The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Sometimes I use certain terms as a sort of conceptual shorthand. These are either terms I use in everyday life, or that have come up as metaphors, neologisms or other memes in the course of writing this blog and that seem to resonate with me or stick in my vocabulary. I thought I’d lay out any commonly-used bits of shorthand here for the benefit of newbies and visitors.

The Organ Grinder’s Glossary

Business As Usual (also, BAU)
1. (adj) The Way Things Have Always Been Done, The Way Things Were, etc. The old way of doing business that depended on interruption marketing, product creation that served the businesses’ needs rather than the customers’, scarcity mindsets, the appearance of ethics rather than the internalization of ethics, opacity rather than transparency, etc.

2. (n) Strategies and actions reeking of the above; AKA, dinosaur tactics.

Dinosaur (also, slow moving reptiles, tasty, lunch, dinner, saurian, Jurassic, etc)
1. (n) Those who cling to BAU business models in desperate denial that those are neither functional nor useful in the modern, global, user-created conversation economy. Dinosaurs are slow-moving, slow-adapting and slow-thinking creatures who often end up being eaten for lunch (metaphorically speaking, of course) by their faster, more adaptive primate cousins.

2. (adj) Describing actions, habits or tendencies perceived as coming from Dinosaur business models

Memeshare
1. (n) A share of the memespace, or mental frame of reference, of a person, group or other entity.

Meteor
1. (n) A catalyst for or portent of significant change, something that destroys old paradigms and opens the door for a new, and probably unpredictable, future.

2. (n) Specifically, the Conversation Economy, vis a vis its effects on The Way Things Were.

Monkey
1. (n) The Organ Grinder’s Monkey, this blog.

2. (n) A metaphor for marketing or any other attention-getting action, specifically Marketing 2.0/Conversation Marketing/etc. “The Monkey says, ‘Entertain them and they will come.’ “

3. (n) The primal part of the human mind that makes it do stuff like freeze in terror at the sight of a harmless snake, but calmly barrel down a busy Interstate at 70 mph with a cell phone in one hand and a mascara wand in the other, at complete odds with the realities of rational risk assessment; the primate mind. “You may know that, just because WalMart only has 10 Egregiously Perky Elmo dolls left in stock, that doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly become a vital part of your life support systems without which you and your family could conceivably perish. However, scarcity drives the monkey insane.”

4. (n) Me. Hi!

Organ grinder (also, grinder)
1. (n) An entrepreneur, solopreneur, small business, organization or other avatar of my target audience. “He’s just your average grinder, trying to earn a living.”

Shiny
1. (n) The goal, the target, the purpose, the whole point of the exercise. Money is the most obvious incarnation of shiny, but fame, prestige, power, hot chicks (or dudes), salvation, empowerment, attention, etc, are also likely alternatives. “Following these tips will help you get more shiny.”

2. (adj) Attractive, distracting, attention-getting, desirable, lust-inducing, alluring, etc. “Whoa…check out the new iPhones.” “Oooo…shiny!”