The survey was inspired by a web site that has been making the rounds lately called what the fuck is my social media strategy? It works by randomly combining social media jargon and other annoying MBA-like phrases into coherent-seeming sentences. A similar site to make the rounds lately is called unsuck and it translates business jargon for the layman.
If you can trust the survey results -- and I am not so sure you can -- then the big takeaway is that these words don't bother people very much, at least not most people. The most irritating word -- viral / virality -- was, on average, not quite even "fairly irritating". Individual annoyances varied widely, though, as pictured in the second chart below. One person responded "not irritating at all" to all words. And the line extending farthest to the right, well, that's me. I don't consider myself a very irritable person, and even though I picked the words, I was quite surprised to see that result.
The reason why I say I am not sure the survey results can be trusted is because I suspect many of these words only bother people in certain contexts. Most people are not bothered by words, they are bothered by concepts. I believe that's why words like viral and tribes came out on top, because they are the easiest concepts to grasp without context.
Me, on the other hand, I am bothered by "empty" words, no matter the context. What I mean by "empty" can be demonstrated easily by playing the what the fuck is my social media strategy game of randomly combining words in a sentence:
Tools communicating engagement strategies.
Users executing community utilities.
Leveraging tribes to implement strategic communication.
Harnessing networks to utilize tools of implementation.
I ask this with sincere curiosity: Does anyone not want to barf after reading that? I am genuinely, physiologically disturbed by sentences like these. I am especially bothered by words that are both empty and unnecessary. Why say "implement" when you can say "do"? Why say "utilize" when you can say "use"?
I know I am not the only one who feels this way, so to the benefit of word snobs everywhere, I have included a thesaurus at the end to help you avoid such teeth-grinding emptiness. (Click any of the images to enlarge.)
