Our friend Joy Jennings has penned another post for Media Orchard that might even top her last one. Here it is.

—

Who can we blame for all the buzzwords that have crept into our day-to-day speech? We never seem to use these words outside of the office, but boy, do we love ‘em in meetings and e-mail. I think some people hear a good one, then can’t wait to trot it out in their next conference call.

See if you cringe at these top seven offenders. I confess to having used these, usually against my better judgment. Feel free to send your own least-favorite buzzwords to me.

1. “mission-critical”

I guess this one came around when some management guru told everyone to start writing mission statements, vision statements and elevator pitches. And then like glassy-eyed converts, we all spent 18 months bickering over conference calls about the best wording for such claptrap so that we could print it on the back of our business cards and hide it on a never-visited page of our Web site. Then anything critical became “mission-critical.” Well, folks, abort the mission.

2. “key”

This is a synonym for “important” that irks me no end. Primarily because it’s uttered throughout organizations on company time, but is never used when you’re talking with your friends and family about what’s important. Lose your keys. Please.

3. “initiative”

Companies used to have projects or maybe new products. Now any endeavor, particularly a new endeavor, is an “initiative.” God help me, I never want to write another press release about an initiative.

4. “strategic”

This is maybe the worst adjective on the list. Companies love to have “strategic” business partners. I suppose this makes the partners feel better. But really, wouldn’t you guess that any partner is going to be a business partner? And isn’t any business partner part of some kind of strategy? (And isn’t “partner” a legal term that we need to stay away from entirely?) The other crap-tastic usage is the strategic business unit. Two of those words are simply unnecessary. It’s just a unit, end of story. Basically, if you need to clearly label what you’re doing as strategic, you have bigger problems.

5. “going forward”

In the future, we’re all going to live our lives going forward. From now on, we’re going forward with a new plan. And we’ll continue our business careers, eschewing buzzwords like “going forward.”

6. “functionality”

Engineers and other product designers love to list the functionalities of their beloved products. I’m here to point out that “function” is a very useful noun that means the same thing. “Feature” is also an oldie but a goodie. “Capability” can also serve your needs quite well. Let’s all agree to do our very best to find other words instead of this grating buzzword.

7. “solution”

I feel guilty about this one because it is in the name of the last company I worked for. I couldn’t avoid it. But any business journalist will tell you that they particularly dislike this buzzword. Lots of technology companies can’t bring themselves to say that they have products, systems or even services — no, they must have solutions. But never to problems. Nuh-uh, that’s a bad word that is rarely uttered. No, they have solutions to “challenges.”

You probably have other buzzword examples. I do too. “Value-added,” “heads-up,” “learnings” and “think outside the box” can all drop out of the lexicon yesterday if it was up to me.

Buzzwords are bad because they get in the way of clear communication. Our colleagues think they make them sound smart — or they’re so immersed in corporate-speak that they truly can’t think of a better alternative. As communicators, it’s up to us to show them the way.

—

Joy Jennings is a freelance writer who helps organizations with marketing and public relations projects.

Last week, we published the first of our series of posts on Web 2.0 buzzword abuse, running the term “Web 2.0″ through the search engines of about 40 marketing bloggers to determine which of you used this term the most (and the least).

Today, we’re going with one of the Web 2.0 buzzwords that we find most annoying: “mashup.”

“Mashup” started as a musical term. But as adopted by the software world, it means (per Wikipedia) “a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”

The evolution of the usage of “mashup” is a classic example of how marketing and MBA types slip onto the technology bandwagon; typically, they do this whenever the bandwagon begins to resemble a gravy train.

The object is simple, really: If you can co-opt the hip new technology term in your business pitches, you seem much more “with it” when presenting to potential clients — even though you don’t know the difference between PHP and PCP.

As Oliver Paradis put it in a rant to Wired:

The truth is, mashup is a manufactured buzzword, and like any buzzword, it drips with tacky artificiality, marketing innuendo, and vague implications. I have lately observed the application of this metaphor to the most unlikely subjects, including art, video, laptops, cell phones, movies, sneakers, cars, toothbrushes, and who knows what else. I look forward to the moment your writers properly address this particularly trendy and overused word by jettisoning it from your hallowed pages.

‘Nuff said. The median upon which the index was based was three uses of the term since 2006. The results:

Micro Persuasion: 19.0
jaffe juice: 15.3
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: 7.3
Adrants: 7.0
a shel of my former self: 5.3
Brand Noise: 4.7
Online Marketing Blog: 3.7
NevilleHobson.com: 3.7
Marketing Pilgrim: 3.3
Seth’s Blog: 3.0
Diva Marketing Blog: 3.0
What’s Next Blog: 2.0
Church of the Customer: 2.0
Make the Logo Bigger: 1.7
PR Squared: 1.3
Blogging Me Blogging You: 1.3
Brand Autopsy: 1.3
BlogWrite for CEOs: 1.3
Bad Language: 1.0
PR 2.0: 1.0
Brand Sizzle: 1.0
Beyond Madison Avenue: 1.0
Todd And - The Power to Connect: 0.7
Emergence Marketing: 0.7
Pronet Advertising: 0.7
MIT Advertising Lab: 0.3
Marketing Begins at Home: 0.3
Copyblogger: 0.3
Presto Vivace Blog: 0.3
The Buzz Bin: 0.3
Common Sense PR: 0.3
Communication Overtones: 0.3
Media Orchard: 0.3
POP! PR Jots: 0.3
The Flack: 0.3

The following blogs should be saluted for not using the term even once (at least according to their search engines): Duct Tape Marketing, Open the Dialogue, Strive Notes, Marketing Whore, Occam’s RazR, On Message from Wagner Communications, adgoodness,Copywrite, Ink., The Copywriting Maven, Chaos Scenario, and Into PR.

As you can see, Steve Rubel tops the index for the second week in a row. Frankly, maybe it’s not fair to include Steve, since he posts more often — and more often about technology — than the rest of us. What do you think?

Since we’re back on the horse now (as in, back in the saddle, not back on heroin), Media Orchard realized we had a bit of catching up to do on all the marketing and PR blogs out there. And what better way to catch up with marketing blogs than to track their relative levels of Web 2.0 buzzword use and/or abuse.

So we decided to take a list of Web 2.0 buzzwords and enter them in the search engines of 40-or-so marketing bloggers to determine the number of instances each blog used one of the buzzwords. To level the playing field a bit between older and newer blogs, we counted only the period from January 2006 to the present.

We’ll present the results of our research one buzzword at a time over a series of posts — building up to a deafening crescendo with a comprehensive Web 2.0 Buzzword Abuse Index, incorporating all results to determine which marketing blogger uses or abuses buzzwords the most.

For our first report, we’ll disclose the results for — what else? — the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

We found that the selected blogs used this buzzword a median of 14 times during the period (about once per month), so we set that as “1″ in the index and gave everyone else a score based on that average. The higher the score, the greater the use/abuse of the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

The results:

Steve Rubel is the biggest user/abuser of “Web 2.0″ by a wide margin — using the term an average of three times per week, more than twice as often as the nearest challenger. In Steve’s defense, he does post more frequently, and has more of a tech focus, than most other marketing bloggers.

The full rundown:

Micro Persuasion: 13.9
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: 5.7
Online Marketing Blog: 3.8
PR 2.0: 3.3
Seth’s Blog: 2.6
a shel of my former self: 2.6
Marketing Pilgrim: 2.4
NevilleHobson.com: 2.4
Media Orchard: 2.4
Pronet Advertising: 2.1
Diva Marketing Blog: 1.8
BlogWrite for CEOs: 1.4
The Flack: 1.4
Adrants: 1.3
Communication Overtones: 1.3
POP! PR Jots: 1.2
Emergence Marketing: 1.2
What’s Next Blog: 1.1
Duct Tape Marketing: 1.1
Open the Dialogue: 1.1
Strive Notes: 1.1
Church of the Customer: 1.0
jaffe juice: 1.0
PR Squared: 1.0
Chaos Scenario: 0.9
Copyblogger: 0.8
Beyond Madison Avenue: 0.7
Todd And - The Power to Connect: 0.7
Bad Language: 0.7
Blogging Me Blogging You: 0.6
Brand Autopsy: 0.6
MIT Advertising Lab: 0.5
Brand Sizzle: 0.5
Make the Logo Bigger: 0.4
Copywrite, Ink.: 0.4
The Copywriting Maven: 0.3
Marketing Begins at Home: 0.3
Into PR: 0.2
Presto Vivace Blog: 0.2
Brand Noise: 0.2
On Message from Wagner Communications: 0.2
adgoodness: 0.1
The Buzz Bin: 0.1
Common Sense PR: 0.1
Marketing Whore: 0.1
Occam’s RazR: 0.1

If you’re not on this list, we’re sorry — our fingers got sore. But please feel free to put your own blog’s results in comments.

Overall, we were surprised how seldom many marketing bloggers use the term. Of course, a number of you may have gotten off easy because your search engines didn’t return all the results they should have.

Running the same query on different blogs really makes you appreciate blogs with good search. We were particularly impressed by the ExpressionEngine-powered search used by Shel Holtz and a few others. We also noticed that some slackers who shall remain nameless don’t even have a search engine on their blogs.

Next up: “Mashup”.