Irreverent Thinking

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:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

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.