I used to do it a lot, quite often they were there “just to brighten the page up” but mostly they were pointless. I’ve recently started using mobile broadband and get frustrated when people stick huge images on web site so maybe I just carried that thinking across and am being more considerate.
Or it could be because I am still learning WordPress and the Typepad platform I used before was easier (for me) to insert images 
I’m been keeping online diaries for years, long before it became known as Blogging and I was an early adopter in paying TypePad for a professional blog platform (2004). Up to now I have written just for me, but I’m starting to get comments and so I’m becoming a bit more serious about it. I’ve just come across a post from a Canadian Blogger called Eric about How NOT to be a successful blogger. It made me chuckle and is one of the best posts I’ve seen this year - definitely worth a read.
See if you can count how many mistakes I have made. I got to 9 and gave up. Oh, well, I’m learning and will get better hopefully
Following on from a post I made a few weeks ago on Pods I tried to turn the thinking on it head and see how the corporate world could benefit from analysing the use of pods and pod behaviour. Most companies now realise that they need to do more than simply put up a web-site, run a few email shots and start a blog - they realise the traffic (raw fuel) flows around these places and lots of other unrelated places such as independent blogs.
Understanding this “sphere” is something I have been trying to make sense of over the last months and I’ve always used words such as space or sphere and wondered why it didn’t feel right. My initial foray into Facebook provided the trigger for me to realise that it’s less about space/place/area and more about connections, family if you will. Hence pod.
So what role does my pod play, if any, when it comes to deciding how the corporate world should deal with me. It stands to reason that better understanding me allows the corporate world to sell/promote/educate in a far more focused way so the question then is how do corporates learn from this?
I think this is early days and I think the corporate world has to understand how these pods work before they can leverage them so step one is to build the corporate pod, the places and connections that the corporate touches. Understand this influence and then extend it outwards, sorry no solutions yet - just a mindset and an idea I’m going to try this week and see how well it goes down with a client. I’ll keep you posted.
And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So “who do you trust?” becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.
So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:
No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.
I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth.
We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence. Old marketing is dead - we all pretty know that by now - and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow.
If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bullshit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.
This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a measurable RoI for it!
When Blogging falls down
I heard a colleague the other day talk about the rise of corporate blogs that are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts at selling or pushing products and ideas. This is bad, but I maintain a blog and it is done with the commercial intention to attract interest in my company, its platform (VITES), services and surrounding products. So how can Flog (flogging-based blogs) exists in the same space?
Well, I thought it was nothing as simple as the aim - it is the tone, the intention. I am honest about what we do and how we do it and I have been blogging on and off since 2003 so I kind of grew up with it.
I do hope that some of the big boys get it wrong and fall flat on their face as they hide behind blogs and pretend they are trying to widen consumer understanding or “handing their brand over to the common man” - it’s all tosh and the agency world is still struggling to work out how to leverage this new communication medium.
I love this open world, it rocks
I mean, come on - who can take that phrase serious. Lets read it again “A User Experience Lens“. Pah. Why all this bluster and ranting? Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been tasked with bringing together the copy for our new website and whilst that has meant writing some 80 pages of copy I must admit in my dark hours I have sneaked off to the Internet to get some inspiration and re-start the creative juices.
Most of the browsing reveals the same-old-samey stuff that has been around since 1998 and some efforts at trawling turn up gems such as Tom Peter’s Blog which do make me smile, distract me for 30 mins and usually end up inspiring me. For every good however…..there is a bad and in most cases (such as the User Experience Lens above) the bad is so bad it makes me laugh and therefore ends up doing good - I wonder if that is what they intended to achieve?
