Viper Marketing & Communications Group

Surfing is like… well… Surfing

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

Back in the day... when time was plentiful... you simply sat outside in the line-up with other surfers waiting for the next set to arrive from the ocean and then enjoyed a great ride to the shore on your chosen wave. When you finished, you paddled back out to repeat and repeat until you had either had your fill or felt so tired you could ride no more.

The challenge though and the constant draw of the beach and of those endless sets of waves was the fact that every second of every day there would be waves, perhaps the perfect one, breaking at your favourite beach. You simply had no chance of catching enough let alone all of them.

This then is a similarity between real surfing and so called web surfing. Just think today of the endless stream of web sites, news services, social media, fora and message boards, pushing countless amounts of content towards you. It's simply impossible to keep on top of this endless stream of messages and communication without help.

In the real surfing world we have seen in recent years the birth of new ways of riding the water with kite surfing and similar derivatives pushing the boundaries of speed, technical ability and excitement. The same can now be said on the web with if you search for them carefully, content aggregators that work with you to collate and present you with digestible amounts and styles of information.

The result for the real surfer is better use of time and energy, less waiting in the line-up and optimising of the adrenalin rush extreme athletes search for. In the web surf analogy it's all about control of information that reaches you, ensuring you read and see things that are most important to you and these are set aside from the vast noise caused by irrelevance.

Just a few tools that aggregate my content include Tweetdeck, Mashable and Flipboard.

But I'm afraid my favourite secret surfing locations will remain just that....

- Posted on Wednesday 21 Jul 2010 at 15:23 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: flipboard (2), mashable (2), surfing (1), tweetdeck (2)