I have been in countless meetings where individuals in the room enter in an unconscious Olympic race to throw down the most buzzwords into a conversation. And it is embarrassing when I am that individual.

As a Technology Consultant, I am surrounded by tech experts who recklessly drop “tech-abulary” into conversations and topics without any double looks or oversight from their peers. Eager to fit in, I mimicked their speaking style and buzzwords. I adopted the tech jargon so that I would not appear under-qualified. But it never sounded right.

Even worse than the self-humiliation is the confusion and miscommunication that comes from spinning a buzzword incorrectly, which may cause misalignment and frustration among team members. I now remind myself, ‘Seek to understand.’ I pause and ask myself if this buzzword conveys what I’m trying to say.

Below are five buzzwords that I utilized incorrectly in conversations. (And I am not alone). I clarify the trendy expressions in the content below.

1. Cloud:

Misuse: “Team, in order to, adapt to the changing landscape, I recommend we offer a public cloud offering for our products. I want our company to be SaaS enabled with cloud hosting capabilities for our clients.”

What’s wrong about this example: Cloud is a generic marketing term that has come to replace words such as “Thin Client” and “Network Computing.” Cloud Technology is the sharing of resources to achieve economies of scale with the efficient use of resources to reduce infrastructure and costs. There are many ways cloud technology can be deployed, and these options are sometimes conflated with “the cloud” itself. For example, Software as a Service enables a user to access a software applications over the internet. Cloud Hosting is when companies/users can utilize remote server resources for their website. Document Storage, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are other examples that are sometimes referred to as just “the cloud” but each option provides a different outcome that can be used independently as a strategic differentiator.

Correct Usage: “Team, the recent acquisition will enable our product to be re-engineered into a SaaS model that can be hosted on a public cloud for select clients.”

2. Big Data:

Misuse: “The HR department urgently needs to release a job requisition for a data scientist to streamline Hadoop technology into our firm to enable our clients with the technology to turn their big data into data-oriented results.”

What’s wrong about this example: Big Data is a term used to identify how complex and large data is aggregated and mined for information. The loosely structured data can be composed of multiple disciplines areas such as Business Intelligence, Data Visualization, and Predictive Analytics. Machine Learning is a field of computer science focused on big data. Hadoop/HDInsight is a software framework to process efficiently process large data sets. The term is often used inaccurately because firms tend to group all these activities together. Each discipline mines voluminous data in different ways to drive more informed decisions.

Correct Usage: “The HR department needs to release a job requisition for two developers and two Data Scientists to build out a Predictive Analytics dashboard to assist with forecasting. The dashboard will leverage the customer data that our service has collected with external factors. This product rollout will enable our customers to deploy a Big Data strategy with relevant capabilities for their firm”.

3. User-Generated Content:

Misuse: “We need to ask our interns to come up with some user-generated content.” “Check out what digital agencies can create the best user-generated content.”

What’s wrong about this example: The “user” in “user-generated content” generally means the customer or the user of the product and “content” means original stories and photos. This is real, authentic, unbiased information provided by the user, not from the company’s sales and marketing teams. It’s not an aggregation of information from multiple kinds of sources. If you’re still unsure, replace “user” with the name of the person who created the content. Is the “user” someone who uses the product or service without vested interested in trying to market or sell that product or service? If so, then it’s “user-generated content.” If it’s written by your sales rep or marketing director, it is not.

Correct Usage: Let’s come up with some contests to incent our fan base to post user-generated content to Facebook and Twitter.

4. Native Advertising:

Misuse: “Since our readers are Spanish speakers, let’s make sure we use native advertising so that we can be effective.”

What’s wrong about this example: “Native advertising” does not mean advertising in the audience’s native language. It is a marketing tactic where sponsored and paid advertising adopts the similar formatting and style of the online service, leading the audience to believe the ads are content produced by the content provider and not ads placed by an advertiser. Advertisements and promotions are blurred with content that may affect the end users’ ability to differentiate between sponsored and free-form articles. Sponsored articles that related to products and services are common examples.

Correct Usage: VitaHerbal used native advertising on health blogs to get people to buy their herbal drinks because they read articles on how effective these drinks are for dieting. And these people never lost any weight.

5. Pivot

Misuse: “Hey, for lunch I recommend we pivot our regular choice Thai and attempt to try a new cuisine. A new BBQ restaurant opened a block away that received amazing reviews on Yelp?”

What’s wrong about this example: “Pivot” is often used to mean “change” but it’s a special kind of change. A pivot happens when a team changes a plan or course of action when their original idea or concept did not succeed, per their expectations, forcing them to leverage their current resources for an alternative idea or concept. This term can be applied to across industries and occupations. For example, a restaurant chain may pivot their menu but leverage the existing infrastructure. A politician may pivot the question asked but still take advantage of the captive audience and debate forum. Most common in the startup world are when early companies “pivot”–shift business models–until they determine the right fit for the customer, feature, product or technology.

Correct Usage: “I think it will be beneficial to the firm if we pivot our focus from development within the existing framework to the future roadmap. Our team is equipped with the appropriate skill sets and resources to succeed, but our current approach/plan will not be able to support the expected business outcome.”

Did you find this useful? Share with me examples of buzzwords you’ve heard used incorrectly or you’ve misused yourself and I’ll write about it.