More playing around with Flickr. My all-time favourite picture of the kids…
Archive for 1 September 2004
This is me testing a Flickr post. Clever idea, very silly name…
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
It’s one thing to create an effective email campaign – it’s another to keep track of who’s forwarding your message on to their friends and contacts.
Forward Track is an intriguing take on the problem aimed at online activism – and its first outing is supporting the campaign by a parent who lost his son in the shootings at Columbine High School to extend the ban on assault weapons. And quite apart from the wholly-worthy cause, there’s a very interesting twist on combining social networking with straight-forward marketing.
To quote the website:
Much like Friendster and other social networking softwares, ForwardTrack works by building a database of specific people and their connections to others. By recording each person that participates in a given campaign, and who he or she has invited or emailed, the system is able to calculate and display the actual impact of every individual. The hope is that by allowing people to track their own impact on a cause, it will motivate them to try even harder to spread the word.
The site for the initial campaign shows not just how many people have responded to the call for support, but also where they are geographically and how the reach of the campaign has increased with every degree of separation. From 28 people in the first degree, the campaign has reached 7,359 by the sixth – and presumably that’s likely to be an underestimate if you assume that not everyone’s actions will necessarily register with the tracking site.
From a marketing point of view, it’s fascinating to see how social networking theory is being put into action in practice, and from a technical perspective it’s equally interesting to see how online marketing is exploiting social networking. The idea that being able to track your own personal impact on a cause will make you more motivated to become involved is one that I think we’re going to see more of.
Sometimes an anecdote or a decently-witty story can ‘lift’ a presentation from the mundane to memorable. StoryBlog from Jon Strande does pretty much what it says on the tin – it’s a collection of stories and anecdotes for use in presentations and documents and the like.
There’s some which are a little – ahem – cheesy for British tastes, but it’s worth a look if you could use a dahs of inspiration.
