Coining terms for social media — Scrapple is the newest!

February 11, 2008

That’s right. Where SPAM is the junk mail you don’t want, and BACN is the junk mail you DO want, SCRAPPLE is the junk mail that used to be BACN but is now moving toward being SPAM. I learned of the BACN terminology at Podcamp Boston. Now I have introduced the SCRAPPLE terminology into the American lexicon.

Think of when you were interested in buying a car. You sent emails to a bunch of dealers and they contacted you with valuable info on sales and vehicles and financing. The emails they sent you were BACN because you wanted most of the info that was inside, but you still wouldn’t put any of these addresses or salespeople on an Evite list for your next sangria party.

Now that you have a car, their emails are all relegated to the full-on SPAM pile.

Somewhere in-between is the SCRAPPLE pile. Take for instance your ongoing search for a laptop or better yet an HDTV. You sign up for Circuit City and Best Buy emails. You do so to enter a contest for an iPod or god-help-you, a Zune.

You get a couple emails a week with cool new products features and this is categorized as BACN.

But somewhere and some day the bloom fell horribly off the rose. You realized it was easier on your inbox and on your delete key to just put CC and BB in your bookmarks and go there once a week to see if the 46″ LCD had dropped to $799.

At that point that semi-valuable email BACN was turned deftly into SCRAPPLE.

Use the word, spread it, love it.

By the way, here’s the Wikipedia entry for SCRAPPLE – pre-Web 2.0 usage. And here’s the first paragraph…

Scrapple is a savory mush in which cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, are simmered with pork scraps and trimmings, then formed into a loaf. Small scraps of meat left over from butchering, too small to be used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple to avoid waste. Scrapple is best known as a regional food of Philadelphia, South Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.

More to come…