I often do presentations / workshops for startups to try and explain how best to approach and deal with media, and why they should pay attention to the ‘packaging’ of their message when pitching journalists.
One of the things that really get me going is the insane amount of hyperbole – which, by the way, I just recently learned to pronounce correctly – that is often found throughout press releases or blog posts.
Thus, I tend to urge people to avoid meaningless buzzwords that somehow find their way in most every news announcement, such as ‘leading’, ‘next-generation’, ‘cutting-edge’, ‘ground-breaking’, ‘award-winning’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘innovative’, ‘game-changing’ and all that other gibberish.
When you have to read a lot of announcements on a daily basis, it gets very tedious to weed those out mentally, as almost every journalist quickly learns how to do. But now there’s a better solution.
The friendly developers over at Woorank (a great, bootstrapped Belgian startup co-founded by my buddy Jean Derely) have been nice enough to develop a Google Chrome extension especially for me.
Dubbed Buzzword Filter, it does exactly what you’d expect: install the browser plugin, and you’ll be able to create a list of words you don’t like to read.
Click the icon whenever you’re on a Web page with too many of those words, and bam, they’re gone (you can easily toggle it on and off). Simple and useful. Just the way I like my software.
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Robin Wauters 