Sorting out your SMEs? Tracking to your MBOs? RTing your friend’s OOBE? What now?
This post goes out to all the technology marketers who, like me, are drowning in a seemingly bottomless bowl of acronym soup. You know who you are—diving into your DMs, composing your CTAs and issuing the occasional OMG.
Acronyms are formed from the initial elements in a phrase, and are pronounced or spelled out as new words. Thanks to the EM team at CMD, here’s a short list of strange and ponderous ones, as well as a few acronyms commonly used in business situations. Think of them as pepper in your next PPT—just don’t overdo it.
At the risk of looking like a n00b, here goes …
1337: elite software developer, abbreviated from code
AR: action requested
BOM: bale of materials
BTS: back to school
COB: close of business
CTA: call to action
EOD: end of day
EOW: end of week
KPI: key performance indicator
MBO: management by objectives, pronounced IM-BOH
KTHXBYE: OK, thank you, goodbye
OOBE: out-of-box experience, pronounced OO-BEE
RT: retweet
SMB: small and medium business
SME: subject-matter expert, with the unfortunate pronunciation of SMEE
TAM: total available market
VAR: value-added reseller
WW: work week
When in doubt, don’t strain yourself. Consult the handy Acronym Finder or the Urban Dictionary.
OK, did anyone have an aha moment? WDIM—what did I miss?
Next up, observations on onomatopoeia in #hashtags. (JK, folks.)
Tags: cmd agency, conversation starter, crisis communication, social media, tools, Twitter
A few more acronyms that many of our technology clients use:
TDM – technical decision maker
BDM – business decision maker
CXO – Chief Executive Officer or Chief Experience Officer
A few that I had to learn on my own:
ROI – return on investment
NSFW – not suitable (or safe) for work
TY – thank you (don’t know why that one was so hard for me to figure out.)
Julie, thanks VERY much for posting these as well as the resources to look up others. Many of these may seem like “no-brainers,” but the danger of no-brainers is that when we use them we often succumb to the “curse of knowledge” discussed in the book Made to Stick.
Thanks for helping out a n00b.
Coming from one n00b who doesn’t have someone else around to ask, I wanted to thank you for all of the acronyms you’ve posted here. I’ve got a few more that I had to learn for myself:
ROI – return on investment
NSFW – not suitable (or safe) for workplace
Acronyms can be a useful tool, but we have to be careful when we use them that we don’t fall in to the trap called “the curse of knowledge” mentioned in the book, Made to Stick. This trap occurs whenever we begin to assume that those to whom we are communicating are working from the same knowledge base as us.