It's Time To Play Buzzword Bingo!

Sometimes it’s as if marketers and social media types and other people charged with presenting our message to the public have a language all of their own. Which can make it a little difficult to understand their message.I’m here to help – here’s a glossary of 13 common buzzwords, and what the people using them really mean:Authentic: "We didn't buy our followers, and when our intern drunk-tweets on our account, you'll know it's because we just keep things real."Client-Centric: "We do our best not to piss off the people whose business pays our bills, even if they're wrong. But they're never wrong. Did I do that right?"Content: "It's such a pain to say article or infographic or videos or all the different things it could be, so let's just give all those things that people read or watch one word that doesn't differentiate between them, and then include advertising in that, so that no one knows if they're being marketed to."Crowdsourcing: "We had no ideas, so we just asked everyone what they thought and plan to use their answers in a blog post and e-book later."Disrupt: "We're doing something old in a slightly new way. It's going to change everything you ever knew about [insert industry here]. Or not."Engagement: "We answer Tweets when someone mentions us. And they're nice."Guru: "I have my account set up to automatically tweet every article published on TechCrunch and Mashable."Influencer: "This person has a lot of followers on [insert platform] and will post about us if we pay him."Omnichannel: "We need to be on every platform and share everything everywhere. Also, it's a big word and sounds good when we say it in meetings."Pivot: "Our first [second, third, fourth and fifth] ideas really didn’t work out, but that doesn't sound as good."Second-screen: "Let's make people focus on two things at once and maybe they'll end up subliminally absorbing our commercial messages."Snackable Content: "People have short attention spans so we've gotta give them content in little bitty bits. Also, I'm hungry and the vending machine was out of Munchos."Synergy: "Let's work together, but in a non-boring way. It sounds like energy, which is all active and everything."Thanks to Merlin U. Ward and his Giant List of Buzzwords.A version of this post originally ran on Inc.