Nodilus: Smarter Social Networking
20 years ago social networking meant going to conferences and stuffing pockets with business cards. 10 years ago you built out your email contacts. Last year you added your twitter profile to your business card.
Word of mouth marketing has gone through similar stages: 20 years ago word of mouth marketing most likely meant getting people to talk to each other about your product. 10 years ago, getting them to blast something to their email contacts would be priceless. Social networking and social media at this point are almost as ubiquitous as a mobile phone. Getting someone to tweet about, post to facebook, and talk to their friends about your product is a triple-whammy.
And now I’m actually seeing word of mouth-style social media networking used as a business organizing structure: Nodilus.
Smarter Social Networking
Their approach is about using social networking in a smart, strategic way to utilize the power of word of mouth marketing- similar Mashable’s Summer of Social Good, but rather than being a campaign for a specific period, Nodilus is trying to use social networking as the organizing structure of a business venture. Here are some excerpts from their idealistic, innovative and intriguing home page:
“The creative potential of humanity is currently resting at our fingertips… The enormous potential of social networking offers new opportunities to harness the collective intelligence of our Planet, opening the possibility to the kind of future we want our children to inherit. Nodilus is developing a revolutionary social utility designed to link its users with the people, skills, and projects that are laying the way to a better world. The idea behind Nodilus is as simple as it is audacious: to create a self-organized universe that inspires its users to discover and present ideas, activities and projects that match their values and affinities.”
Even the organizing structure of Nodilus is intended to reflect the way those who want to be a part of it find it and become engaged initially:
“It is an open network designed to be intuitive and intelligent, grounded in ethics, based on trust, with an innovative feedback and appreciation system that puts users in control of its quality and integrity… A tool of this importance can only be developed with an open-source model that values your contribution as a part of the collective intelligence we wish to harness.”
And it builds in the ideas at the core of Summer of Social Good or CSR movements in general:
“It focuses on essential topics we must address in order to inspire a collective movement toward a more resilient, equitable and regenerative future – food production, transportation, energy independence, health and healing, education, community organizing, activism, habitat, local economies, complementary currencies, and sustainable communities, to name just a few. Nodilus strives to empower us to become effective stewards of our biospheres and communities, improving the quality and depth of our experiences of life along the way.”
If you resonate with our project, we would like to hear from you.
They are specifically looking for Investors, Developers, Creatives and “Connectors” – a la Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point. 1 part business, 1 part social networking, and organizing it all based around the idea of connecting.
If it works it will mean the word of mouth marketing approach has gone beyond persuasion and entered into innovation, creation, and, most of all, business.
Scott James
