This wacky media world we live in is full of buzz words and poorly articulated phrases. This little glossary is meant to help with that.

A Cold Start - A cold start means no brand, no traffic, no content, no revenue – no credibility. Everything that needs to be done needs to be created without any momentum.

Call-to-Action – People are busy and messages are surrounded by noise, success with a marketing message includes a clear call-to-action that informs the reader what action they should take. If they’re engaged with your message they’ll take that action and you’ll make more money.

Click Through Rate (CTR) – Click Through Rate is a measurement of an ads effectiveness. If an ad is shown 10 times and 1 person clicks on it the ad is said to have a 10% CTR. In reality, a slew of research shows that the CTR average across the internet is under .1% – that’s less than 1 click per 1000 ads shown. The ability to deliver a good ad (well crafted and the appropriate ad size and location on a web page) in association with appropriate targeting – targeting local people with local ads in our case – has allowed Locable ads to generate between 500-1000% the CTR as the internet average with the best performing ads garnering many times that.

Content Marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Digital Editions – publishers use this phrase in a variety of ways but generally a digital edition of a magazine is available via some sort of flipbook technology built in Flash. Yep, the same flash that Apple does not support with their iPhone or iPad. On occasion publishers will refer to a PDF version of their magazine as a digital edition but this isn’t really accurate and PDF versions are bad because they’re huge files and generally must be fully downloaded by the user before they can be read.

EdgeRank – Facebook created EdgeRank in 2011 to address the overwelming amount of information people get from their friends and the pages they’ve Liked on Facebook. In a nutshell, it attempts to determine how relevant the post is to you and then based on that level of relevance it may or may not appear on your Newsfeed (the stream of posts that most people use on Facebook). The net result is that only a fraction of activity is visible to any one person and only a fraction of one’s activities (whether a person or business) are visible to the people that their friends with or are Liked by. Thus the importance of relevance and engagement is elevated and spammy quantity over quality posts are hindered.

Hits – You should bannish this word from your vocabulary, unlesss you’re a baseball fan it has a no business being mentioned in relation to website traffic. Hits are the number of files served which include things like images, CSS, javascript and many other items that appear on a single webpage. As a result a single web page can have 10, 20 even 100 hits… it’s a bad measurement of traffic.

Juice – SEO juice is the credit Google, Bing and others attribute to your content. If someone links to you that link is a ‘vote’ for your content and increases your SEO juice.

Local Voices – Local Voices are individuals in your community that are passionate about local issues, topics or interests. They may or may not already blog but want to be part or lead a conversation online with other enthusiasts.

Media Mindset – this is a term we’ve adopted because we find publishers think about their publication, the paper doohickey that they create and distribute. A Media Mindset is one that what you do in print, online, with social media and even at events are all related and work together to deliver a consistently compelling cross media community engaging experience.

Monetization – the process by which you generate revenue from a given activity… generally used when referring to websites or other digital activities. For instance, you can Monetize a website via ad sales, sponsorships, advertorials, contests etc.

Print-to-Web – When combining The Locable Approach with the Media Mindset we’re able to take print readers and convert them into web visitors – no small feat. We convert print advertisers and deliver more value through the integration of web packages. And we take a print brand and create a media brand from it. Thus, Print-to-Web is a set of practices, technology and resources employed to build community online around established local media properties.

Purchase Funnel – Not every message is useful for each person. There are many variations but a purchase funnel includes 4 main parts (actually, any decision we ever make includes these 4 steps some are just very rapid): 1. Awareness; 2. Interest; 3. Desire; 4. Action… know what you want your audience to do and how you want to impact them to get the most out of each and every message.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is the process of maximizing the ability for people to find your website when conducting a web search. SEO is about content quality and relevance more than ‘technology’ though a website needs to have a solid technical foundation to ensure the other SEO efforts are fruitful. SEO is a process, it’s ongoing, and it’s something you cannot afford to do poorly.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – like SEO, SEM is about driving ROI through search engines but it’s specifically a paid placement approach that enables a business to select which search phrases they’d like their ad to appear next to. Cost is determined on a Cost-per-click basis that is the advertiser pays for each click the ad receives.

Solution selling is a sales methodology. Rather than just promoting an existing product, the salesperson focuses on the customer’s pain(s) and addresses the issue with his or her offerings (product and services). The resolution of the pain is what constitutes a true “solution”. – Credit Wikipedia.

The Locable Approach – we don’t approach the “local” problem the same way as everyone else. We love building community, we say “Main Street for the 21st century”, by working with local publishers. The Locable Approach combines the values, readers and relationships of our affiliates with a specific web-based content strategy and approach to serving local businesses that allow us to build community online and help businesses join the conversation all while helping publishers become more profitable.

Value Multiplier is a phrase the describes taking one action yet receiving multiple benefits from that effort. Within Locable, it’s a signal how important it is for lean organizations like local publishers to get more than one benefit out of a given activity and, most notably, how digital efforts need to fit within existing print efforts. This can apply to content, promotion, ad sales, or any other aspect of your business where redundancy equals waste – wasted time, wasted opportunity, lost revenue, or simple inefficiency – the equivalent of a husband and wife each driving their own car on their way to romantic getaway… Value Multiplier’s are the business equivalent of car-pooling and they let you get in the Express Lane.