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A little while back Tom wrote about Kickstarter, the site where people ask strangers to fund their projects. Today I tripped across Fiverr, a website where you can purchase services from strangers for $5. What can you really get for $5 you ask? It turns out you can get a wide variety of things, including:
- Someone to post fliers for you around their college campus
- Astrological readings
- Transcription Services
- Custom created birthday cards
- Voiceovers
- Advice
- Exposure for your website
While much of it is silly, it’s a sign of how the web creates personalized products and services, micro-services if you will. While $5 might not seem like much, if someone can perform a $5 task several times in an hour or leverage the power of their own social network to advertise over and over again, they might make a little bit of extra money. More importantly, services like this and Kickstarter continue to lower the time and money investment needed to start something new.
I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot of advertising lately that is attempting to be green or to connect with consumers via social media or create community. Too often, my response has been “REALLY?” The idea is somewhat sound… give consumers what they want and like to get them more involved with your brand. Create some love. I get it. The problem is the execution.
Today on my way in, I heard a radio spot for a body groomer for men. The ad highlighted two things: 1) the company will plant a tree for each unit sold and 2) you can go to their website to create an avatar, a virtual shaved you. Honestly, what’s the point? They have a series of humorous videos to both explain the product benefits and drive interest, that makes sense to me. But the social/green aspect feels out of place.
First, if your brand wants to go green, that’s great. But don’t greenwash. If you go green it needs to be related to your product. So if you plant trees but still use toxic chemicals or kill indigenous plants and birds to make your stuff, that’s no good. How could a body shaver go green? Maybe they could make the product more energy efficient or use a high percentage of recycled plastic in making it. Those would both be relevant. Otherwise, don’t bother.
Second, not every product needs or deserves a community. Using a viral video to highlight benefits, drive interest, etc. makes sense. If it’s cheap and you think it will have any impact, do it. The problem is do I really want to be in a community for a product like this? Do I need an avatar just for me? Does any guy really talk to their friends (or strangers for that matter) about grooming and how they look? The answer is not really. So while you might think it’s great for your customers to talk to each other about your product or brand, you still need to understand if they’re actually going to do it.
I’ll give some brands like this credit though. They provided a few how-to videos to let guys escape embarrassment and learn about new ways of using the product on their own.
Green and social were new and interesting and have become “expected.” However, as with anything else in life, they’re only worth doing if you do them well.”
If you don’t know what Spotify is already, then you should by now – especially since the new update as of yesterday will make Steve Jobs run for cover with his precious iTunes. It’s been out there for a couple of short years – exploding first through Scandinavia and further on finding its way out in Europe. It’s a music service software that let’s you stream and play any music through the Internet directly on your computer and even your iPhone. Yes, other software like Pandora and Last.fm are out there as well, but appear totally irrelevant in comparison.
Imagine your iTunes filled with everything you could ever ask for, but that’s taking no hard disk space. I know what you’re thinking – so, what if I’m out and there’s no reception on my iPhone, or I have lost Internet in my house? Well, then you can download your playlists to an offline mode that will act just like any MP3 player, even if you are connected or not. Pure brilliance. Unfortunately, they haven’t released it in the US yet – Spotify is fighting with licenses and bigger record companies for access, and it shouldn’t be too far now. My way (and many others that are living in the US) around it is; I registered for free in Sweden while I was there, and when I’m now a subscriber every month ($10) I get a premium account which let’s me ‘travel’ with the service indefinitely–otherwise it would shut me down after 2 weeks abroad.
The new update (called ‘The Next Generation’) features pure awesomeness. With your own individual profile on Spotify you can now connect with your friends on Facebook, or whomever you’d like – and share tracks, playlists and artists with easy clicks. With your own inbox you can send and receive songs – you can ‘star’ favorites and let your wireless connection share info between your devices. It’s now even more about sharing, and who doesn’t want great, daily recommendations from other music lovers around their social network? Read about the release and get excited. Soon, when the US will get access, I’m seriously saying that Apple and iTunes will have a hard time competing. This is by far one of the greatest softwares I have ever experienced, and I do like to pride myself in good things that are Swedish. Let the music free!
I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
Since Valentine’s Day just passed us by, I thought it was suitable to bring up a small company in New York, called Urban Signals, to the love-searching spotlight. This newly started company, with their iPhone app as the main focus has been gaining a lot of media attention lately.A work in progress, the idea is to flirt and connect with people in your surroundings and see if they’re ready for bonding using the GPS capability in your phone. The CEO of the company got her vision when she realized that there were so many connections that got lost each day, and she wanted that to change. Basically you send out a signal through the app to whomever shows up on your radar with the hopes for a response. With your own profile you can easily share whatever information you want. The system is built so that abuse doesn’t take place – this works by giving the signaled person an option to respond or deny your signal request. If it’s a positive answer then you can continue engaging with that person by asking a question, similar to a live chat or messaging. Also, the radar never tells the other person where exactly you are unless you want it to do so – that’s all up to you of course and there’s a “meet up” button for that.
At their blog you can follow the ongoing development and events and see what’s next, or even follow the ‘Hook-up Van’ on its mission to connect the people of New York. Apparently, more media coverage is around the corner. I really like this idea and hope that San Francisco will experience the radar soon. It’s quite innovative, and I see this as a meeting point for more spontaneous people, that don’t necessarily want to go through several steps in order to engage with each other. Apps that are made to connect people are a brilliant thing. So what are the risks you might wonder? I don’t know yet, but I guess that wide usage will tell us more. Hopefully we’ll meet out there soon ready for coffee, a drink or even dinner. As their motto says, “Urban Signals is taking love back to the streets!” Check out their website here.
