| S |
| Search Engine | A directory of content on the Internet through which you can search for Websites and other Internet sources of information on a topic or keyword(s) that you supply. Each search engine obtains its content, categorizes it and displays it in a slightly different way. Some very popular, commercially supported directories and search engines are Yahoo, Excite!, AltaVista, Lycos, Webcrawler, HotBot and Infoseek. There are hundreds of them and they frequently link to each other. Experiment to find the one that returns the search results that you need. |
| Server | Servers are the computers that you connect to when you visit a Web site, use FTP or email. |
| Signature | The three or four line message you can automatically append to the bottom of an email message or Usenet news article that identifies the sender. Large signature files (over five lines) are considered poor "netiquette". When used correctly, signatures can be a very effective marketing tool. |
| Sitelet | A sitelet is a small--and often temporary--section of a Web site, usually focused on a particular topic or purpose. Most Web banner ads take users to hard-selling sitelets instead of main Web sites. Sitelet addresses are often used as an alternative to domain names in magazine and direct mail advertisements. |
| Skins | Skins are colorful, customized and interchangeable sets of graphics, which allow Internet users to continually change the look of their desktops or browsers, without changing their settings or functionality. Skinnable applications are growing in popularity and available through a variety of Web tools, including ICQ, RealNetworks and NeoPlanet.Skins are becoming a valuable marketing tool to reach new audiences because, unlike rich media banners, they can be implemented easily and at a lower cost. In addition, skins are tiny files that are easy to download or email, hence, popular skins spread rapidly through the Net. Several companies already use skins to market to their target audiences, including New Line Cinema, which joined with NeoPlanet to create a "Dr. Evil" skin to help promote the latest Austin Powers movie. For a collection of more than 4,000 skins ready for download at http://www.Skinz.org |
| Smart shopper | Customers in Internet who looking for a bargain would change the supplier at any time. |
| Smart Tags | Developed by Microsoft for their new Windows XP operating system, 'Smart Tags' are little pieces of software that give you links to other material on words you encounter in a Web-browser window. The feature would enable the company to turn any word on any Web site viewed through Internet Explorer into a link of Microsoft's choosing. The announcement stirred up so much controversy among Web content creators and site operators that Microsoft has decided to pull the feature -- at least for this year. |
| Snail Mail | A term that email users use to describe the traditional mail or post office service. |
| SOHO | SOHO, which stands for Small Office/Home Office, refers to the small business or business-at-home user. This market segment demands as much or more than the large corporation. The small business entrepreneur generally wants the latest, greatest and fastest equipment, and this market has always benefited from high technology, allowing it to compete on a level playing ground with the bigger companies. |
| Spam | Very controversial. Refers to the act of posting the same message to several inappropriate newsgroups or, more commonly, mass mailing unsolicited email messages. |
| Spider | A bot that serves a search engine by exploring the Web, collecting Web page addresses and page contents, and following links from them to other addresses to collect still more Web information. Also known as a worm or crawler. |
| Stickiness | Destined to remain one of the more evocative buzzwords, "stickiness" refers to a site's ability to engage a visitor by providing interesting, useful and informative content. Stickiness is often measured in terms of the average number of hours that a user spends on a site in a given month. One of the most sticky sites today is Ebay with a typical user spending around 2 hours per month on the auction site. Most of the major portals, such as Yahoo!, Excite and MSN, are battling for stickiness bragging rights by adding more user-oriented features and customization, such as free email, personalized pages and auctions, in an effort to keep visitors coming back and staying longer. A not-so-sticky site might have the average user spending under 5 minutes each month. One of the challenges of measuring stickiness is that it requires tracking individual users. This type of measurement requires some type of registration/login mechanism or cookies placed on users' PCs, both of which have their own drawbacks. |
| Streaming | Technology that permits continuous audio and video delivered to you computer from a remote Web site. It requires a high degree of compression to transfer audio or video (or both) at current modem speeds and still retain sound and picture quality. |
| Surfing | Informal term for exploring the Internet, as in "surfing the net". Most often used in reference to accessing sites on the World Wide Web. |
| T |
| Targeting | A term for an advertising oriented on the targeting group. The aim of the targeting is to limit the recipients of the adverts to the desired target group in order to optimize the effectiveness of the adverts and to minimize the losses. |
| T-commerce | For the most part, today's marketer is at least somewhat familiar with the term E-commerce (electronic commerce); but Industry buzz has it that the newest field to be reckoned with is something called T-Commerce -- which is E-commerce over TV, and Web transactions instigated by TV commercials. |
| Traffic | This term is used to describe how many people visit your Web page. It can be measured in many different ways, such as hits and impressions, by many different software packages. |
| Tweening | Short for in-betweening, the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Tweening is a key process in all types of animation, including computer animation. Sophisticated animation software enables you to identify specific objects in an image and define how they should move and change during the tweening process. |
| U |
| UMS | (Short form for "Unified Messaging Service)Integration of all classic means of communication in an e-mail box: calls, fax, voice mails, SMS, ... |
| URL | Universal Resource Locator. A standardized format for Internet addresses. The URL for the NetPlus Website homepage is http://www.netplusmarketing.com. |
| Usenet | A collection of thousands of topically named newsgroups, the computers which run the protocols and the people who read them and submit Usenet news articles. Not all Internet hosts subscribe to Usenet and not all Usenet hosts are on the Internet. |
| V |
| ViewTime | The ViewTime terms the time in which a potentially advertising part of a Website was visible during a using course (time unit pro visit). |
| Viral Marketing | You've seen it a hundred times. Maybe you've even heard it mentioned a hundred times. But, what exactly is viral marketing? The answer is simple: advertising and/or marketing techniques that "spread" like a virus by getting passed on from consumer to consumer and market to market. The concept can best be illustrated with a few examples. HotMail (pre- and post-Microsoft) and Yahoo! both use viral marketing techniques such as adding a tagline and link at the bottom of every HotMail and Yahoo! email users' message. The entire Geocities network of member sites is a case study in viral marketing. Many Geocities members build personal websites for themselves and encourage others to visit. Not only do these sites have the company name in the URL, but there is a company link on every page. As the name implies, viral marketing techniques have the potential to start very small and grow to enormous proportions. What has made such techniques popular for many Web companies is that effective viral marketing programs can be created and launched with less money, time, and effort than traditional promotion programs. Viral marketing has also been an effective online marketing technique because of the speed and efficiency of Internet communication. |
| Virus | A destructive program that has the ability to reproduce itself and infect other programs or disks on your computer. The best defence is to run anti-virus software periodically. |
| VRML | Virtual Reality Modelling Language. A programming language that has been designed to build 3-D applications on the Web. |
| W |
| Wording | The proper address of the visitors of a Website. First of all it is the term choice which also has a strong influence in search of an offer over the searching machine. |
| WWW | The World Wide Web (or Web) is the graphical, point and click part of the Internet. Software called browsers allow you to hyperlink from one site to the next with a click of a mouse. The Web is the fastest growing portion of the Internet and the most familiar part to most people. |
| X |
| XML | eXtensible Markup Language. A richer and more dynamic successor to HTML. |
| Z |
| Zip | A method of file compression. Zip files contain vast amounts of information that has undergone compression to reduce the amount of space that the data take up. |
