Targeting my market
I’ve been using Google Analytics to measure visits to my blog. Every week I discover that new users are checking the site, but are they coming back? Then I found out about this thing called Blogpulse.com which tells you ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ in the blogosphere. I was surprised to see that editorial issues are not hot – positively frigid, don’t even come up in the search facility.
Even writing about it now I find it hard to believe. There must be thousands of lonely editors out there – somewhere – who want to share bad writing or confide that they too don’t understand the words anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to ‘target’ my market.
Thing is, I don’t really know how to do that – I need more training to learn about marcomms and e-comms I suppose. But I’m distracted by not understanding the words, by the word ‘communications’ being abbreviated and made into a suffix.
Marcomms confused me, so I did a little research on the internet. It turns out that:
“Marketing communications is a systematic methodology utilizing content and media to broadcast programmatic material designed to create awareness, preference and response.”
I’m guessing this means communicating to market your product or service. I’m certain, when I read sentences like this, that the conspirators who laugh at editors everywhere use the marketing industry as a cover to promote their evil cause.
e-Comms is a little more obvious, the ‘e’ being for electronic of course.
But neither expression leaps out and says ‘communications’. And of all the words in the world, you’d expect a word meaning ‘communication’ to communicate at the very least.
I then find myself distracted by the fact that I’m using the word ‘target’ as a verb. It just shows how quickly language moves on.
In Plain Words, first published in 1948, Sir Ernest Gowers talks at length about the word ‘target’ as a metaphor.
Gowers quibbles with expressions like ‘global target’ and ‘overall target’, which he attributes to economists. He even says that:
“most of us, at some stage in our careers, have discharged missiles or projectiles at ‘a shield-like structure marked with concentric circles’.”
That’s because his life was more exciting than mine. But he seems unaware of ‘target’ being used as a verb.
Is it a sign of the times that we use these expressions in the public sector now? We have carbon reduction targets for 2020, child poverty targets and obesity targets.
And the public sector has become a ‘target market’ and targets its comms at you, the resident, patient, citizen or ‘customer’.
The economists, and their jargon, have taken over the world.
