Irreverent Thinking

I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.

You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.

Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.

It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?

And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …

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.