Genius or Gimmick?

Sometimes in life you get a mental smack in the face with cold, wet fish –and this was my experience when reading this latest post regarding The Grid: http://www.vincentmaher.com/?p=946

Bottom line is, in mobile marketing terms, we now looking at being able to market products and services based on mood. Fascinating stuff – and a thought that breeds a whole family of related thoughts, spidering out rapidly and in various directions.

My primary concern here is that of relevancy to the receiver – if the message is relevant, it is awesome. If not, it is nothing short of invasion of privacy. Note that relevant in mobile advertising lingo must mean both requested and relevant.

Campaigns that are targeted at age, sex, location and mood will be a built on planned spontaneity - and fairly easily handled by an I.T system.

Overall - I would say genius.

Brain storming / crowdsourcing with Twitter

Have a peek at this idea as resported by the team at Springwise.com - http://springwise.com/weekly/2009-09-09.htm#ideasculture.

It’s awesome - giving a Team a tricky problem and waking up the next morning to a bunch of solutions!

From my side, I can think of using this internally for feedback from staff on how to improve a product / process flow or literally anything. Giving it a time limit is also very clever, as it creates a happening and immediate vibe around an issue.

More info on Crowdsourcing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_sourcing.

Will the potential applications for Twitter never end?

SportGator

I am a bit of a sports fan, and one of the things I wanted to be able to do from my mobile phone was to get the latest sports news - not the articles - just the headlines, and quickly.

So, I put SportGator together. What it does is aggregate sports news from 2 of the biggest providers, into various categories. (You can filter by clicking on the top or bottom category menus.)

This means I can get updated in under a minute - remembering that this is from my phone. When I want to read full articles, I’ll do so in front of my PC.

The site is still new, so if anyone has any suggestions - like adding another news feed - please let me know!

The lunatic fringe meets social media

Hat tip to Vincent Maher for this article on his blog. Seems a Standard Bank customer with an axe to grind has created an account on Twitter with the intention of embarrassing and exposing them.

The lesson here is that in it’s essence on-line social media is brilliant, but as with all things in life it can take a few to ruin it for many.

Also, consider visiting sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Zoopy and booking your brand name.

YouTube Viral does it again

What do you do if you fly United Airlines, watch you guitar being treated roughly by baggage handling staff, alert flight attendants who do nothing about it, and upon arrival at your destination, discover that your guitar is broken, and United Airlines refuse to compensate?

The answer:

Write a song about it, get over 4 million people to watch it, and when United Airlines agree to do something, tell them to donate to charity.

Very cool.

Song can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo.