In a recent com­men­tary at M2M Mag­a­zine, Peggy Smed­ley dis­cov­ered that Pres­i­dent Obama has been call­ing for the advance­ment of many M2M ini­tia­tives. After polling 100 M2M Com­pa­nies to con­firm her under­stand­ing that the Smart Grid is in fact an M2M appli­ca­tion (why this was not obvi­ous, I do not know), she called on Pres­i­dent Obama to avoid plain speech and refer to this tech­nol­ogy by it’s “right­ful name — M2M”. Mrs. Smed­ley could not be more wrong, and here is why…

To be fair, Mrs. Smed­ley falls prey to the same issue that has held back the M2M/​Telematics indus­try for years: we fail to under­stand the end user’s per­spec­tive. This is an easy mis­take to make. After all, our indus­try con­sists of peo­ple who fondly recall slide rules and pocket pro­tec­tors; we are engi­neers. We love pre­cise language.

But end users don’t care. Their con­cern is sim­ply, “How does this impact me?” They have never heard of “M2M” or “telem­at­ics”. These words mean noth­ing to them. Worse, our use of such words is a direct imped­i­ment to an under­stand­ing of telem­at­ics’ value. These words are turn-​​offs. By using unfa­mil­iar words, two things occur: we make the lis­tener feel igno­rant, and com­mu­ni­cate that there is much to learn before our mes­sage can be under­stood. Why would any­one endure such learn­ing curve when rel­e­vance is uncertain.

I am sure that Pres­i­dent Obama’s speech­writ­ers got a healthy laugh from Mrs. Smedley’s phone call edu­cat­ing them on the “right­ful name”. They cer­tainly know a core prin­ci­ple of acces­si­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tion is “when not address­ing indus­try insid­ers, avoid insider ter­mi­nol­ogy”. Work­ing from the White House, they daily use acronyms such as GAO, NCLB, NIH, and of course POTUS, VPOTUS, FLOTUS & SCOTUS. But these acronyms never reside in Pres­i­dent Obama’s speeches. Why not? Because no one out­side Wash­ing­ton under­stands them. So, why would any knowl­edge­able speech­writer assume insider ter­mi­nol­ogy from a third-​​party indus­try? They won’t, and they are right not to.

Our indus­try would do well for itself if we learned from Pres­i­dent Obama’s speech­writ­ers. How can we frame our prod­ucts and ser­vices in a way that com­mu­ni­cates their value to prospec­tive users? Until we take off our nose-​​taped spec­ta­cles, and try to under­stand the per­spec­tive of our tar­get audi­ence, we will fail to see main­stream adoption.