Irreverent Thinking

So much these days is made of your trust rating on the web that there is an argument saying that those with rarer names are easier to find and therefore easier to trust. So if you’re called John Smith then it is highly likely you will be lost in a deluge of other John Smiths or, worse still, mistaken for someone else. The growth of the social networking has seen an explosion in name searching is now one of the commonest activities, whether it’s inside Facebook of directly on Google.

Time to change your name, maybe?

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.

Trust is one of my favourite topics as the whole dynamics are changing. Take Facebook, you actually trust your friends not to spam your email address and this trust is extended to your friends friends as these guys have access to you via your network. Strange really, in a world where we feel more and more insecure and worry about identity fraud, credit-card scams and all of these new threats we now face.

We interact far more through the virtual world and maybe that gives us the feeling of physical security but we also seem to be learning a new way to trust - we trust by actions and opinions and we respect those that are around us. The reverse is also true - I belong to SELOC a forum created in 2002 for drivers and lovers of Lotus cars and I’ve been pretty active racking at 8,000 or so posts in the last 5 years. There are clear boundaries for what can be posted and generally they are adhered to but every now and again the whole thing goes off the rails and a mass debate kicks off discussing the merits of rule 5.4 or whatever. When this happens the forum splits into factions that are quite vocal and sometimes abusive in complete contrast to when the waters are calm. Anyway, a newbie arrived on the forum asking about an Open Day at Lotus’ headquarters to celebrate 40 years…blah, blah get the idea. Lots of people chipped in opinions about whether it was a good or bad thing to go to and then someone discovered that the original poster worked for Lotus’ marketing company. This generated so much bad-press for the event and the company that they requested the thread to be deleted.

Me? I chuckled. It’s good that the agency world understands the importance of the community but woeful if they think they can influence it by registering a new user and making a single post. It that post had come from one of the SELOC big-wigs then many would have listened and quite a few would have turfed up the M40 to show up.

Abuse the trust and you get caught out.