“Playbour” is one of those new hybrid words that bored creatives and techno-supremo’s keep brandishing around when talking about all things digital. The catch on and then we’re stuck with them. This one however tells the story of the current emerging superpower of Social Media. A tool that people are only really beginning to understand how to use and exploit.

So, what is “Playbour”? Well, take a pinch of play, throw in a dash of labour and hey presto, you have yourself a nice little oxymoron and the word “Playbour”. These are two polar opposite words. Play by definition means “not work”, work quite obviously means “not play”. But when mixed together, they generate new meaning. A bit like “Military Intelligence” or “Girly Man”. “Playbour” itself refers to a new paradigm in how companies, individuals, organisations and networks can achieve goals and tasks. Think Mechanical Turk, but you don’t have to pay the workers.

As an avid iPhone app downloader, with apps ranging from sports to an autism calculator, from Twitter to banking, yesterday, I came across a new app named Waze. Waze has been billed as a “Social GPS” where users, over time, will score points in return for mapping out roads and traffic. FourSquare meets TomTom. Users can “steamroller” new roads, map road directions, and collect “goodies” along the way in a pac man-like chomp. It’s constantly updating, and, as with other forms of social media, it complies to your usual core Network Theory rules. The more people that use it, the more value it holds.

But why would people engage? Well, because there is an element of play, a dabble in the realms of fun and most importantly, there is a competitive edge to it. Well, there can be, if your that way inclined…

When we begin to delve into it a little, there are plenty of examples of the power of play. A fortnight ago, Google turned the homepage of the worlds most famous search engine into a simple Pac-man environment. You could chomp your little way through the “G”’s and “O”’s of Google and and avoid those pesky little ghosts of 1980’s fame. I spent perhaps five, maybe 6 minutes playing it. The rest of the world? Well they spent 4.8 million hours, of work time. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I dare say that is somewhat more work than your office gets done, ever. Imagine if you could harness that power.

Imagine if the millions of users and hours involved in Farmville could be used to actually plow fields, plan cities or at the very least, power Wales. The power of Play is immense. Points and Prestige are rapidly becoming the new Pounds and Pence. So, sack all your staff, make the work a game and pay them in “highscorer” bonuses. Who knows, might even work for British Airways.