Buzzwords: What’s the fuss about?

Buzzwords: What’s the fuss about?

It’s an over communicated world. And the time for easy to understand, lucid communication seems to be over. RIP. Hearing some of the jargon, you feel as if you are staring down the barrel of a gun (where unlike present day communication, the threat is clear, present and danger). Whatever happened to using simple language to state what you actually mean.

Buzzwords

I am certain most of us would have come across (and still coming to terms with) these buzzwords that keep sprouting like popcorn from the machine. In case you have not, let us do a bilateral to understand what these mean. Oops, by bilateral I meant a face to face, one on one meeting. And, all along I thought these kind of bilaterals were reserved for Heads of State, Diplomats etc. Nothing official about it, I dare say.

The other day I was quite tempted to reach out to my friends who love snorkeling (I am not the underwater type though my boat has been rocked many a times) to understand what it means when people say deep dive. In the good old world, it very definitely would have had to do with water, exploring for marine life, pearls, the quarrel for coral etc. Not any more. For the uninitiated deep dive means going in depth into understanding a subject and getting set for the next round of buzzwords…meetings or should I say bilaterals?

Now, being laid off or asked to leave is not exactly a very pleasant situation to be in and given that state of mind, how would you react if someone came and told you that you are being reorganised …what if the person responds by saying that she is very organised? Sorry, won’t help. Reorganised here means you are asked to leave or let go. Period. Won’t seem to be such a gracious exit.

Do you have bandwidth was a common question posed when it came to mobile, telecom or radio equipment. The dictionary meaning of bandwidth is ‘ the range of frequencies with a given band, in particular that is used for transmitting a signal ‘. In the present context, if a colleague asks you if you have bandwidth, it purely means do you have time to help out with a project. It might be sending out the wrong signals but well that is the reality.

buzzwords 1

Narrative is another flavour of the season. Once upon a time, we would equate this with screenwriting, story telling, essay writing etc. But ever since President Obama fell in love with this word, it has taken off exponentially but in a completely different context. Why has “narrative,” an ancient word, moved suddenly to center stage in today’s politics? I think it has something to do with the growing sophistication of the political spin industry and growing competition between media outlets for increasingly fragmented and polarized audiences. In other words, today’s audiences are no longer satisfied with choosing their own news outlets. They also want to choose their own versions of the reality that news covers. Whether they realize it or not, they’re shopping for their own “narrative.”

There is lots and lots more and you sometimes wonder what’s the fuss or should it be buzz about. Strategic Fit, Quality Vector, Knowledge Management, Drill Down, Smartsise, Rightshoring…the list is abuzz and goes on and on.

New words are added to the Dictionary every year. Last year, selfie and hashtag became part of Merriam Webster’s Dictionary in recognition of their popular usage. And new words and slangs reflecting the increasing use of technology are also added to the Oxford Dictionary every year. Looks as if the buzz is not going to stop. So, time to mind your language might as well come out with all guns buzzing!

 ENDS

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Image Source: Sterling PR and Edelman

Visitors are from Earth.Unique Visitors are from some other Planet!

Visitors are from Earth. Unique Visitors are from some other Planet!

The numbers make incredibly heady reading. The NFL sport has a huge fan following and a team like the Washington Redskins takes fan following to an absolutely exponential level.

Going by a recent Washington Post article, the Redskins which moved its training camp to Richmond a couple of seasons back, undoubtedly prompted more NFL fans to know and read about the city of Richmond than it would have normally happened.

RedskinsNow brace yourself for these sledgehammer blow numbers. To understand the impact of the Redskins team move to Richmond, a third party media monitoring analysis report was conducted by Meltwater and TVEyes. Now here is the prognosis: That report determined, among other things, that there were “7,845,460,401 unique visitors of print/online coverage of the 2014 Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Camp from July 24-Aug. 12.

RedskinsIf you are numb with shock, here could be the reason!! The Unique Visitors that the report cite is far higher than the actual population on Planet Earth (a total of 7.26 billion as estimated by the Census Bureau), of which only 40% have real internet connectivity. It’s quite possible that a lot of (hue)mankind  from Pluto, Mars, Jupiter and where have you were very interested in the Redskins.

Its quite apparent that this joke of a report has not gone down very well with a lot of people(many of whom not being thick skinned are seeing Red, do pardon the pun). Highly tempting as it may be, I am not appointing any of these ‘experts’ to monitor our ISD Global site’s (www.groupisd.com) statistics and unique visitors and the reason is very simple. We are looking for unique visitors of the human kind that walk the earth. If any(thing) from nether world were to browse and visit us, we wouldn’t know how to deal with it. At www.brandknewmag.com we populate our site with content, but if we were asked to use content to populate population, we would come a cropper!! We are neither that Unique nor Rich(mond) you see…

ENDS

www.groupisd.com

www.brandknewmag.com