Using Your Own Words
I’m not a big fan of jargon, although I’m sure I speak aviation jargon all day long without realizing it. So, I guess what I really mean is: I’m not a fan of jargon that I don’t understand. It agitates me and leaves me anxious that I’m going to miss some crucial grain of information, simply because I misunderstood the meaning of a word – because I thought that “cloud computing” had something to do with weather predictions.
At the end of last summer, several of us sat down in the conference room to discuss social media and how our use of it might transform our industry, our company and us. By now, most Americans know what social media is and maybe most people knew then. Maybe I was the clueless one. I struggled to keep up in the meeting simply because I didn’t understand the terminology. It all sounded like Jabberwocky to me. I recognized the words as being English, but I had no idea what to do with them. I’m still no pro at social media jargon, largely because it changes faster than I can keep up; however, I’m better at it now than I was then. I have learned to translate the jargon into words that are comfortable for me. I can boil the strange, new concepts down into conceptual language that I can relate to.
When I was at an industry conference in San Antonio, a session speaker used our company as an example of one that is diving headfirst into the technology and communication culture. I mistook the presentation date and missed it, to my great embarrassment, but I heard that it was fantastic and that we were reflected in a complimentary way. As I chatted with people during the conference, I got a lot of, “I’ve heard I should do this, but I’m still not sure how” or “They said I should do these things, but I don’t know why.” After nearly eight months of blogging, tweeting, posting, disseminating, commenting, editing, photographing and god knows what else, some days I’m still not sure the How but I’m figuring out the Why.
When I first shifted from operations into outside sales, I met lots of blank stares when I told people who I was and who I worked for. They’d never heard of us, in spite of our size and our history. It was a disheartening struggle. I went door-to-door, talking about who we are and what we do. I was making progress, but in a global scheme, it could be measured in microsteps. At the end of the day, you’re not going to see an ad for our company or most other aviation companies in the Wall Street Journal. We don’t buy ads during Wimbledon. And we don’t have an agreement with a mainline airline. But, we’re good at what we do. Social media has given all of us a way to share our questions, our beliefs and our ideas with the world.
You’re good at what you do. You’re more than a set of wings and a block purchase program. You have ideas of your own and beliefs on how to make your company and our industry better. This is your way to share it. You don’t have to rely on a canned message from somebody else. You can say it for yourself. All you have to do is learn the language.
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Jon Anne,
and understand the language. My challenge as a business aviation professional is not understanding the language, but learning (sometimes through trial and error) the best way to reach out to those in our community, including current and potential customers, vendors and competitors. CFM’s blog is a great example of leveraging social media to encourage community relations in bizav.
I was also at S&D in San Antonio and I attended the social media session. Many of the attendees seemed to feel the same way you did: that social media speak sounded like jabberwocky. I grew up with social media (I learned to type by instant messenging
Two years ago, I had never heard acronyms such as FBO or NBAA, but I can now speak “business aviation-ese” with any of my industry peers. I believe social media adoption in bizav will be the same: it will take some time for everyone to understand the language and best practices will always be growing and changing, but over time, if we focus on fostering a community atmosphere, all users will be able to benefit from participation.
Thanks for the great post! I’d love to see a tweet-up at this year’s NBAA – see you there?
Thanks for your encouragement , Danielle! As you know, we believe that social media gives us all an unprecendented opportunity to connunicate with our peers and, perhaps more importantly, with the thousands of people who drive by general aviation airports daily. They look our direction, but they don’t really see us or see the benefits we offer to them, to their companies and OUR communities. As an industry, we have been frustrated by inaccurate media portrayals. How exciting that we can finally tell our own story!
NBAA 2010? You bet!
Jon Anne;
This is a wonderful post. One of the distinguishing characteristics that you reflect on here is your willingness to sign your name to what you say. You post your face to the comments you make. You make a commitment to your words because they will be around long after the ad spend is gone and the tennis fans go home.
Thanks, Dan. We’re only saying what we truly believe; and, if you really believe something, it’s not hard to put your name on it. I may be wrong from time to time, but, in the words of Charles Schultz via Lucy Van Pelt, I’ll be wrong at the top of my voice.
Jon Anne – Thanks for this post and your honesty about not getting it at first. I appreciate this perspective since I find myself trying to explain why social media is important to sales reps and managers every day. I find myself saying, “Trust me, you get out of it what you put in to it.” And many times, that is just not enough. I have convinced a handful to sign up for Twitter and a few have agreed to blog, but not many are actively participating. I see it slowly changing, but it is up to the trail-blazers to lead the way. Thanks for being one of them.
Beth Humble
Social Media Trail Blazer for Duncan Aviation
Thanks, Beth! We are all having a good time with this. It’s a big undertaking, make no mistake, but it’s introduced us to so many people (like you and Dan and Danielle) that we probably would not have met otherwise. We can share our ideas, our successes, and our failures, learning from each other to make our industry stronger. I sound a little like I’m running for office, which is surely not the case. I believe in what we do and who we are. The main stream media has presented our industy as something other that what it is. and I believe that we are the only ones who can successfully defend it. Besides, if we won’t, who will?
Love the post, as always – Jon Anne! People tend to make too much or too little of social media. I like your technique of boiling down the jabberwocky into manageable terms!
I like to compare social media to a telephone. It can be a very effective business tool, for instance, if your sales team is using it well. It can also be a complete waste of time if your employees are gossiping with friends all day with no apparent objective.
The two things I recommend for businesses using social media -
1) Make it part of a marketing and/or customer service strategy (or in your case, PR and advocacy! Since it’s obviously working for you that way.)
2) Measure the return on investment
This takes some discipline, but that’s business for you, especially these days, right?