Buzz marketing has been around for a while now, but I would like to point out one of the best examples I have seen in recent time.

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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What happens when you take an established dimension of looking at videos (featured, rated, comments, views) and then completely twist it on its head? What if enough videos and features now exist on all those many subjects that one can look at the unfolding of the events related to each and every subject, happening, or person in chronological order?

You get TimeTube.

Particularly interesting if you are reading about a person or event. It helps you chart the impact, pre and post reactions and what the whole world has to say about that particular experience, as time passes. Pretty darn interesting.

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Pretty plugin. And damn useful. Its a shame I didn’t discover this before.

ScribeFire adds loads of functionality to the Firefox browser, for all bloggers. Publishing posts on the go is a breeze, and categories and past entries are also easily manipulated.

Find the plugin here.

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Every time I think what more can people do, to creatively bring a win-win, there is one more brilliant marketing insight that falls plum onto my lap.

For the uninitiated, CAPTCHA is the oddly designed scramble text and numbers that one has to enter for verification on websites; to prevent auto-scripts and email-bots from entering / registering / creating accounts / running DoS attacks etc. While we usually land the boring gibberish on login and register pages, some guy actually thought of using that mindspace for advertising brand names; capturing valuable attention, and also making the user repeat it in his/her mind for filling in the web form. Seth Godin also covers this in his blog.

As users are very likely to read and type the CAPTCHA text, some people are suggesting to commercial this cryptic graphic. See good examples from Jean Yves.

Brilliant!

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Put together Firefox and Facebook. And Twitter, Flickr and a few other social networking websites. And a few media sharing applications while you are at it. You now have Flock, the social web browser.

Still a long way to go, in terms of customisablity and features. But a fantastic concept, nevertheless. I am typing this post in its ‘Blog this’ feature. Lets see how it turns out :)

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Today a friend’s friend Y was telling us about her 5 year old nephew. Apparently this loveable kid was being remonstrated at home, and guess for what. He bought the same X-box game twice on eBay. (He just won the bids, he didn’t pay for them, Y tells me amusedly.)

Now lets wait here for a frickin’ minute. This is so wrong on many counts. What’s a 5 year old doing on eBay? Wait a frickin’ minute more. How the hell does he even know what eBay is, let alone how to BUY stuff on the site?

I didn’t know what a PC was until I was 10. The internet didn’t exist. I walked to a neighbour’s home to make phone-calls. I first used a mobile phone when I was in college. I was doing a research paper on Google in my Engineering college, when it was just registered as a company, and people were just discovering search engines. Wikipedia and Web 2.0 is still WOW.

And there’s this new bunch of kids, for whom Google, Wiki, mobiles, broadband, wireless, eBay, cash cards, Pentiums are a given. Like TV was for me. Like radio was for my parents.

Goddamit. I’m already feeling old. And I’m just frickin’ 25.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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What’s common between the QWERTY Keyboard, Orkut & Windows?

They all zark the theory of natural selection right up its own behind. They are examples of mediocre innovations prevailing and becoming market leaders in the face of better, kickass competition.

It is public knowledge that the QWERTY keyboard is one of the worst designs that one could make for the English Alphabet (The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams on the typewriters. Or so says Wikipedia). Even as I am typing this, my fingers are being unnecessarily pressurized and my tendons worn out one keystroke at a time, when there are more scientific, more efficient ways of placing the keys on the board. The most frequently used ‘e’ and ‘a’ and all other letters are not optimized to reduce chances of the eventual carpal tunnel. But still none of us use the better, healthier DVORAK keyset.

Friendster, Hi5 and Facebook. Many more features, easier interfaces, many more user created applications, much more technologically advanced than Orkut. They don’t even screw up often, no ‘bad server, no doughnut’ cow-crap. But still, every teenager and every gen-x leftover worth his cool avatar is flocking has already spent uncountable hours on his Orkut scraps, writing testimonials and checking out profiles of strangers.

And don’t even get me started about Windows. Known in the 90s for its Blue Screen of Death, I must say it has come a long way with NT and XP as an operating system, but yet, it’s nowhere even close to Open source competitors. Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and hajjar other options. No security holes ever, no virus attacks, no SP2 updates, no exposed vulnerabilities, no trojans, no worms, (or atleast, lesser trojans and worms) and best of all, many of them don’t cost a frickin’ penny. But yet, I look at the market share of Windows, and I want to wake Darwin from his grave, whack him on his head, and ask him if he had any clue as to what he was talking about.

The common thread that runs across these examples is: Adoptability. Sometimes it is caused by the lack of options or the first mover advantage (Qwerty). Sometimes it is because of ease of use and simplicity (Windows). Other times it is the peer group and portability (Orkut).

Whatever the reason is, if it makes users adopt an innovation, and stick to it, we have a winner! But how does one use this quirk of markets to one’s advantage? Combine all of them and make them your strategy.

Move first, make it usable, influence the peer group, leave it to the community. And watch any innovation spread like wildfire.

And, if you have an innovation that is actually one of the best in the market, combine these strategies and you can kick anyone’s butt. Including entrenched behemoths. (Firefox vs IE, Wordpress vs Blogspot).

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Hmmm… got my feedreader running, subscribed to my usual reads, and one more of the wonders of simplicity in human creativity was waiting right there, in my feedlist, begging to be read, and subsequently, shared.

www.extrabed.in. Go visit. Right now.

The concept is alarmingly simple. Bloggers host bloggers who are traveling to their city, and in return get a place to stay when they are traveling. Save on crazy hotel rates, and the issue of security and hosting a stranger is negligible (most bloggers are compulsive chroniclers of their life anyways). A brilliant way to shack up with fellow bloggers and make new friends.

And yes, runs on a wiki, so basically everyone builds the site. The only area of growth pains is going to be the fact that even the net-savvy Indian blog community isn’t too adept with wiki-editing. So the Web 2.0 site that is supposed to look slick and simple, ends up looking like a Frontpage nightmare gone wrong. Some intervention from the hosting community needed there, methinks. Brilliant idea about sharing stories and pictures of bloggers who met through the site.

On the whole a nice simple concept with some renewed faith in user-developed content, and relationships too. Bravo!

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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