Online marketers have a code, culture and vocabulary that is a foreign language to people who don’t live and breath Internet marketing geek speak.
A search marketer’s daily lexicon includes words about tactics and actions for sharing and virally spreading messages, building brands and helping rank websites on the front pages of search engines. Geek speak represents daily life online, our Internet marketing jargon and lingo used while participating in online communities.
Geek Speak for Tactics
Geek Speak relating to methods, or tactics, for marketing and positioning a company’s products and services include some of the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Blogging, User Generated Content (UGC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking, Reputation Management
Does online marketing have more acronyms than government work?
Translate and learn some of this lingo at MarketingTerms.com, an Internet marketing terms reference.
Geek Speak for Actions
Internet marketers, as well as customers and non-marketing types who surf the Web and/or buy products online, are all part of the process. Our actions become part of the marketing message. You may not know the word or term for what you are doing when you’re online, but when you are speaking about a product or service, your language becomes part of that company’s brand.
Geek speak for daily actions through which we share include:
Tweet, Stumble, Thumb, Sphinn, Digg, Post, Tag
- Tweet - a message less than or equal to 140 characters posted on Twitter
- Thumb - the act of giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to cast your vote on a website post, article, photo on StumbleUpon. People who look through StumbleUpon then Stumble upon sites for which others have voted.
- Sphinn - voting approval or disapproval (desphinning) submissions made on Sphinn, the site where many in search marketing hang out to share stories
- Digg - another “vote” of approval to say you like an article
- Post - creating an article for a blog, a blog post
- Tag - adding a keyword to posts or inserting words into a tweet or bookmarking a site with tags (Delicious)
These terms relate to participation on social networks, also known as “socnets.”
