Talking jargon may not help you to connect or does it?

Over the period of the last three months, which has been often interesting to say the very least as well as never being predictable - we have had meetings to connect with many different types of organisations throughout the West Midlands region.

The intention has been to connect and develop valuable networking/sales contacts and affiliations that can help Prequire of which Connect WM and Need to Sort is part of to move forward with its business aims and objectives. We have met some fantastic people who are looking to expand their businesses to obtain more recognition, awareness and most importantly more profits.

The one thing we have noticed during our conversations is the use of jargon which is banded about at meetings, the most common and used phrase is "I will touch base".

Where has this phrase come from in itself it makes no sense but to the average person it means "I will call you" or "have a meeting". 

It was once said that if you are going to communicate a message it is best to use proper clear language, although now in the modern business world you may need to have a quick lesson on “Jargon”.

In some cases, there are languages which are specific to an industry, for instance, printing and design use words like “bleed”, you know if you heard the word bleed it certainly does not immediately bring to mind a leaflet or a business card .......or does it ?.

There’s the newish phrase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) would mean to many only a few years ago that there would be a need to have the car’s engine looked at to get the best performance. But today it’s a phrase referred to about improving the results to a website, again today a website could be full of a load of spider’s and webs...

Twitter is a prime example if you said to someone ten years ago that they would be “tweeting” on a regular basis they would have looked at you a bit strange, more so today when you hear people say that they get up, have a coffee, then do a few tweets can make your imagination run a little wild.

Twitter, Tweets and DM (Direct Massage) are not phrase used in business..... To everyone worldwide they mean - "I will post you a message". What has happened to normal speaking?

LinkedIn gives an idea of linking and ConnectWM also gives an idea of connecting but with Twitter, you could imagine the meeting when that name was mentioned, there must have been loads of coughs and laughter but that name is now worth zillions.

Another phrase being used is “Avatar” – we’re sure that most people would think that you are talking about a movie, but it is used to describe numerous things like an image or a logo, what next?

There can be a big danger and a problem if a business person uses a term when they don’t really understand what it means if the person they are talking too doesn’t have a clue what they are on about.

The phrase Viral Marketing is another that can cause confusion, for instance when sat at a marketing seminar, one of the attendees gave the impression that they thought that viral marketing was a reason to just hand out post-it notes with their business details on.

Now we’re not saying this is wrong as opportunities have to be taken where they can, but it does make you think that with all these phrases and messages being thrown about - that it could cause embarrassment if the understanding of the phrase is not fully comprehended, either by the person talking or the person listening.

So with that, we’re going to log out, have a quick tweet, put a post on our wall and see if I can connect on LinkedIn. Oh nearly forgot we’ll have a few Diggs also...

Question is? What would we have thought if we said that in a conversation 15 years ago!!!!!!!!