Jargon Watch

GAMEY - Google, Apple, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo!. VC-speak for the group of companies expected to buy up the creme of Silicon Valley start-ups. Thanks to CNN Money.

Generation Cash - Generation Content getting paid through sites like citizen journalist photo agency Scoopt, and video sites like Revver, eefoof and Flixya splitting ad revenue. This content for cash game has gone mobile; mobile operator 3 pays video creators per download through its SeeMeTV initative and MyNumo rewards the creators of ringtones, videos and wallpapers through a revenue share approach.

The concept also extends to the black economy trading on eBay and those people operating as part of the Fon wi-fi network and the big cash prizes offered by the likes of Intel and Netflix for customer-generated innovation. It's Alvin Toffler's prosumer concept made good. Thanks to Trendwatching.

Jargon Watch

Income inequality - As cited by Paul Donovan of UBS global economics team in the podcast episode Unequal Economics.

There has been a well-observed difference in disposable income between the rich and poor, however UBS also found that the inflation rate for those less well off in society has been higher than other members of society.

Like thermoclines in cold water stratifying out into different layers so different inflation rates have affected income groups.

For the past ten years, the worst off in society have undergone a recession whilst the well off have done well. Donovan claimed that this had a number of knock-on effects:

• Companies whose product offering is aimed at the lower-end of the market will be adversely affected by higher inflation rates
• The pension returns required by different levels of society are very different due to the different cost of living profiles
• Income inequality is likely to bring more progressive taxes, political resistance to globalisation and a subsequent disruption of the economic cycle

Jargon Watch

Creation Nets - Where hundreds and even thousands of participants from diverse institutional settings collaborate to create new knowledge, to learn from one another, and to appropriate and build on one another's work—all under the guidance of a network organiser. From the McKinsey Quarterly article Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation by Hagel and Seely-Brown.

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Bushenfreude - Like the tax cuts of the Bush administration, but dislike the rest of the presidents policies. From Slate.

Starbucking - Telecommuting from a coffee shop, courtesy of Valleywag.

Jargon Watch

Naivist - From a Danish social policy and current affairs book Islamists and Naivists by Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittelkow warning of conquest by Islamic fundamentalists in Europe.

A naivist is a European who ignore the threat posed by Islamists. Their book is bound to get more publicity as it compares Islamic fundamentalists with Nazis and Communists.

The book has become a bestseller in Denmark and received coverage in the European press. Kudos to the International Herald Tribune.

Jargon Watch

Jenny Jones - as in to have a Jenny Jones moment or to do a Jenny Jones. An action that in retrospect was inadvisable and makes you look very bad in the eyes of the public - a PR nightmare.

From the Amedure murder that occured because of a 'prank' on the Jenny Jones talk show. An episode was recorded where Scott Amedure confessed his love for mechanic, Jonathan Schmitz who was straight.

Whilst Schmitz laughed it off on the show, three days later Schmitz killed Amedure.

The show was accused of using underhand means to get Schmitz on the show and should have known about his history of mental illness which is thought to have aggreviated the situation.

Whilst Jones was not found liable in court, the court of public opinion voted with their feet and the show as eventually cancelled in 2002.

I am curious oranj

El Reg has caught up with Orange's mod your mobile campaign. I am sure the programme is designed to crank up the ARPU (average revenue per user) amongst Orange users and get some positive word-of-mouth karma about the brand.

Mobification - the art of modifying your phone: from painting it to adding a screen cleaner and Hello Kitty pendants, a Reebok lanyard from Romford market or a new ringtone is sweeping the chav nation.

With almost 90 per cent of those surveyed (for a press release) admitting to at least altering their ring tone.

Iain Tait of Poke London has been involved in running an online campaign to highlight the MaxPower version of mobification for Orange here.

Jargon Watch and black experience

GFE - Google fcuking exists. As in telling someone to look online via a popular search engine for an answer that would be located there.

A while ago I blogged about the launch of Coca-Cola Blak. I have since had a chance to try it. Imagine a medium sweet cold thermos coffee with a faint fizz like orange juice that's gone off. It's bizarre but likeable.

Jargon Watch and links of the day

Sexiled - When your room mate kicks you out so that they can engage in sexual activity. Apparently the phrase used to describe said condition on college campuses according to IG TrendCentral.

Gartner releases their 2006 hype curve, with a poor image is even less use than a Big Brother contestant.

Google the verb

Google has finally woken up to the fact that the very art of googling upon which the business is based chips away at the company's right to own its own brand.

'Google it' as in to search online using the Google search engine is legally verbotten. If its legal stormtroopers don't crack down soon anybody could call a web site Google something or other.

I guess its time to Yahoo! that Bitch as Ian Rogers said.

Jargon Watch

Launch and abandon - The process of marketing a product for three or four months and then moving on to the next priority. Common marketing practice with car companies who have new models coming out with regularity of someone with a high-fibre diet.

It came up in an article about the Ford Motor Company promoting its new Fusion line of vehicles by putting hot wheels toys in packs of cereals.

Part of the deal included on-pack pictures of the toys.

A canny piece of marketing: catching kids whilst they're young to build a love affair with the brand (Ford of Europe did a good poster campaign based on this idea for the Focus earlier on this year on the London Underground), or tapping into the child that exists withing every adult male. I guess someone should have told them that the only male adults that get to eat cereal are stoners, college kids and slackers get to eat cereal.

Mattel must have been very happy at the bulk order of 600,000 toy cars especially as the market for Hot Wheels is shrinking due to the KAGOY social phenomena (kids are getting older, younger).

Kudos to the San Jose Mercury News.

Links galore

Stopgap Marketing and Mad.co.uk have published the results of their salary and work survey across all aspects of marketing. Women made up about two thirds of the respondents and the best sector to work in from a pay perspective is market research.

The biggest areas of dissatisfaction (page 36) were strong leadership from senior management and the lack of a clear career path. So it seems whilst the board thinks that marketing is too important to be left to marketers, marketers think that the directors should make a start by running the company. Full details here as a PDF document. Want to know more, contact Lou Bushell at Stopgap.

The nice people over at Terratag have launched their latest t-shirt designs, buy one now and pretend that you are down with the kids and can talk their hepcat-speak daddio.

Also Orange have finally released details of their project. It's an advertisement supported by a Big Brotheresque blog: the blog has the best argument against convergence I have ever heard, a quote from a participant called Jeff "I have deleted all the crap that came on the phone to free up memory and have copied as many of my Bonnie Tyler tracks on to it as it will hold."

There goes Orange's ARPU targets up in smoke then. The Orange ad will appear tonight on ITV, but I am sure they will have people like Iain Tait and the super-sharp coders at Poke London seeding it on YouTube in no time at all.

Mog is the new Last.fm seriously. Check it out.

Lastly thanks to a review of Why Johnny Can't Brand DSI (dominant sales idea) is the new USP (unique sales proposition), just another example of why Bill Hicks told marketing and advertising people to kill themselves: "By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No, this is not a joke: kill yourself . . . I know what the marketing people are thinking now too: 'Oh. He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market.' Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags."

Jargon Watch

Jason Calacanis over on his blog tries to create a new meme to encourage usage of the new Netscape website.

Diggscape - The action of submitting a story to both DIGG and Netscape, or asking users to vote for your story on the two services.

There is still the opportunity to get this on to UrbanDictionary as well, as it is currently undefined.

It's interesting the way Jason has tried to get Netscape direct injected into the online Zeitgeist and is something that PRs can learn from.

It will be interesting to see how successful Netscape becomes in its new reincarnation. What is also very interesting is the way that Jason has removed other services like del.icio.us, reddit and Yahoo! MyWeb and pared it down just him and Digg.

Thus setting up a classic David and Goliath-type story, with Netscape being David.

One of the biggest problems that I had as a PR person when I worked inhouse at Yahoo! was that the dominant (maybe monopolistic position?) of Google meant that the name of the search engine became a verb to describe the act of searching online itself. Despite my best efforts I even found myself slipping into it a few times.

Now that the profit imperative has been removed I google with abandon.

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Capture
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Calling in rich - When the partner of a business has enough money and doesn't want to work any more they are said to call in rich.

It can be very difficult if the business hasn't succession-planned for the departure.

Generally it refers to the founders of technology companies, but I have known a partner in a hedge fund to do this.

Kudos to A VC.

Jargon Watch

Sausage casing girls - Young women and girls who are overweight and wear clothes that are far too small for them, so creating giant love handles and letting it all hang out in an unsightly manner.

The debate rages on whether they are fashion victims needing to wear the latest slinky tops and hipsters, in denial about their size or showing body pride.

There is one great line from Letting it all hang out (July 5, 2006) by Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times: "Fat or skinny, it doesn't matter," she said. "The guys in there will look at you if you're wearing a little skirt and hoochie tank top."

Jargon Watch

wadds.jpg
Originally uploaded by adamgilhespy.

Militant consumers - highly organised disciplined consumers who are brand and marketing immune. They make best use of the near perfect market information available online to get the best price on items and are strident in an un-British manner demanding a refund on sub-standard customer experiences. Kudos to my old guv'nor Stephen Waddington over at Rainier

Jargon Watch

Zing
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Zing - A 'new' social phenomena that Samsung is trying to build around using the Z5; a poor imitation of the iPod Nano. Zing means to listen to music on your Samsung MP3 player and putting your head in another place instead of the dull normality of your life.

Unfortunately they are using tube ads to build this new social phenomena, there doesn't seem to be a spokesperson as a proof-point of the ground swell and given the popularity of the iPod it would be hard to back Zing up with credible research to build into a media story. So its a bit of a PR dogs dinner.

It may seem like a funky idea in downtown-Seoul, but its not going to wash on the Central line with its sea of white earbuds, instead it has the connotations of a cleaning product and has no appeal on the z-list of MP3 players. Dial Z for loser.

Jargon Watch: All talk and some action

Voice 2.0: The integration of voice telephony into web services, voice is an attractive proposition for everyday users; with mobile phones voice is still the predominant use of these devices.

There are many businesses who believe that voice is something which you build a business offering on top of rather than out of (which is the reason why Vonage's share price headed south on IPO).

A classic example of this would be having web ads and integrating call through to the supplier via VoIP or Jangl, an ad-supported service that provides one-time anonymous phone numbers to people that they could us when meeting new people in a bar, selling on Craigs List or eBay.

Its not only a consumer play however, McKinsey has found in its regular surveys of CIOs that they are looking for integration between telephoney and business applications as well (more information here).

Providing voice over IP networks does run into the risk of the carriers interferring with the quality of service officially like SBC's quest to end network neutrality, or unofficially using tools like Narus to monitor data at the application level and then altering the quality of service applied to it.

Jargon Watch

Textcasting - Created by the nice people behind Slate.com, what if rather than listening to inane stuff on an iPod you used it to read articles like summaries of the key issues that is in the mornings news?

Wouldn't that be more convenient than trying to open a tabloid or berliner-sized paper on the tube?

OK, so I may prefer to listen Public Enemy's Fight the Power on the way into work; but I have to admit reading the key news stories would be cool.

Apple hasn't tricked out the iPod as an e-book reader but Slate have put the text in the description field of a 15-minute silent audio file. Well if you can watch the Matrix on an iPod why not read smallish articles?

Also providing content to an already established ecosystem of devices like the iPod through an established channel like the iTunes Podcast service is going to be a lot easier than trying to sell e-books and readers to consumers like Sony is currently attempting.

Over at SourceForge the Encyclopodia project is putting Wikipedia on an iPod.

Jargon Watch

Phantom phone rings - Mistaking everyday sounds for your cell phone ringing and then responding in a Pavlovian manner to the stimuli by checking your phone.

Apparently advertisers are using this in a deliberate manner to prevent audiences from tuning out to their messages. Mobile phone ring tones occur in an attention sweet spot of 1,000 to 6, 000 Hertz (babies crying also hit in this range).

The solution? Get a piece of music as your ring tone.

From The New York Times (May 4, 2006) I Hear Ringing and There's No One There. I Wonder Why by Brenda Goodman.