
After he defined “view at 30,000 ft,” an airplane metaphor for the big picture, Matt Mecs, whose intelligence drove my first buzzwords post almost three years ago, directed me to “30 Days of Buzzwords” on Mashable. I picked just a few to whet your appetite and to leave room for a few others that caught my eye.
A talented writer and original thinker, Mecs is also director of sales at Local Focus Radio and media studies adjunct professor at Metropolitan College of New York. We share tooth grinding reactions to most buzzwords.
From Mashable:
Curator
Stephanie Buck wrote “If you use the web you are a ‘curator’” which she makes clear has nothing to do with the museum kind but refers to “a whole new catalog of professions, brands and tools — and most revolve around the web.” She continued: “A curator ingests, analyzes and contextualizes web content and information of a particular nature onto a platform or into a format we can understand. In other words, a curator is like that person at the beach with the metal detector, surfacing items and relics of perceived value. Only, a web curator shares those gems of content with their online audiences.”
Ideation
In “How About a glass of ideation?” Dani Fankauser explains: “Most often, when people use the term ideation, they’re referring to coming up with ideas, also known as brainstorming.”
Snackable Content
“In our busy, media-saturated, distraction-rich lives, marketers, brands and media outlets have to work harder and faster to grab our attention, giving rise to the buzzword in question — ‘snackable content’” That’s Amy-Mae Elliott writing in “Are you hungry for ‘snackable content?’” She notes that some studies report average adult attention spans run from 2.8 to 8 seconds [the latter down four from 13 years ago.]
Social Commerce
Then there’s Lauren Indvik who covered social commerce. She quotes a marketing consultant, Heidi Cohen: “ ‘it’s ‘social media meets shopping.’”
KPIs
Writes Todd Wasserman in an amusing post about the metric that I’m ruining by picking out just the core for this post: “The acronym stands for ‘key performance indicators.’” He continued: “Every industry has its own KPIs. In retail, for instance, same-store sales are a KPI, while in the auto industry they might be inventory turns or manufacturing cycle times.”
Moving away from this wonderful mashable.com series:
Native Advertising, Snowfalling and Pizza Story
Joe Pompeo, wrote “Times Editor Jill Abramson Likes ‘Snowfalling’ A Lot Better Than ‘Native Advertising’” in CapitalNY. Abramson inserted the terms in her public talk at Wired Magazine’s annual business conference.
Pompeo wrote: “‘Snowfall,’ verb: To execute the type of expensive, time-consuming, longform-narrative multimedia storytelling.”
He quoted Abramson who defined native advertising “‘for the conference set … It’s the buzzword of 2013’s business model discussions at conferences.’”
And pizza story? It’s “A massive breaking-news event that keeps reporters and editors holed up in the Times Eighth Avenue newsroom for extended periods of time. Example: the Boston bombing.”
Six More
Last, here are a few I’d saved from David Mielach’s BusinessNewsDaily’s “12 Buzzwords You’ll Need to Know in 2013.” All definitions are Mielach’s:
Advertainment— “Advertising is no longer about interrupting what people are interested in, it’s about being what people are interested in.”
Phablets— A mixture of a smartphone and tablet.
Alphanista— “Successful women in powerful positions having it all.”
Inventreprenuers— “An entrepreneur-inventor hybrid that markets and/or manufactures their own creation.”
Twinternship— “An internship where the student’s mission is to promote the company and its brands using social media such as Twitter and Facebook.”
Minergy— Someone who uses “minimal energy to get the task accomplished.”
Any buzzwords to share? Do you find them fun, exclusionary, irritating or possibly error-inducing?
