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In the fourth episode of the Tech Product Review podcast series, guest expert Andrew Jenkins chats with host Bill Banham about how sales and marketing pros can employ Pocket to improve research and lead generation efforts.

Listen to the show here.

Pocket is an application and service for managing a reading list of articles from the Internet. It is available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and most web browsers.

Read the transcript:

Bill Banham: Welcome to another episode of the sales and marketing tech review series with our wonderful, special, ongoing guest, Mr. Andrew Jenkins. Andrew, welcome to the show again.

Andrew Jenkins: Thanks for having me.

Bill Banham: Andrew, today, we are going to talk about Pocket. So, let's jump straight in. Firstly, what is Pocket and what does it do? And also, how does it help?

Andrew Jenkins: Sure. Some of you may recall a bookmarking site called Delicious. And Pocket kind of takes things a step further from that bookmarking point of view. Pocket is a service, web based, software is a service, and it integrates to all of your browsers as a plug in, integrates to a number of apps. It used to be called Read Later but now it's called Pocket.

And so, if I find something and I want to save it for later, I can just use my Chrome extension, and say, click it and say save or add to Pocket. I can also add tags so that I can organize that content to look at it later. So, if I want to save an article to, that's going to help me with a blog post, I can maybe add, tag, blog idea. Or if it's about a particular topic like LinkedIn or Social Selling, I might tag it with those tags. So, it makes it easier for me to find those articles later by searching by tag rather than a key word.

Another great use for it is if you've written a lot of articles and you want to keep them stored centrally, so that you can pull them up, and if they're evergreen content, re share them in your social channels, you tag them as past blog or my articles or whatever it might be. Then they can be stored there.

When you subscribe to something that's an RSS feed reader, for articles or blogs from certain sources, those feeds get refreshed. So, the content gets pushed down. And the more frequent content is at the top. Well, Pocket works contrary to that. Once I save it to Pocket, unless that original article gets deleted, it will stay in Pocket forever.

So, it's a great place to keep a library of your favorite content, of content that you want to use in different instances. Like I said, it integrates with all of your browsers, it integrates with a number of different apps, like Flipboard and a few others, like Twitter. And it just makes curating or managing content in higher volume that much easier. And as I said, it keeps your content forever.

Bill Banham: Super, thank you. So, you've managed to run through the features there and several of the key benefits. But, what about the short comings? Are there any negatives when it comes to using Pocket?

Andrew Jenkins: When it comes to search, sometimes it can be a little frustrating. If you're searching by keyword in a particular title, you don't know whether you're getting topics by relevance or how recently it was published. That's why, I think, they really want you to be putting tags on your content, so that you're taking ownership of the management of it. That would be one.

It's great that it's integrated to a number of things. But again, like I said before, I'm a bit of a power user. So, saving things to Pocket one at a time can be somewhat tedious. So, if there's a way to manage multiple pieces of content simultaneously, that would be kind of nice.

Bill Banham: Now, is there a cost to Pocket? Do they have different license fees based on the, I don't know, number of users, anything like that? Or is it one of those wonderfully free tools?

Andrew Jenkins: Well, you can start for free. So, there is a premium model but if you get into a more sizeable usage of it, you can subscribe to it for less than $10 a month.

Now, in my case, I'm curating content for myself, for clients, for a variety of reasons. And even still, as I said, $10 really isn't a huge expense. It won't break the bank. But it's an incredibly handy solution, because of everything that it integrates with.

Bill Banham: So, in your experience, what have been some of the big results?

Andrew Jenkins: Well, if you use things like If This, Then That, or Zapier from a productivity standpoint, this is where having a library of content in the likes of Pocket can be really handy. Where you can set up rules in If This, Then That. If I share a store or save an article to Pocket automatically add it to a particular queue. Or you can flip it around and say I want to automatically save articles from this source to Pocket.

And so there's a lot of, again, it's that integration that's powerful for us, or myself and the company that I run, being able to manage a high volume of content on behalf of myself and for clients. It's searchable, I can have buckets or categories of content based on the tags that I build. And again, I'm looking at something on Twitter on my phone and I can quickly save it to Pocket, add two tags and I'm just using my thumb.

So, from a convenience and ease of use, it's fantastic.

Bill Banham: Fantastic. Mighty powerful words there from Andrew Jenkins. Now, are there any competitors? And if so, who are they? And what makes them different?

Andrew Jenkins: I mean, there are competitors like Prismatic Crate, Scredible, Queue, there are a number of content discovery and management solutions out there. That's not to say that they're, you know, they're, I would say, good in their own respective ways. I think because Pocket had established itself in the early days as Read Later, it's rebranded as Pocket, but those early days and early integrations with things like Twitter, they're integrations with things like If This, Then That and Zapier, those sort of productivity recipes, can, I think, help it stand out. And its integration with Flipboard and Twitter and so on, again, makes it easier ... Cause it's really, it's right there with you at the point of activity. So, I can save something quickly, tag it.

And then when I'm in Pocket itself, I can share right from there. Whether it's to share it to buffer, share it to other scheduling tools or just share by email, a lot of options.

So, like I said, it's right there at the point of activity making things easy for you.

Bill Banham: Okay. Well listen, thank you. And as always, before we wrap things up on another one of these review shows, I need to ask you out of five stars, Andrew, how many would you give to Pocket?

Andrew Jenkins: I'm going to give it four out of five.

Bill Banham: Okay. Well, thank you very much. Well, that just leaves me to say, Andrew Jenkins, as always, thanks for being our guest expert today.

Andrew Jenkins: My pleasure.

Bill Banham: And until next time listeners, get out there, discover new tools, send us a note, tell them ... Get out there and tell us about some of the tools that you've discovered and maybe we might do a review of those too.