Diligence is a good thing. Looking out for what is happening now is what good people do. I think many call it ‘due diligence’. Keeping your eye on what is going to happen soon is another skill. What should we call that? ‘View Diligence’? ‘Clue Diligence’? Maybe ‘New Diligence’? I think I like ‘Clue Diligence’ best. Kind of gives the feeling that there is a higher class of trend spotters out there and we should now call them ‘Trend Detectives’.
And we have one of those in our office – a splendidly perspicacious person called Katy. Anyway, the other day, she sent round a link to Google Wave (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html and http://wave.google.com) and you should go check it out.
It seems to be a splendidly Googlicious fusion of the utility of social networking tools and the futility of trying to work things out on your own. Actually taking the power of connected people to work, share, filter, fact-find and have fun doing it. It is going to be big … very big.
And here is my term for it: “Social Nextworking”. Do you see what I did there?
This set me thinking about the stuff people like doing on the web and I heard a very bright man – Faris Yakob (www.farisyakob.typepad.com) – talking about the joy that people have in mashing stuff up and how it is much easier to engage consumers in playing with your stuff than it is to ask them to create their own. Think ‘Cadbury’s Gorilla’ and you will know what I mean. He has a point, and as he was making it, I thought about another catchphrase that we could all start to use to describe this phenomenon: “User Modulated Content”.
There is even a catchphrase that describes how this happens – “Pick Up, Play and Pass It On’. But maybe I didn’t think that up at all and maybe I just dredged it up from things I have heard other people say. But from whom? And when and where did it come from?
Whilst I was feeling my catchphrase gland throbbing away in the mostly unvisited regions of my brain, I recalled a presentation that a brilliant man called Tom Himpe (and a not so brilliant man called ‘me’) did in April 2007 when he coined that phrase the first time around. We were talking about ‘User Generated Content’ or UGC and the myth of it. At the same time we talked about half a dozen other UGCs that cast some light on where the interweb might be going. Amongst other things we predicted ‘User Generated Crap’ – millions of bits of useless stuff that not many people like (think my last blog post). We predicted ‘User Generated Cash’ where people used the connections made on the web to raise money to support causes and businesses (think ‘Fundable’). Going one step further, we predicted ‘User Generated Companies’ where the web spawned communities of people with a shared idea and the willingness to turn it into a co-operative company (think ‘Threadless’). And many other spiffy acronyms were toyed with.
And that then set me thinking about all of the catchphrases, the natty names and the acronyms that our industry invents and propagates. Ones I have personally seen happen are things like “Connection Planning” (Derek Morris, 1997) and “Transmedia Planning” (Faris Yakob, 2007) and I bet I have seen a lot more considering all the brilliant people I have worked with.
We need these pithy descriptors, these witty one-liners, this taxonomy and we need the people that coin them and make them work. But who are they and how do we moderate them? Who anoints a term? Who defines its meaning? And is there a business opportunity out there to simply name trends, processes and practices and then patent them?
Winston Churchill is supposed to have said: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
And just as in history, where the truth is made by those who write it, in advertising, those with the best end lines are the ones remembered longest. I bet no one will remember the phrase “Social Nextworking”. Maybe I should have collaborated with 'the crowd' to come up with something better.
What do you think the best catchphrases in our industry are and can you point to who genuinely came up with them - not the ones who nicked them and put them in their books or on their blogs?
