In 2005, Amazon introduced the Amazon Mechanical Turk, where users can reach out to a collection of researchers who answer "human intelligence tasks." The idea is that a group of people with predetermined qualifications can perform certain jobs more effectively than computers, whether it is scanning photos or providing shopping recommendations. 

The most controversial area of crowdsourcing is likely in the field of citizen journalism, wherein web publishing might be outstripping an editor's ability to monitor what is going out. As the news cycle gets faster, the danger is that journalistic standards could be relaxed because of an assumption that mistakes tend to be discovered and amended quickly. Consider the recent example where a post on CNN's iReport website claimed Steve Jobs was hospitalized for chest pains. Apple's stock plummeted and the company was forced to issue a statement denying the report.

Origin:
Writer Jeff Howe coined the phrase crowdsourcing in a June 2006 article in Wired magazine to discuss how cheap labor was being discovered via the Internet. Howe later wrote the book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, which theorized that we were undergoing a cultural shift that redefined corporate research and the marketing process.

With the rapid spread of ideas on the Internet, memes have exploded online. An Internet meme starts with a song or catchphrase, for example, that is spread virally. Bloggers often add their own spin or humor to the original idea and that sparks even more discussion. One of the most popular Internet memes is LOLCats, where cat photos are paired with grammatically incorrect captions. If you want to track Internet memes, you can use a service like GoogleTrends to look at a concept's popularity through search engine results.

Marketers have tried to take advantage of memes, which are essentially viral campaigns. The challenge is to discover what makes one meme successful, while another languishes.

Origin : Researcher Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, as a "unit of cultural transmission." He used it to describe how evolution could account for the proliferation of religious ideas or building techniques.

The concept of a mashup dovetails with the rise of social networking as websites like Digg or Reddit, acting as aggregators, pull together news or feeds from multiple sources. That platform is then often designed to be interactive, allowing users to share opinions, reviews, or update information in a fashion similar to Wikipedia.

The idea of creating web-based applications is also a popular choice for mashups as developers have used mapping software, such as Google Maps, to create everything from restaurant guides to real estate comparison sites. Mashups have also been popular in music as artists sample parts of another song to remix an entirely new song.

The mashup is indicative of the way we now consume media as traditional sources are intermingled with online campaigns in an attempt to discover what appeals to consumers.

Origin: Mashups are considered a part of Web 2.0. The term was first used to describe a web application that pulls together content from a variety of sources to perform a specific function, whether it is comparing airfare rates or finding new restaurants.

Accordingly, the ways in which products are being marketed have shifted online. As brands accumulate information about consumers' preferences, they can place advertisements in front of customers who are more likely to champion their message. Companies are now becoming personalities on Facebook, with brands like Seventeen encouraging people to become fans online and promising insider access.

Corporations seek out fansumers to act as brand loyalists, translating the virtues of a product or service online into the new world of social media.

Origin:

Forrester Research introduced the concept of the fansumer in order to describe the evolution of the consumer online as they interact with targeted advertising on social networking sites.

The movie "Polar Express" was panned, with critics contending that the motion capture process created animated characters that were more disturbing than cuddly. And video gamers have remarked in recent years that digital characters are becoming unsettling.

The idea of the uncanny valley has even been extended to photo retouching, as consumers have difficulty reconciling digitally altered photos with their expectations of a subject's appearance. A recent advancement in photorealistic characters from design firm Image Metrics may have provided an answer by analyzing specific movements and timing gestures.

Origin: Japanese robotics inventor Masahiro Mori defined the concept in 1970. He was looking to explain why people suddenly rejected his creations as they became more evolved. Mori based his theories on the philosophies of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, in which both men expounded on the idea that something can be familiar and unknown at the same time.

Correction: One of our eagle-eyed readers noted that the connection between Mori's theory and the work of Freud and Jentsch was made after his postulate was released. Mori's work was not based on their philosophies, it is just a correlation that has been drawn by subsequent researchers.

Google AdSense is the most popular form of contextual marketing. A search engine bot, known as Mediabot, indexes the material on a website and determines which advertisements submitted to Google are a match. Search engines, including Yahoo! and Microsoft, display advertisements on search results pages. Those advertisements are selected based on the key words that a person enters into the search engine.

The idea of contextual marketing has been controversial because critics claim it represents an invasion of privacy. In 1999, when the search marketing company DoubleClick (now owned by Google) attempted to use the information it had collected online about consumers to create targeted promotions offline, the corporation was taken to court over its privacy policies. Public reaction led online marketers to focus on delivering marketing messages that drive responses without being intrusive.

Origin: Contextual marketing is based on the idea of personal profiling, where information about web surfers is collected via cookies. In 1995, permanent cookie technology was invented, which allowed servers to send packets of information to web browsers, and vice versa, in order to track the websites visited by the person at the computer.

Corporations reach out to brand evangelists to ask them to create commercials or new brand messages for products they love. The user-generated content is then uploaded to brand-specific websites or video-sharing sites like YouTube. By yielding brand control, companies like MasterCard and Converse have managed to engage customers in promotion across social networks.

Participatory advertising also involves the changing manner in which people consume marketing. Instead, customers are now interacting with brand campaigns, as the Internet has moved marketers away from traditional, static methods of advertising. Under this methodology, consumers are no longer willing to passively digest product information, but instead want to form a connection with a brand. In a recent successful example, Dove leveraged this approach with the Campaign for Real Beauty, which asks consumers to help change stereotypical ideals of beauty. 

Origin:

The first examples of participatory advertising were seen in the early 1990's as Nike parlayed a series of advertisements with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny into the creation of a feature-length cartoon, "Space Jam." Advertising evolved into a participatory model with the introduction of the Internet and a corresponding change in consumer culture.  

A successful murketing campaign is intriguing enough that potential customers will seek to discover exactly what is being sold or who is the one selling to them. The consumer then ascribes values to the brand and is the one to proactively establish a relationship. Critics are split on whether the murketing of viral videos, like BMW's "Rampenfest" ads, will ultimately damage or save brand reputations.

Origin: New York Times columnist Rob Walker coined the term "murketing" in an article for Outside magazine when he was seeking to describe the deliberately obsequious marketing of Red Bull. He regularly explores the relationship between consumers and marketers on his blog, Murketing.com and in his new book, "Buying In."

Marriott International and American Airlines contend that this practice is potentially driving up costs and confusing potential customers. American Airlines filed suit against Google last year, arguing that unchecked piggybacking was a case of trademark infringement.

Origin
Piggybacking was initially a business term that referred to reducing costs by adding a new project to an existing one. It was extended to the online arena with wireless networks to refer to computer users hopping on an unprotected wireless connection.

As such, digital immigrants experience the same difficulties when they come into contact with digital technology as adults. Their learning curve is steeper and they may be reluctant to adapt to new systems.

The process of assimilation is always easier for those that learned the language of our digital world while growing up. Digital immigrants are often juxtaposed with digital natives, the younger generation that is accustomed to using the wealth of digital technology. The Digital Natives project, a collaboration between Harvard University and the University of St. Gallen, is looking to understand how different generations understand and apply information.  

Origin: The term digital native is attributed to writer and consultant Marc Prensky. He coined the term in a 2005 piece for Educational Leadership, while explaining what teachers have to do to reach students based on how they currently receive and process information.

An onsert is a standard marketing piece commonly used with newspapers and magazines, and recently applied to direct mail. It is a separate advertisement that is attached to a page of a publication or a customer mailing, and usually is in the form of a takeaway product, like a compact disc, magnet, or small booklet.

Onserts have recently been used to explore the field of scented advertising with newspaper companies like Gannett considering pages or stickers imprinted with smells. 

A derivative product of the onsert is the "onstatement," where advertisements are included on an invoice or account statement from a corporation with no distinction between the content.

Origin: Onserts were developed, and named in contrast to the insert (where a marketing piece is included within a publication). Early uses of onserts were the ubiquitous AOL membership CDs or the sticker covering the masthead of your USA Today.

Matrix organizations arose in response to "silos," divisions wherein a strict hierarchical structure left employees in isolated groups only responding and communicating to their direct supervisor. Since information was not effectively shared between the silos, project coordination fell to a C-Suite executive.

In a matrix organization, synergies can be realized by combining elements of project and functional management, as the sharing of resources and employees leads to cost reductions and a more efficient organization. The silos, which in a matrix organization consist of a group of programmers or engineers for example, are now required to communicate. 

Critics question the sustainability of matrix organizations over time as the fluid nature of the corporate structure means that employees can have several superiors and talented workers might feel overburdened.

Origin:

The concept of the matrix organization rose to prominence in the 1970's and 1980's. It was outlined in Professor Jay R. Galbraith's work, Matrix Organization Designs: How to combine functional and project forms.

In contrast to a blue ocean (an undiscovered market), the red ocean is the current marketplace, where corporations are competing for market share. Intense competition leads some companies to go under, and the "cutthroat nature" of business turns the ocean bloody or red. It's the concept of diminishing returns, as companies have to devote more resources to besting the competition in order to build market share slightly.

Without the cost of competition, corporations are free to focus on developing their product. Moreover, innovative companies will have the opportunity to define the rules of the marketplace in their favor.

Starwood Hotel's targeting of non-customers is a recent example of Blue Ocean Strategy as they are trying to step outside the traditional market boundaries of the hospitality industry.

Origin:

Michigan State University Professor Charles W.L. Hill introduced the idea in 1988 that differentiation and cost management was the key to gaining a competitive advantage. The concept was encapsulated in the 2005 bestseller, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

As it stands currently, there is not a lot of restriction on green advertising. The Federal Trade Commission is considering an update on green marketing guidelines, but the "Green Guides," haven't been revised since 1998. In response, a proliferation of consumer advocacy watchdogs have come into existence featured on websites like EnviroMedia's Greenwashing Index. And the planet-conscious claims of marketing campaigns are being called into question.

Recent debates over greenwashing have covered the sustainability of Procter & Gamble's Swiffer and whether Kimberly-Clark, maker of Kleenex and the world's largest tissue manufacturer, was effectively protecting heritage forests in Canada.

Origin

The concept of greenwashing appeared in the early 1990s. It arose as a response to the upsurge in green marketing by corporations designed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990.

The word "Astroturfing" is a play on the artificial, slick surface first used in the Houston Astrodome. It is used to suggest that an alleged grassroots campaign cited by a corporation is fake or pretending to be natural.

In today's world of savvy consumers and watchdog groups, companies that try to hide their true intentions are being uncovered via programs like WikiScanner, which looks to see if corporations have edited their own Wikipedia entries. And so, just as athletes succumb to the hardness of Astroturf, those organizations that employ the strategy of Astroturfing are bound to have their reputations damaged.

Examples of Astroturf accusations in recent months include a campaign for clean coal and alleged Microsoft participation in dialogue on the web.

Origin

Astroturf is a synthetic field surface invented by Monsanto in 1967, nicknamed for its original use in the Houston Astrodome. U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen is credited with co-opting the term to refer to a public relations campaign.