Jargon watch

Cool words and phrases that I picked up during the Media Center’s Emerging Technology, Business and Policy for Senior Executives conference in Palo Alto this week. I’m not saying the folks quoted coined the terms, and I’m not even saying the terms are terribly new. Just that it was new to me …

Prospective search – mining for information that hasn’t happened yet. Casting your search net into the future. Similar to the AdRover feature that newspapers use in their classifieds or the PubSub product that was discussed during the conference.

Retropsective search (i.e. Google) – searching the past, things that already have been on the web. Often takes quite a while for these items to be indexed.

Hot Topic Publishing – finding a hot button, a rising meme, and covering it with a saturation blog. In Esme de Guzman Vos’ case, it’s a blog on municipal wireless networks and the legal and social issues surrounding them, especially telcom efforts to suppress governments from setting up free or competing wireless clouds in towns.

CGM – Consumer Generated Media

Brand Pulse – Intelliseek’s software, which “helps marketers, market researchers and product developers measure and track the pulse of consumer ‘buzz’ about any brand, company, or emerging issue.”

Internet – “The water cooler on steroids.” Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Intelliseek, which is based in Cincinnati. Blackshaw is a P&G refugee.

PlanetFeedback.com, he was involved in this. Apparently, Seth Goldstein helped fund it.

BlogPulse – using early monitoring of the Blogosphere to predict how a meme will rise and get a pulse of certain topics popularity.

Dog whistle – a marketing message isn’t audible to a product’s main consumers but is designed to be heard by a new, Katherine Von Jan of Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve gave this example: Tylenol wanted to draw a younger demographic to its product. While continuing marketing and advertising aimed at their traditional audience, they also sent out a dog whistle campaign designed to win over youth. The key was in “brailing” youth to find out what makes them tick, how they perceive pain and pain relief and to market along those lines. While this campaign is largely invisible to their core consumer (since it’s being focused at, say, skateboard parks, it comes through loud and clear to the youth demographic.

Brailling– Another term dropped by Katherine Von Jan of BrainReserve. This is ethnographic research, really digging in to try to figure out what makes a given demographic tick. Rather than observing them from above and outside, the marketer gets right down at ground level with them and works on their terms.

Podification – another tidbit I picked up from Von Jan. Essentially, the niche-ification of society. While the Media Center’s Andrew Nachison shows his slide show with the extended version of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love” in the background, featuring the “one world” riff. Von Jan noted that the trend really is toward podification, not unification.