Technology, Media and Marketing Buzzwords for 2008
As the year comes to a close, here’s a list of ten marketing, technology, and popular media buzzwords for 2008, in no particular order:
Cloud Computing: Developer programs and services that are available over the internet. A virtual “cloud” for techies to share space, tools and ideas.
Longphoto: A video of 90 seconds or less, popularized by the photo sharing website, Flickr.
DWT (Driving While Texting): Self-explanatory, and not very smart but many of us have done this from time to time.
PhotoBombing: Intentionally inserting yourself, uninvited, into someone else’s group photo for comic effect and/or shock value.
Long-Tail Keywords: Keyword phrases of three to four (and some say five) words, said to convert better than their shorter counterparts, delivering that much desired ROI (Return on Investment).
Green Marketing: Centering your marketing campaigns around the concepts of sustainability and preservation of the environment. Includes ” green-washing“, or taking a product’s shortcomings and repositioning them as ecologically-friendly traits.
Web 2.0: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, countless blogs. If you have incorporated social media into your marketing mix, the good news is that it IS here to stay. Others would say that the bad news about social media and network marketing is that it is here to stay. Whatever your position, Web 2.0 makes the list once again this year.
Web 3.0: Just when we were getting used to Web 2.0, along comes talk of Web 3.0, or the semantic web, a “world-wide database”. The word semantic means “to give meaning”, but no one seems to know exactly what semantic web means. Ironic. Hopefully we’ll learn more in 2009.
Reputation Management: An unavoidable by-product of Web 2.0. With all of this social networking going on comes the need for reputation management, also known as brand management. Think this doesn’t exist? Just ask the folks at Motrin, who suffered the wrath of thousands of angry baby-toting moms (and dads) who did not take kindly to an ad campaign which seemed to be poking fun at them. What followed was some serious damage control by Motrin’s PR team. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here is the ad that unleashed the firestorm. Which leads me to my next buzzword:
Tweet: Various forms or this word describe all things related to the popular social networking/message following site, Twitter. Twittered, tweet’d, etc. I’ll use it in a sentence. “Moms, furious about the Motrin baby-toting ad, tweeted about it for days.”
There are many more popular buzzwords coined in 2008 not related to marketing or technology that are worth mentioning: Hockey Mom (i.e., Sarah Palin), Change (also “Obamanation”), Recessionista (a combination of frugal and fashionable), and the list goes on. Feel free to add any of your favorites in the comments section.
