Cranium is my all-time favorite board game, and it never gets old. For those of you who’ve never played it, Cranium is “The Game For Your Whole Brain,” requiring a variety of skills and created by two former Microsofters. In addition to Gnilleps (the activity in which one must correctly spell a word backwards without starting over) and Humdingers (where members of one’s team must identify the song their team member is humming), the Lexicon activity is a simple, classic multiple choice. A team member must select the correct definition of a word, typically a very obscure word, from four options to advance in the game. That being said, I implore you to continue reading this blog post not for your own entertainment and education, but to give you a secret, winning weapon for the next time you play Cranium.
It’s 2011 and we’ve been living in a world of real-time content delivery for a while now. With the generation and exchange of information happening so fast, new words are being introduced and adopted into our daily vocabulary faster than ever before. Who could forget some of this year’s break-out stars like Belieber, vuvuzela, G.T.L. (my favorite) and the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, refudiate? The consistent flux in our own living language led me to conclude that marketing jargon has grown and changed significantly as well. In fact, there’s evidence to support the idea that the growth of social media use by marketers and consumers has produced an overlap that led to marketing terms making the New York Times’ The Words That Made The Year list. For those of you who are curious about that picture of cat to the right, jump for an explanation and a brief collection of advertising, public relations, social media and SEO terms that you’re sure to hear more this year.

Public Relations Dictionary
  1. SMR or SMPR: The social media release or social media press release refers to writing a press release in a formatting style designed to optimize its content web-based sharing through social tools.
  2. SOV: Share of voice or SOV refers to the ratio of published or broadcast content about a client to its competitors’ “voices” in the media.
  3. Advertorial: An advertorial refers to content, whether in a traditional newspaper or as a blog post, that an interested party contributed and paid to publish.

 

SEO Terminology
  1. Blackhat SEO: Blackhat SEO is the umbrella-term for the general practice of using unethical techniques to improve search rankings.
  2. Anchor Text: Anchor text can easily be described as the text used to frame a link, for example the anchor text for this link to an integrated marketing agency is “integrated marketing agency.”

 

Advertising Glossary
  1. QR Code: A QR Code or Quick Response Code is a two-dimensional code readable by a QR code reader or camera phone that leads to information like text, a specific URL or other data.
  2. Hardlink: Hardlink refers to a physical world hyperlink. For example, QR codes can be printed on business cards or products to create a hyperlink to a web page.
  3. HTML5: HTML5 is the much buzzed-about, highly-anticipated next generation of HyperText Markup Language – the language the Interwebz is primarily written in.

 

Social Media Vocabulary
  1. Social Graph: Coined by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, the social graph originally referred to “the global mapping of everyone and how they’re related,” through social networking, but it has now been expanded to include all Internet users.
  2. Commercial Graph: Similar to the social graph, customers and local businesses directly connect to one another in the commercial graph.
  3. LBS: An LBS or location-based service refers to an information or entertainment service accessed through a mobile device that accesses, uses and delivers geographic information relative to the device’s location.
  4. Meme: Memes are cultural ideas, concepts or content that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet, like a trend. And that cat at the beginning of this post.