Word of the Week – Social Media Campaign

We here at Purple Stripe have decided to start a new weekly feature called Word of the Week. Our purpose? To help enlighten, educate, and entertain you with the terms, lingo and buzzwords that we live every day on the social web. (This week it’s a phrase.)

Social Media Campaign

Incorrect definition: The process of taking pre-existing, traditional advertising, public relations, and marketing materials and shoving them down the social media funnel.  Have you the perfectly constructed 30-second spot and dumped it on You Tube?  Vomit links on Twitter of your boring press releases about your new VP of Boring Product Development? Turn your marketing tri-fold brochure into a ‘presentation’ on SlideShare?  How about a Facebook Fan Page that does nothing but spam people’s Wall with information about your company’s sales?  A blog set up to distribute the latest product literature?

Congratulations! You have effectively created your very own Social Media Campaign!  Now you can go ask your boss for a raise and let you surf Facebook all day “for research on the effects FarmVille has on spending habits.”

Word of the Week – Internet Fame

We here at Purple Stripe have decided to start a new weekly feature called Word of the Week. Our purpose? To help enlighten, educate, and entertain you with the terms, lingo and buzzwords that we live every day on the social web.  (This week it’s a phrase.)

Internet Fame

A specific celebrity status enjoyed by people on blogging or social networking sites that have accumulated a high level of followers or subscribers.  The key difference with Internet Fame (in comparison to only having a high level of followers) is the inflated sense of ego of The Famous fueled by an unprecedented level of loyalty and attention from followers.  The pinnacle of Internet Fame is marked by the inability to navigate industry conferences because of crush of fanboys/fangirls to get their picture taken, debate basic facts of their industry ad nauseam, or attempt to solicit a job/business/funding.  The Famous also grow to expect a particular level of swag, gifts, freebies, and perks not bestowed on non-Internet Famous people (i.e. their followers/fans), and can become quite vocal when denied these privileges (resulting in boycotts and slander).  One variety of Internet Famous people have come to expect that large international companies and brands will completely change the course of their business to accommodate The Famous.

It should be noted that this level of fame doesn’t translate into free lattes at Starbucks, paparazzi stalkings at the grocery store, fans recognizing you on the street – or that your boss at the cube farm you clock in at will care.

Word of the Week – Twitterati

We here at Purple Stripe have decided to start a new weekly feature called Word of the Week. Our purpose? To help enlighten, educate, and entertain you with the terms, lingo and buzzwords that we live every day on the social web.

Twitterati

Normal people (i.e. people that are not movie stars, Nobel Peace Prize winners, best-selling authors, or CEO of Fortune 100 companies) that have an extremely large following on the microblogging platform Twitter.  Mostly the Twitterati are people that have let Internet Fame get to their head, and feel that they are much more important and influential than they actually are.  Missing an extra shot of caramel in your triple-venti that you paid for?  Receive a pitch for a product that doesn’t quite jive with your lifestyle?  Complain to your followers on Twitter, DEMAND RETRIBUTION, call for boycotts, and watch companies crumble to their knees with a click of your RT buttton!

How can you be expected to keep up the level of Tweets you send to your 221,309 followers if sponsors don’t line up with their checkbooks to subsidize your existence and continue to let you keep doing nothing all day.  As if.

Now, where is my triple-venti caramel soy dammit!!

Synonyms: Twitterista

Word of the Week – Astroturfing

We here at Purple Stripe have decided to start a new weekly feature called Word of the Week. Our purpose? To help enlighten, educate, and entertain you with the terms, lingo and buzzwords that we live every day on the social web.

Astroturfing

An English-language term referring to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but designed to mask its origins to create the impression of being spontaneous, popular “grassroots” behavior. The term refers to AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt (“outreach”, “awareness”, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means.

To a lesser degree, any form of endorsement or testimonial that gives the impression of coming from someone’s personal point of view rather than a paid endorsement (or for corporate gain) can be considered astroturfing.  Popular examples of this are Twitter messages from people that rave about the new restaurant in town or review-style blog posts that give glowing reviews of products, when in fact there was money exchanged to publish a positive review.  Not only is the practice frowned upon, but the FTC is in the game with new guidelines and require disclosure if any sort of financial gain (payment or free products for example) were exchanged.