Blisstering Solutions

Last month, the eminently readable and undeniably talented Ginger Conlon wrote a post about buzzwords on the 1to1 Media Blog (which is one of the first things I read each day, and you should too, because it quite nicely puts things in a customer-centric frame of reference). She asked about buzzwords people hated, and she got a barrage of vitriol about verbiage people were tired of.

I had to think about the difference between a buzzword and jargon. Jargon seems to be the accepted shorthand language people use when discussing a specialized subject they both understand, while buzzwords start life as terms used by marketing people to describe those specialized subjects from the outside. Buzzwords can evolve into jargon, but the evolutionary process can be brutal and the weak are culled from the herd mercilessly.

I don’t have that much trouble with buzzwords – I just try to avoid them if they’re confusing. And they can be. Let me coin a new buzzword – “fuzzword.” That’s a buzzword whose definition is fluid and subject to change without notice, logic or purpose. Right now “cloud computing” is a fuzzword. Not long ago, “socialprise” was also a fuzzword (and I wrote about that, then!). 

Fuzzwords drive me nuts, because they’re used to describe new things in a shorthand way – but since they can be applied to a broad category of things, the audience never catches on to what they mean. Either the end users define them on their own and bring them into the realm of jargon, or these words remain in the realm of marketing, where their impact and usefulness fade with time.

They’re also pretty easy to make up. In response to Ginger’s post, I suggested the buzzwords “Cloudsourcing,” “Tweetalitarianism” and “Analysales.” I suppose I could make up definitions to them, but I would rather not. That could actually make them useable in areas other than marketing.

Thus, I announce the first annual Inside CRM CRM Buzzword Contest. Send me your best original buzzword and its definition; the winner will be picked by my panel of experts (a mysterious group of marketing pros) over whom I exert total and ruthless veto power. You can email them directly to me at cbucholtz@tippit.com; the winner will be entitled to a dinner on me at the earliest time that I and that person are in the same geographic proximity (I’m in San Francisco, by the by). So do your worst, wordsmiths!