Posts Tagged ‘media buzz words’
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.
