Welcome back to what we hope to be a regular cycle of blog postings. We have a great team here at Peerset with a variety of fields of expertise ranging from online advertising to cognitive science, logic, linguistics, and of course systems design, programming and marketing. I am sure that we will hear from these folks in time, but for now most of the blog postings will be coming from me, so please allow me to say a few words about myself. Because the title of this forum is DrV's Blog, you have probably figured out that my last name starts with a V but is too long for most people to remember (Veidlinger) and that I am a Doctor. But I am not the kind that helps people, as the old joke goes. I have a Ph.D. in Asian Languages so I guess I could help people if their problem was that they needed some translating done. But even then, the languages I study are mostly dead languages such as Sanskrit and Aramaic. So there is not much call for emergency translation assistance.
People always ask me what a "dead" language is, and the answer has a lot to do with the issues that we will be talking about on this blog, actually. A dead language is simply a language that does not change. It does not, contrary to popular belief, mean that no one speaks it anymore. It could in theory be spoken by a lot of people, but they do not introduce new words and ways of speaking like one sees in a living language. English, for example, is a very vibrant living language, by which I mean that it is
constantly changing and taking on new terms, and old terms are being used in new ways. Just look at texting. The development of a whole new way of communicating by using short phrases such as "C U L8r" and "lol" is a very exciting lexical shift for us linguists to contemplate. And of course new uses of old terms, such as "spam", "cookies" and "virus" are cropping up literally every day.
Where am I going with this? Or in texting lingo: WTF?  Well, the community of users is always (at least) one step ahead of industry when it comes to employing terms in new ways, or creating new terms to refer to old ideas. Language is so dynamic that an advertiser has to work hard to keep up with all the new ways that people are thinking and talking about their products and related ideas. An advertiser has to constantly mine the Internet in order to be sure to keep their copy in step with the fast-paced culture of today. This can make it difficult to keep a truly up-to-date list of targeting Keywords that represent your product or service.
You should be sure to keep a close eye on what is being said about you and your products on social media such as blogs, social networks, product rating sites and the like because you never know what new words and ideas your product is going to be associated with. This is, of course, best done in an automated fashion, and there are a number of companies that provide services to help you track what kind of things are being said about you and by whom on social media. The main aim of this kind of analysis is often to determine how the vectors of influence within the online community are organized with respect to your product – to answer questions such as: who is leading the way and who is following? Where do reviews appear first? How can I reach the most people with the least effort?
In addition to this, a linguistic analysis of the way people are talking about you and the kinds of words that are associated with you can provide extremely valuable insight into your cultural niche and the mindset of those who are interested in what you have to offer. If done properly, you can really capitalize on your knowledge of how your product fits into the culture of the moment and thereby boost ROI on your advertising budget by ensuring that ads are sent to the most relevant audience possible, and that your ad copy is in tune with the way that potential customers are thinking about your product.
