they exist, they feel compelled to issue publications, regardless of whether they have anything to say. Typically they repel readers with vague titles that include murky abbreviations: “The ERDF program area” and “ELLO fosters opportunity.” Those brave souls who persist in reading are pelted with platitudes – “Improvement is not made by running faster, but by walking a shorter distance” – or assaulted with jargon – “interregional operational programme priority”. The tedium goes on, and the reader goes off.

Magazines and social media courses constantly roll out advice on what makes a good Facebook update. Updates should be designed like advertisements, and ought to include images that feature smiling people. If you don’t have a colorful ad image of your own, you should pick one up on the internet, or at least link to a suitable video. The least successful updates, according to the gurus, are text only: marketing surveys suggest their attention value is several hundred times smaller than that of updates with images. But hey, those text-only updates meet my needs better than smiling faces and cat pictures. I think that apt observations, compact summaries, well-chosen facts and invitations to discuss also can succeed on Facebook. Your goals determine how to use the medium. While Facebook offers more varied entertainment than Twitter, that’s not to say the entertainment is only for advertisements. Facebook’s pages and groups lend themselves effectively to education and to group participation, as long as the communication aligns with the objectives – and as long as you ignore nonsensical advice.

Advice for bloggers often appears as lists: three guidelines, five tips, ten commandments. I have become oversensitive to lists; nowadays I try to avoid them in my teaching. However, two collections of advice have found favor in my eyes: Riku Vassinen’s Ten Commandments of Blogging and Glen Long’s 20 Rules for Writing So Crystal Clear Even Your Dumbest Relative Will Understand. Vassinen’s ten commandments speak precisely about pitfalls into which experts and officials often stumble. Although readers are interested in a strong personal point of view, over-cautious writers do not dare to take a stand and be themselves. Glen Long, for his part, tells you to get straight to the point and use concrete language – words which readers can feel, smell, and taste. Long’s own guidelines illustrate the message: he urges bloggers to use the fortune cookie test (express the core in one sentence), to write like a paranoid CIA agent (share only the most necessary information), and to use metaphors like a spoonful of sugar to help the message go down.

I train officials to use plain language. Usually I tell them to condense their wording: cut useless introductions, delete tautology, and shorten expressions. For example, in a ideal case a response to a citizen initiative can be shortened from a full page to one sentence without losing the core content. We often do succeed in reaching a consensus about brevity, and the edited text saves time and nerves both for officials and for citizens. However, one question comes up repeatedly: won’t we lose credibility if the issue is presented briefly and in plain language? When an official responds to an initiative with one or two sentences, won’t the originator feel that the issue has not been examined thoroughly? Many in government seem to fear that they will appear not to be doing their jobs unless each reply demonstrates seriousness through sheer length, with an introduction, repetition, and of course long citations of regulations or laws, preferably with other references. Both the reader and the writer should ask if the response is attempting to convince by its reasoning or by its length.

There are multiple digital worlds, and users of social media should not compress them into a mere channel for advertising. Professionals and experts are often advised to create a personal brand via social media. I think that the brand must not be a goal in itself. The best online branding occurs naturally, as a by-product of sharing good content. If all you “market” is your own posts, you became a self-promoting wannabe shoveling your vanity into the digital stream. Twitter, for example, is too useful a tool to be a mere advertising channel. Up-to-date professionals make Twitter part of their PLE, keeping up with developments in their field. These people add value by sharing useful content related to their interests and expertise. We used to tell critics of Wikipedia that instead of complaining, they should improve its articles. The same applies to content production anywhere online. We should not let marketers hijack social media.

Recently, Tampere University hosted the first academic Twitter conference. There were 18 presentations by Twitter researchers from eight universities. The conference attracted 150 people, who despite the long day participated actively right through the last debate. One central theme was live tweeting during the Finnish election debates on TV. The favorite subjects of the live tweets were the chairmen of the political parties, economy, and the nature of the debate. In general, tweets focused less on issues and more on how debaters spoke and acted. Moderate debaters received the most positive reviews. At the conference, Twitter was seen as an excellent platform for public dialogue, but its user base was considered elite. Twitter does not directly democratize debate; rather, it reproduces the power structures of society. My presentation dealt with the use of Twitter by city governments. Cities should reduce autotweets and increase discussion and networking with residents. This requires a re-evaluation of the objectives and significance of Twitter in city communications.