What all the buzz about? Top 10 buzzwords every small business owner should know

What is all the buzz about, you ask? Well, we as humans love coming up with new ways to communicate and buzzwords are a way to do that.

From writing characters on cave walls to texting each other on phones, we like to use particular words, symbols or pictures to capture the attention of others and help get a message across (ahead of all the other messages) and create excitement and interest.

The same is with using buzzwords, words that put a picture in your mind and communicate an idea, in a very popular and excitement generating way.

There are hundreds of words out there and the list changes from year to year and sometimes even regionally. For instance, I find that things are popular on the east coast, way before they are popular in Northwest Arkansas.

I don’t know if there are more inventors of hyped-up jargon on the east coast or not, but if you travel often, you are likely to hear certain words used in larger crowds way before you hear them at home.

Of these words that, rest assured, have already made their way to Northwest Arkansas, there are 10 that we here at Type 3 feel that are “must know words” for all small business owners with web sites. Let’s see how many of these you can use in a sentence 🙂

Top 10 buzz words you should know

Freemium – A program or app that has a basic free option and a premium option that you have to pay for.

Newsjacking – It is the “art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so your ideas get noticed”

mCommerce – This stands for mobile commerce. It is web purchases that target the buyer that uses a mobile phone or tablet

Infographic – Is a visual graphic that represents information, data or knowledge with the purpose of presenting information quickly and clearly

Snackable Content – Is bite-sized chunks of information to quickly convey an idea. With small attention spans being an issue with those browsing the internet, many will focus on providing content and information in very small amounts

Brand Storytelling – This is the storytelling that goes beyond your basic description of products or services and is a culmination of many points of contact, creating a story out of your brand identity

User-Generated Content – This is content that the user of the communication provides. Mostly mentioned in reference to social media, an example would be of a customer posting a video on Facebook of how to use your product and you share their post on your page. She is the user of your product and she generated content for you.

Social Influencer – Someone on social media that influences large groups of people. Some times they are experts in the areas of influence and sometimes they are people that create buzz and are just after attention (and getting it)

Vlogging – A video blog. It’s a video that is set up like a blog. Sometimes videos get more attention and create more conversions on client websites.

Disruptive – It’s something that you do in business that disrupts the current status of how you do business or how your industry does business. Example: Netflix was disruptive to the movie rental industry as customers no longer had to go to a store to rent one but could do so at the comfort of their own homes.

Buzzword overload

Ok, so a person can possibly suffer from a syndrome called “buzzword overload”. Symptoms are rolling your eyes every time someone uses one or more of these words. At times this reaction can be almost uncontrollable.

Now to counteract all of this buzzword mania, the Wallstreet Journal created Business Buzzwords Generator, a tool that would gather subscriber business buzzwords and jargon and it would create a buzzword statement or two from randomly drawn buzzwords.

Whether you choose to use buzzwords or not, you need to understand their meaning and possibly incorporate them into your daily vernacular. Try at least 1 per date to get started. You’ll be an SME by the end of it (an SME stands for subject matter expert and could be someone of any formal or non-formal training on a topic).