The world of social media is abuzz with catch phrases and proprietary terms that can make newcomers feel like they are visiting a foreign country. Learn to speak the language however, and you will earn respect and credibility amongst your peers (or you will hear them making fun of you for using too much jargon when they think they hung up the phone but didn’t). Check out the following social media 3.0 beta buzzword guide and soon you will be chatting the nomenclature with the best of them and leaving your supreme hashtag on the Twitterverse. Before proceeding, you should keep in mind that we have chosen to help you understand how not to use the term in our examples. If you skipped the intro and are now returning to the blog to leave an angry comment after misusing these terms, you will be laughed at.
Social Graph
“I’m waking up at 530am tomorrow to jump online to put in some face time with my social graph so that I can finally shake the stigma of being the only person who is seven full degrees away from Kevin Bacon”
A person’s social graph is nothing more than a chart of all of their social connections. The user is placed at the center and their friends, family, and even businesses can serve as points all around them on the graph. Lines are then drawn from the user to their connections, and also between their connections where appropriate. This is used as a sort of at-a-glance view of your overall social activity, and looks pretty impressive when done in color coordination and hung above your desk.
Circle Back
“We’re going to loop in Chuck and Beverly and then we’ll circle back later”
Basically a really fancy and important way to say “lets have a meeting.” The difference is, when you “This quarter’s conversions weren’t congruent with our projections, I think we need to circle back on this one,” it makes you sound far more consequential than saying “lets have a meeting” ever could.
The Semantic Web
“We are essentially creating an aggregator that aggregates all of your aggregrated content into one easy to use semantic web interface”
This one gets a bit more hairy, but can make you sound really hip at the coffee shop. The semantic web is a concept of the Internet in which all pieces of data online would be tagged in order to make things easy to catalog and to help understand relationships and meaning of data. Think of your pictures on Facebook that contain tags of your friends’ names. Whenever you need to see pictures of you and your buddy Carol, you can just look for “pictures of me and Carol.” The semantic web, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee would essentially allow machines to make meaning of all of our data and allow our beloved Internet to be easily understood by robots so that they can properly serve us for a decade or so before they revolt. You don’t have to know how it will work, you just have to be able to talk about it until people lose you, and then you win!
Transparency
“I envision a strategic partnership in which we are both completely open with our technology and true motives because that transparency is really the key to my...our success”
Transparency is neat sounding corporate speak for “what are you doing?” When businessmen talk about forming a transparent relationship, what they really intend to say is “we need to see everything you are doing at all times.” As an example, transparency into a marketing partner’s social campaign means that one party gets to check in about where they are publishing, what they are writing, etc. Of course, such a domineering and invasive position is a turn-off in most partnerships, so the term transparency was created to make the whole thing go down smooth as a milkshake.
Brand Ambassadors
“Let’s tee up our brand ambassadors and push our message through any and all social channels’
Contrary to what the phrase implies, a brand ambassador is not an actual position at the company, so you have got to be careful when your coworkers begin throwing this term around because they could be referring to any number of people who work for your business. A PR agent, a spokesperson, a celebrity endorser – any of these people could be considered brand ambassadors, and to tee up with them is to sit down and develop a detailed plan of action for what they are going to do. Brand ambassador just sounds much more powerful than “representative,” doesn’t it?
Crowdsourcing
“Crowdsourcing the best new color palette for our style guide will help us get some of our blind-spots illuminated by opening up our knowledge pool to the masses.”
Crowdsourcing is a social movement taking place in which businesses can outsource (there’s one part of the word) design and content creation work to the crowd (…and there’s the other part). The crowd is simply any designer or hobbyist who wants to take a stab at your task. Businesses who post work orders up on crowdsourcing sites often get dozens (sometimes hundreds) or submissions, and can freely choose their favorite one and pay only that designer.
Initial Top Line Brainstorm ( or ‘B’Storm’)
“Are you free from 8amPST until 10amPST for the initial top line brainstorm sesh? From there you can put together a deck and then we will circle back before starting on the actual work”
A top line report is an important part of any new business deal that outlines the basic research, key findings and brief projections of a project for upper management to review. An initial top line brainstorm is when the people authoring the top line document circle the wagons (see above) and figure out what should go into the report. Alternatively, this is known as putting together a document.
Link Love
“I’m giving some link love to my favorite insurance site because they vote for my Yahoo! Buzz submissions.”
The goal of social media optimization is to attract the highest number of inbound links as possible. In layman’s terms, this means that you want readers to feel compelled to link to your content on their private Twitters, Facebooks, and blogs. Whenever someone links to your content, they are said to have given you “link love,” as they are showing their adoration of your work with a highly coveted link.
Corporate Positioning
“This deliverable is key to our corporate positioning, so we are going to make sure that the CTO also gives his feedback on the placement of the logo on the cover sheet of the TPS report”
Corporate positioning is a very brief term for a big concept. When you are working on your corporate positioning, you are trying to put the business squarely in your marketplace and establish it as the leader in whatever niche you happen to serve. This is, of course, a muti-faceted, long-term goal that cannot be accomplished with a few swift tactics, but telling the board you are working on corporate positioning should appease them, as few people understand exactly what it entails.
Putting In Some Face Time
“While an email thread or occasional conference call is probably sufficient for our workflow, perhaps we should both carve out several hours from a busy mid-week workday and put in some face time.”
If you want to discuss something of importance, (how to expand your foreign traffic, for example) but you don’t need to have a formal meeting about it, perhaps you just need to put in some face time with a few other coworkers. Putting in some face time is just simply meeting face to face to discuss corporate matters, but it can be done over a lunch, or maybe at coffee before the work day begins. Rather than telling someone you want to meet up for a soda and talk about something, make sure they understand the main focus of the soda is business – call it some face time.
Social Proof Optimization
“I’d love to come to your wedding but we just created a carousel widget that rotates our call to action from 12 different colors and we are going to be tied up all weekend swapping out the hues to make sure our social proof optimization doesn’t undervalue yellow just because we are using a shade of yellow that is too bright”
Social proof is a psychological concept that predicts that people’s behavior will be influenced by others in the group. Usually, this term is used to explain complex social interactions, but social marketers have taken to applying it to their marketing campaigns. The idea is that if everyone in a social community is signing up to your blog and commenting on your activity, new users who have never been there before will be influenced to behave in the same way. This buzzword has grown into one of the most popular in the past year as marketers strive to tweak page layouts and sales messages to increase the power of this social influence.
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