Why has the world of online marketing not picked up on the image campaigns of radio stations and trade shows? There are individuals willing to wear your t-shirt, place a bumper sticker on their car, or answer their phone proclaiming their love for your product if there is a chance of a product giveaway reward for compliance. The street team, the random person in the trade show crowd that just might sight you and reward you with an iPod or free concert tickets.
In the world of weblogs, a marketing company would team up with Technorati for a marketing campaign. Every participant would need to have a Technorati profile for notification purposes and to please the sponsor. The marketer then seeds a meme and provides a tracking method. It could be a quotation, a product page, or an image. Technorati provides the marketing firm with market attention statistics.
Example 1. Bungie launches Halo 2 on November 9. A fan base already exists for the product, but Microsoft would like to amplify the hype. Bungie hosts an image counting down the time until the Halo 2 release based on your time zone. You place the counter on your site. Technorati crawls your site, sees the image source, and you are in the contest. Prizes rewarded by time zone, overall, by week, etc.
Example 2. A new rock band heads out for a 20 city tour. They would like to gather fan feedback without spending a lot of money. They create individual pages on their site with set lists and photographs from the event. Fans link to the individual concert page. There is now feedback for the road tour, indexed and live. A written set list could be a give away, or a larger item such as a guitar or iPod for a contest spanning the entire tour.
The Technorati Developers Salon is just a few days away, yet we have not heard much from the company since the Emerging Technology Conference in February. I have lots of ideas. Dave says he is listening.