Business Jargon and Annoying Phrases..!

“Customer Engagement” – “Value proposition” – “Clickbait” – “Growth Hacking”

Jargon, Buzzwords, Spiel are not a new thing in business, with marketing departments being guilty of introducing a lot of them, but remember for those people outside of your Business Vertical, often referred to as new or potential customers, jargon is just gobbledegook. Businesses are now releasing content that suggests things like “We want to engage more deeply with customers to better understand their needs“. All customer service agents have just cringed because it’s obvious the marketing department came up with that, you’ll have to excuse them of course because unlike you they have no idea about talking to customers.

Real-Time Engagement on Facebook, Twitter and the like is on the increase and it’s not just big businesses who are learning to monitor enquiries and comments. If you work in PR you already understand the importance of swift action and how this can turn around a possibly damaging situation from negative online comments.

Some Buzzwords such as product benefits can have value when aimed at customers whilst others will just bewilder them. We live in a world where businesses must create a Customer Relationship that keeps people Re-Engaging with their content, after all it’s believed that Engaged Customers are more loyal customers… With this in mind shouldn’t we be using the simplest language possible when we send our content Over The Wall..?

Our job (yours and ours) is to Build Relationships with current and potential customers, so we should be looking for opportunities to join in on both the good and bad, post useful content, reinforce positive content, provide answers during discussions, whilst staying abreast of trending topics to show we have a Helicopter View of what’s happening in the World.

Learn to strengthen your Conversation Marketing, if you’ve managed to build an Engaged Social Community, these followers will often sing your praises and defend your brand and products when under attack from Flamers which will save you from being on a Burning Platform everytime something kicks off.

Social Media Monitoring gives you the opportunity to deal with genuine concerns that deserve your attention, however if you have built good Social Customer Retention then Flamers generally get no support and burn themselves out with no real damage done. Things happen in life, don’t try and Think Outside The Box to hide innocent mistakes but always see if you can make them work for you, if not then honesty is the best policy.

Social Media is a real Game Changer when it comes to Customer Interaction, so embrace the quirky, don’t be afraid of humour, talk about other stuff, social media is not a place to be stuffy and uptight, don’t be scared to relax from the marketing messages, remember most social media is of a personal nature and not a place to be formal. You won’t score points for the amount of Jargon, Buzzwords or Spiel you can get into a post and never forget users can smell marketing a mile off…

Jargon	And in English…?
Real-Time Engagement	Talking to people, right now.
Touch Base Offline	Talk to each other in real life.
Think Outside the Box	New ideas not yet thought of.
Content Curation	Sharing other people’s content ‘with meaning’ for customers.
Mocial	Mobile + Social = an unnecessary combination of words.
Omnichannel	The same as multi-channel but marketing at its finest convincing you it is a new thing.
Thought Leader	Authority/ The Big Guy in the industry/ The Einstein of [insert subject here].
Responsive Web Design	A website design that works on all screen sizes.
Synergy	Working together.

So if you are a thought leader that likes to touch base offline, whilst maintaining Real-Time Engagement across an omnichannel strategy offering a Value Proposition on your Responsive Website supported by sending content over the wall via social channels; Just remember there are people out there that won’t have a clue what you’re talking about, so you better know what it means in plain English.