Fritinancy

June Linkfest

The headline calls them “30 Most Overused Buzzwords in Digital Marketing,” but one of them, “P-commerce” (“participatory commerce” or “Pinterest commerce,” depending, I suppose, on context), is underused in my world: it was new to me. I’ve definitely seen a lot of “gamification,” though.

Full Dilbert comic here.

“I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s,” linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote in a May 20 post on his blog. Zwicky devoted most of his post to a discussion of “garbage,” and concluded: “So the pointy-headed boss’s gamification rewards count as garbage, trash, and rubbish, maybe junk as well, and are on their way to becoming waste and refuse.”

One of the words on the “30 most overused” list, “showrooming,” was a Fritinancy word of the week in April 2012.

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If you live in the United States, there’s an excellent chance you live in Emmaland or Sophialand.

I remember when all women named Sophia were about 90 years old, like Dorothy’s mother on “Golden Girls.” And in a few decades, it shall once again come to pass.

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Prosecutor, Lariat, Ranger, Roundup: What are all those macho herbicide names telling us?

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“The Art of the Brick,” Edward Sawaya’s new exhibit at Discovery Times Square, is “a Legoistic survey of art masterpieces,” according to a recent New York Times review that introduced me to the acronym AFOL: Adult Fan of Lego. AFOL and many other Lego terms – but not “Legoistic,” which is wonderful – are defined in the Lego Glossary. (“SNOT: Studs Not On Top. A building technique that places LEGO elements on their sides or even upside down to achieve the shape or structure the builder wants in their creation.”)

“Lego,” in case you didn’t know, is a contraction of Danish leg godt: “play well.” It’s never pluralized. Here’s the Lego Glossary entry for “Legos”:

Oh no you didn’t! Technically, the official plural form for more than one element of LEGO is “LEGO® brand building bricks”. That’s ridiculous, though, so most LEGO fans refer to one or more bricks as “LEGO”, following the grammatical convention of “fish” and “sheep.”

Insisting on all capitals, however, is just silly.

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Linguist Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, looks at 12 old words – kith, wend and eke among them -- that have survived by being fossilized in idioms.

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After 60 years of sanctions, Coca-Cola is back in Myanmar (Burma). How to sell Coke to people who’ve never tasted it? “They had to keep it simple, and they had to find the right message. A message, it turns out, that was hidden more than a hundred years back in the Coca-Cola archives.”

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“Dear NSA: Those slides are hideous.” Designer Emiland De Cubber suggests a radical remake for that PRISM presentation.

August Linkfest

Even among billionaires, there’s room for improvement. See how Bill Gates has transformed his presentation techniques over the last few years. (Presentation Zen, via Brand Mix.)

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One way to add juice to a presentation is to use effective metaphors—for example, Gates’s “12-foot truck trying to get under a 10-foot bridge.” Listen to James Geary, who calls himself a professional aphorist, explain how metaphor works and why it matters. (The Pollywog Blog.)

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Want to become a name developer? Or name your own company or product? Nothing beats practice, practice, practice, but study helps, too. The Thingnamer blog has pored over some of the best books on naming and given each one a mini-review and an honest rating, from “Must Own” to “In Need of Update—Avoid.” Click through to buy.

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“When do you need an exact .com—and when can you get away without one?” In a succinct yet comprehensive video tutorial, Laurel Sutton, a principal at Catchword Branding, provides the lowdown on finding the right domain name.

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Two brand-related posts on Nancy’s Baby Names: “How Many Babies Are Named Ikea?” (answer: many more than necessary) and “Car Names As Baby Names.” (No, I’m not the Nancy of Nancy’s Baby Names. Meet the other Nancy here; read my own post on deciphering the IKEA naming system here.)

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Here’s a bit of irony: Condé Nast, which shut down Gourmet magazine in 2009 after 68 years of publishing, is getting into the restaurant business. The first titles to be licensed: Vogue and GQ. Brandchannel speculates about what the signature dishes of other hypothetical Condé Nast eateries might look like. (Glamour: “Are you really hungry for dinner? Or love?”)

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The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant blog, Inside Scoop, asked readers to nominate the worst restaurant name in town. There are 112 comments so far; “Squat & Gobble”—yes, it’s a real restaurant, with two locations and an X + Y name—appears to be the unpopular favorite. (Via NameFlash.)

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What do Grace Kelly, Kurt Vonnegut, Johnny Weir, and Sherlock Holmes have in common? They’ve all had asteroids named after them. But first they had to win approval from the International Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. (Mental Floss.)

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Bored with Buzzword Bingo? Take your most-loathed corporate jargon (“move the needle,” “realize negative gains,” “ideate”) to Unsuck It for an instant translation. Or click “I’m feeling douchey” for a random jargon-to-English conversion. (Hat tip: Karen.)

Word of the Week: Pecha Kucha

Pecha kucha: A presentation format in which each presenter is limited to 20 slides at 20 seconds each, for a total presentation length of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.

Pecha kucha was conceived and named by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham, a western architecture firm in Tokyo; the first event—Klein and Dytham called it PechaKucha 20x20—was held in Tokyo in February 2003. The concept spread around the world, especially among the design community.

Pecha kucha (sometimes spelled PechaKucha; its creators have obtained trademark protection for PechaKucha Night) is the transliteration of an onomatopoetic Japanese term that means "chit chat." It's pronounced as three syllables: pe-CHALK-cha. The format is often described as "the antidote to death by PowerPoint." Other informal definitions include "attention-deficit theater" and "the Twitter of slide presentations."

According to the official PechaKucha.org website:

Good PechaKucha presentation [sic] are the ones that uncover the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas. Some PechaKuchas tell great stories about a project or a trip. Some are incredibly personal, some are incredibly funny, but all are very different making each PechaKucha Night like 'a box of chocolates'.

UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business recently hosted its first Pecha Kucha Night, "Dimensions in Design: The Evolving Role of Design in Business." Read the live Twitter stream from the event here. PK Nights take place monthly (mostly) in San Francisco, Chicago, London, and other cities.

A similar presentation format, Ignite, was started in Seattle in 2006. Ignite limits presenters to 20 slides at 15 seconds each.

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Do you, like me, have trouble seeing "pecha kucha" without thinking of gutta-percha or Esa-Pekka Salonen?

Words on Screens

"Communication is the transfer of emotion," writes Seth Godin in "Really Bad Powerpoint."

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Seth lays down the law: No more than six words per presentation slide. No cheesy images. No sound effects that came with the program (rip and burn your own, he says). And no bullets ever.

This is Seth Godin talking, the bald, oracular marketing guru who commands huge speaking fees (I've attended one of his presentations; Seth does Really Good PowerPoint) and is quoted fawningly all over the blogosphere. When Seth talks, business leaders snap to attention and salute. But will a lecture from Seth change their pathetic PowerPointing habits? Not a damn chance. They're too scared, too ovine, too unimaginative. And too unlikely to team up with the very people who might save their reputations: writers and designers.

Here's an example of how PowerPoint might be done brilliantly. VidLit isn't strictly a presentation format; it's a book-marketing medium. Company founder Liz Dubelman spent ten years in film and television production and got the idea for VidLit while listening to This American Life, the National Public Radio program that's been described as "like movies for radio." VidLit is like music videos for books. Dubelman and her crew record authors reading snippets of their work and add original music and Flash animation to create, in Dubelman's deadpan words, "a compelling new form of entertainment." Her first creation was her own short-short story, Craziest, about her Scrabble obsession. She became briefly famous when a VidLit (or YidLit) for Yiddish with Dick and Jane attracted so much attention that she and the book's publisher were sued by the publisher of the original Dick and Jane books. Nothing like a lawsuit to fire up the fame engines. Now playing on the VidLit site are clever little teasers for The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit, by Lois Beckwith; Don't Get Too Comfortable, by "This American Life" regular David Rakoff; and--my current favorite--Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace. And many, many others.

So what can corporate presenters learn from VidLit? Plenty. Notice how the images in a VidLit don't politely mirror the words being spoken. They play peekaboo with the words, tweak their noses, run circles around them. Notice how the soundtrack creates an instant "going-to-the-movies" vibe. (Hey, this isn't a meeting--it's entertainment!) Notice how the narrators never say "um," or "let's see if this thing is working." And notice how you feel after you've watched a VidLit. Yep. It's a "transfer of emotion."

That's communication.