You Ask, I Answer: Identifying and Using Audience Slang?

In today's episode, Christy asks, what slang does your brand use on social media? Any you avoid. Slang's an interesting challenge because very often it is not just uh a broad audience, like a generation. A lot of people will say, like, using the the language of the kids these days, right? You know, the old the old get off my lawn thing.

But slang is really tricky because it isn't just generational, it's contextual to a specific group of people. Every individual group, including your audience, has its own slang, has its own lingo. In B2B, for example, we have tons of jargon. In in marketing, we have tons of jargon. We talk about things like customer journeys and CX and UX and all this stuff that somebody outside of our group wouldn't know.

The acronyms are inscrutable. Um we do this because as humans, it's a way for us to be able to identify other people in our group, uh identify people in our tribe. Um the the rationale of a brand using this obviously is to say, like, hey, we're one of you two, if you actually are. Now, if you're not trying to use slang is fraught with danger. Because again, using the terminology, it is incredibly tricky unless you have done extensive study.

So if you want to use slang to relate to your audience better, you've got to understand the all the cultural context that goes with it. There's a process uh called uh ethnography, it's from the anthropology that effectively does this where you, you know, kind of like uh Margaret Mead uh or Jane Goodall, you you embed yourself in that society, in that group, and maybe you don't participate at all. Uh you just listen. You listen, you study, you vacuum up data, you analyze it, and you understand the different terminology, the different uh contexts that certain words are used in. Uh if you are if you have an audience that has a community of someplace that's publicly accessible uh or is accessible with you know minimal invitation, that's the place to start.

If there's a a Reddit, uh a subreddit out there on uh Reddit, if there is uh a Slack group or a Discord group uh that you can join, go live in nature, like an anthropologist would, um in that community and listen. Listen to see how language is used and how uh how people are using it to convert convey meaning. It's really tricky. Um it may require you to actually sit down and talk to people and ask them and understand what things mean in the context of that community, because even sites like Urban Dictionary, which are great and fantastic resources, and I strongly recommend having it bookmarked in your browser, even those will not necessarily tell you how your group is behaving, the context of your uh I don't know, uh society that you're trying to study. Really simple example.

When somebody uses the slang term egg, they could mean very different things depending on uh what group you're in and the context it's being used in. It could mean uh somebody who is transgender who hasn't come out, it could mean uh somebody who's an idiot, which is uh uh uh slang term in new in New Zealand. Um it could mean somebody who is uh ethnically white but behaves in a manner that is uh let's just say um they have a strong affinity for Asian cultures, right? And you can see how these terms could be very offensive if you use them incorrectly. You know, one of the things that we always advise uh marketers is before you roll out a marketing campaign, somebody should do an urban dictionary check to make sure that you know key points are not inadvertently offensive.

Uh slang is even more tricky because you're you're trying to use the language uh and you may or may not have the context correct without a lot of study. Give yourself budget for yourself months, weeks, if not months, to learn this stuff. Now, you may be saying, Well, I that sounds crazy, I'm just not gonna use any because I don't want to spend months studying something just to use certain terminology on social media. It's more than that. If you do an ethnography project correctly, um you gain a very good deep understanding of the audience in ways that uh simply just skimming posts on Reddit uh would never get you.

And there's a lot of value in that because it helps you guide your marketing. Uh ethnography projects are something I have strongly recommended to for marketers for years, years and years and years. Uh, uh because when you understand your audience, you will create marketing that is much more personal, much more uh in depth, and much more meaningful to people. Again, with or without the slang, just knowing that, for example, there are uh people who are ethnically one uh group that associate and have an affinity for in another group is an important context. It's something that uh as long as it's not offensive, you might want to figure out how do you work that in to the conversations you have with people in in this target group.

So there are a bunch of frameworks out there that uh are really good for understanding sort of all these the different ethnography things. Dr. James Spradley uh probably has the most thorough network, uh thorough most thorough framework when it comes to ethnography. Um so check out his papers over on Google Scholar. You can read about how Sproadley's framework works.

It covers things like space, actors, activities, objects, acts, events, time, goals, feelings, and anthropologists use this to document uh what they're doing in a uh in a different society that they're studying, and most importantly, create interactions, chart out interactions between all these different things so that you understand how this group of people approaches all of their interactions with each other. You can use technology for it, but a lot of it is qualitative, a lot of it is just sitting down and listening, maybe doing one on ones uh with key members of the community. That's how you make progress in this sort of thing and how you eventually learn A, whether the slang exists or not, B, what it means, and C whether you have any right to use it or not. So we could spend a whole lot of time on this, but I will st uh say go study. Don't use it without study and give yourself the time to do it right and to do it thoroughly, and it will have a much bigger effect and impact on your marketing than uh just slang on social media posts.

It will help you really understand your customers or your potential customers uh so well. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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