The Importance of Being Urban

In my last blog entry, I touched on the nascent phenomenon of grassroots online "citizen journalism." What that's all about is essentially capturing the zeitgeist--the spirit or movement that defines the age. Related to this is the idea of staying attuned to the latest idiom, the hippest new words and figures-of-speech. It's not just incumbent on the marketer to know what's being communicated in this hyperactive digital age, but rather how it's being communicated--in what terms, phraseologies, and neologisms.

To this end, arguably the most revolutionary tool marketers have at their disposal is the Urban Dictionary. The Times Online called this popular revisionist iteration of the English lexicon the "future of slang dictionaries." Whether you want to know what words kids are using to define the cool, the hip, and the edgy, or you're struggling to figure out what exactly the term "hot mess" means in one of R Kelly's rambling urban operas, it's all there in its emphatic (and sometimes scatological) glory.

And it isn't a joke. The founder, Aaron Peckham, is a computer science student turned Google employee. His is a dictionary written not by academics, but by the wordsmiths themselves. It's unedited, unabridged, and utterly uncontrollable. But it's a wave of noise that should not be dismissed or ignored, because germinating somewhere in that huge, amorphous hum of slang might be the next big buzzword or catchphrase that will sell a million units of your product.

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