Doing some sort of Web 2.0, social media glossary for marketers is an idea we’ve been kicking around for sometime. With so many terms getting tossed around and created almost daily, tracking social media can be dizzying. While there are tons of glossaries out there for social media (Google it, or better yet, Bing it), we thought one dedicated to marketers would be a welcome addition.

Obviously, it would be easy to go overboard with something like this, so before we began we created some ground rules:

1. Avoid defining ridiculously well known terms like “Blogs” or “Social Networks.” Forgive us if some of our choices are still a little obvious.
2. Don’t define companies directly. Defining a service within a company, like “Facebook Fan Pages” for example is OK. Specific software is OK too.
3. Add a  “Benefit to Marketers” statement with each listing, where applicable. It’s all about you guys right?

Over the next week or two, we’ll publish the full glossary, culminating in offering it as a PDF for download, or maybe a Wiki. So with that…

A

AIR: stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, a technology that allows people to take web code (think Flash, Flex, HTML/Javascript/CSS) and deploy it as a desktop application. Tweetdeck, a popular desktop Twitter client was built using Adobe AIR.
Benefit to Marketers: an effective way to get your content portable and out of the competition of a web browser into a dedicated application that can stay top of mind with its users.

Advergame: see “Branded Games/Entertainment” below.

Avatar: the picture or icon one uses to represent themselves online, predominantly on social networking sites.
Benefit to Marketers: think avatars, think branding. As you represent your brand(s) through social networks, your avatar is an important brand element. Think about how it appears to others. Is it legible? Is it recognizable?

Authenticity: being true to yourself (i.e. your brand) and your customers when using social media. Some of the biggest social media marketing train wrecks have occurred when marketers weren’t completely transparent and authentic.
Benefit to Marketers: isn’t it obvious?

B

Blidget: “WTF is a Blidget?” That’s exactly what we said too when we first heard the term. Quite simply a Blidget is a widget that displays your blog. Blidgets use your blog’s RSS feed to populate into a portable widget that can placed anywhere widgets live. As far as we know, the term was created and popularized by Widgetbox.
Benefit to Marketers: you’ve got a blog, why not a Blidget? Get your content portable and sharable. Services abound to create a Blidget in minutes.

Blogroll: a list of sites displayed in the sidebar of blog, generally for the purposes of advertising who the blogger reads regularly.
Benefit to Marketers: give a shout out, get a shout back.

Branded Games/Entertainment: an online game or entertaining content that is based on, or features your products or brands.  With social media the potential to share games, play on social networks in multi-player environments, share images created from entertainment apps, and create status updates based on game activity abound.
Benefit to Marketers: where do we begin? There’s a massive shift in online marketing to create content to keep brands top of mind. What better way than by entertaining your audience? Some of the most fun casual games and apps have been created by brands, and with the introduction of social media, have much more potential to go viral.

C

Community Building: the process of forming an online community around a common goal, passion or interest utilizing social media’s capacity for sharing text, images, audio and video.
Benefits to Marketers: marketers who create forums for people to connect around their brand while helping facilitate—not control—the conversation will only continue to build brand followers.

Conversation: the threads of exchanges through social network posts, tweets, and blog comments are often referred to as conversations in the context of social media.
Benefits to Marketers: start one, be part of one, have them often.

Crowdsourcing: essentially tapping into a collective of like-minded people to solve a problem or generate content. Popular example: Wikipedia.
Benefit to Marketers: what a great way to inspire conversation around your brand or sponsor a promotion where people are invited to solve a problem.

D

DM: short for “Direct Message” a term used to send a private Tweet from Twitter.
Benefits to Marketers: what, you’re not using the Twitter?

Dave Albert: the president of Emerge Digital, a social media agency that writes this blog. Dave loves feeling smart by helping write glossaries.
Benefits to Marketers: have you seen some of the campaigns Dave’s devised?

Stay tuned for Part II, E-J coming soon…did we miss a term? Leave us a comment below.

Microsoft’s highly-anticipated Bing.com debuted recently, and Microsoft is reportedly mounting a massive ad campaign to promote it, so I decided to conduct a completely random, non-scientific, borderline unfair test of Google vs. Bing.

Based on some current client work, I wanted to locate articles that talked about successful launches of Ning sites–that is, the social network platform that allows anyone to create thier own social networking communities. So I fired up both Google and Bing and typed, “successful Ning sites”

Now I realize this is a fairly ambigous phrase. Successful how? But if Google or Bing could read my mind, they’d know I meant successful in the sense that the resulting site got a lot of people signing up, participating and generally staying engaged (making money helps too).

The results? Well, both search engines gave similar results, but Bing seemed to work more like a reference tool for the term “Ning” than give me actually relevant results around what constitutes a successful Ning website. In the top results were ning.com, the Wikipedia entry on Ning, and a couple Ning websites. Google on the other hand, had at least 3 articles on page 1 that were inline with what I was looking for–while not perfect, at least I was able to glean some valuable information.

OK, so winner: Google. And yes, it is a completely unfair one minute comparison. However, how many chances do you think people testing Bing out will give it? That’s right: one. For all  Microsoft’s millions of dollars in Bing promotion, they’re only going to have one shot to get this right. Personally, I don’t think Google has much to worry about.

I read a post not too long ago about how Seth Godin’s book, “Permission Marketing” had turned 10 years old recently. Not to come off like a soothsayer, but I recall when I first read that book, it completely made sense to me–it was just so natural, so commonsense.

What my 20-something naive head failed to realize at the time was how unnatural and foreign these concepts were to other marketers. The book was eye-opening to say the least.

Our last post talked about how Facebook Fan Pages could very well eclipse brand landing pages and microsites as the leading method way to drive people to an online “home” for  brands. That post, and being reminded of Godin’s landmark book got me thinking about how Fan Pages also fit in so well with opt-in marketing–that permission to be marketed to–to be part of the conversation.

For example, I presently have 1,668 emails sitting in a “to be read” folder in Outlook. These are all email newsletters I’m interested in. I genuinely want to read them, but of course, I rarely find the time. Contrary, I do read my favorite blogs via an RSS reader (mostly now lying in bed with my iPhone). However, if I become a fan of a brand on Facebook, I fully expect the occasional post to show up in my News Feed. In fact, I want it to because I’m that invested in that brand. For example, I love the show “Pitchmen” on Discovery. I became a fan of their page and occasionally Billy Mays (or someone pretending to be him) will shoot out a clip, or when the next episode is going to air.

The posts are short, I can breeze right past em, or click through if I want. And I actually perk up a little when I see a new one. When’s the last time a marketing message did that? Conversely, I would NEVER read an email newsletter sent from the show…Billy, I love ya, but stay out of my inbox.

And yes, I realize this all takes a page from Twitter, but having the posts integrated with the Fan Pages keeps the conversation and the interaction all in one place. I can see it all during my 10 minutes a day of “Facebook time.”

Facebook even announced the ability for people to Become a Fan of your page right from ads you run on the site.

It’s unlikely Mr. Godin could have predicted all the wonderful places permission marketing would go…but we’ll always thank him for getting us started, and continuing to be a thought-leader in the field. Viva La Godin. Viva La Facebook.

For what seems like eons, though Oceanic Flight 815 was Lost well before, brand marketers and the agencies that represent them have been trying to find effective ways to tap into the Facebook audience. With 200+ million accounts worldwide and 50% of those users hitting the site daily, it doesn’t take much grey matter to see why.

Some firms have only dabbled in social applications, often with less-than-stellar results. (One infamous example was Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, which may have received more attention through PR than the application itself.) Clearly, some brands are good candidates for Facebook Apps due to the nature of their brand—such as how they fit into people’s lifestyles or have reached coveted cult-status—and some brands aren’t. (For example, who really wants to interact with toothpaste on Facebook?)

That leaves most brands with the option of advertising on Facebook, or creating Facebook Pages, which essentially provide the ability for them—entities that aren’t “people” per se—to create a presence on the site. While Facebook Pages have existed for some time, until recently they were pretty static—templated and limited in functionality. Back in March, however, Facebook launched an entirely new Pages strategy, making them more like user profiles, and equally important—much more customizable.

This new approach gives brands a greater presence on the premiere social network, and the primary reason to be on Facebook; to connect with others by letting people “Become a Fan” and following the brand through status updates, photo galleries, videos, widgets, apps, links, custom content, and offering the ability for fans to post their own content and comments (brands have some control over this). It’s starting to catch on.

For example, the other day I saw a TV spot for Vitamin Water, specifically advertising their Vitamin Water 10 products. Did they put a URL to the Vitamin Water website on the screen? No, they directed people to their Facebook Pages. (If you’re interested, you can see it at: http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater10).  I find this move telling, because the actual Vitamin Water site is beautiful. It’s a highly immersive whiz-bang Flash site that Vitamin Water undoubtedly paid handsomely to build—but really, it’s nothing more than an advertisement online. The Vitamin Water Facebook Pages? OK, I have to admit: they’re pretty well done. They could have created some custom pages, and touted their  “Animal Attack” Facebook App a bit more clearly, but the presence is really pretty well thought out—there’s some Flash allowing users to learn about the flavors, watch videos, and do fun stuff. As of this writing they have about 22,000 fans (up from under 20,000 just last week), and seem to be updating their Wall posts fairly regularly with real people actually commenting and rating the posts. (And by “real” I’m assuming not paid agency people or Vitamin Water employees.)

Despite the naysayers, it’s easy to see that people do want to interact with brands on social networks—as long as there’s a story to tell and a reason to share it. While 22,000 Fans might not sound like much for a large consumer-brand, these represent the people who actually thought enough to follow the brand—actual visits to the pages are inevitably much larger. To that end, consider Victoria’s Secret’s PINK Facebook Pages, another consumer brand active on the site, at over 1.2 million fans. Now those are real numbers.

Will Facebook become the new home for brands? Or just a short-term fad? Are Facebook Pages the Golden Ticket to reaching a vast audience sharing and passing along brand info to their friends?

On second thought, maybe I would become a Fan of toothpaste. Aquafresh anyone?

(Note: as of this post, Aquafresh has 396 fans and hasn’t updated their Facebook Pages in what appears to be a little less than a year. Tom’s of Maine is doing much better…)

Cue the film clip.

Remember the scene in Jerry McGuire where Tom Cruise bursts in on Renee Zellweger, his former girlfriend, a wrenched look of anguish on his face (number three in Cruise’s repertoire of five)? Cruise rambles through all his ‘feelings’ until he crescendos into the well-known “you complete me” line. Of course, Zellweger melts into his arms, they get married, they live happily ever after, blah, blah, blah.

At Emerge Digital. We don’t complete you. We extend your reach.

The collective wisdom among interactive agencies is that there are developers who write the computer code upon which all internet applications run (websites, games, widgets, …) and designers who create the look and layout of everything you see in those applications (text, images, visual & organizational flow,…). Both of these roles are essential to any interactive campaign, yet because of the history of advertising, the assumption is that the two are completely independent and that if you can do one, you can contract out the other.

This assumption is just wrong. What’s worse, it creates dysfunction right from the start.

Think of it like a relationship. What you have is two people attracted to each other because each seems to fill a gap in the other. That’s how it starts anyway. But it rarely results in a Hollywood ending. Each partner winds up feeling that the part he/she brings to the table is undervalued and that what his/her partner brings is inflated out of all proportion. The same thing is true for interactive agencies. Design agencies who contract out for development and development agencies who contract out for design both bring unhealthy relationships to the table—dominance/submission, condescension/resentment, etc. It’s a lot of baggage that you as a marketer shouldn’t have to deal with.

Enter Emerge Digital, stage left. You probably saw that coming, huh? That’s okay. You don’t want any surprises coming from the agency you hire. You want creativity. You want expertise. You want …(drum roll SFX) results.

Emerge Digital is unique among interactive agencies because we place equal value on both the design and the development aspects of your work. We feel they’re really just two sides of the same coin, which becomes particularly important for marketers because it’s your coin.

(Relax, there will be no “Show me the money” references here.)

What we’re talking about is a constant, complete integration of design and development through every step of the process. It’s a vision that includes perceptions associated with both of these creative strands as well as a constant grasp of the ‘Big Picture’.

More than that, though, the close relationship between design and development at Emerge allows us to be more flexible than other agencies. And this allows us to be more innovative in adapting new technologies and design strategies to marketers’ needs. This agility translates into our clients sidestepping the competition and getting their messages out more quickly and to greater effect.

This amounts to a seamless stream of communication, between designers and developers, between Emerge and you, and between you and your audience. Furthermore because our focus is interactive, this communication doesn’t end when your message finds its audience on the other side of the screen. On the contrary, that’s the point at which the conversation between client and customer starts—a more honest and high value conversation than any scripted dialog you’ll find in a summer blockbuster.

Emerge Digital: Now playing on every screen your audience uses.

(Roll credits)

No animals were harmed in the production of this blog, unless you count the haircut we gave our cat. She now looks like a cross between a lion and a poodle. Looking good, Abby.