Pigeon Marketing

I had never heard of The Unlimited Company before this morning. But then I heard about Winston and the Pigeon Race 2009 – within minutes, my colleague asked if I had heard about it and I received an email about it. And, of course, it’s all over twitter.

Basically, the company’s taken a logistical challenge – getting large volumes of data from one office to another – and a staff member’s comment that a carrier pigeon would be faster than South Africa’s notoriously slow and costly broadband, and turned it into a brilliant marketing initiative.

The challenge of crowdsourcing policy and feedback

Personal Democracy Forum’s Techpresident posted an interesting video in which White House Science and Technology Officer Beth Novak makes the point that new media has been great for getting the message out there, but poses the question, “How do we crowdsource feedback and input in a way that’s manageable?”

Bad Service comes back to haunt you

Bad service is bad for your reputation. Not doing anything about it is even worse. You don’t want to have a video like this about your company on Youtube…

more about "Bad Service comes back to haunt you", posted with vodpod

IEC should use mobile technology to avoid running out of ballot papers

Helen Zille and the Democratic Alliance have been quite critical of the Independent Electoral Commission’s managing the distribution of election materials such as ballot papers and boxes, and with good reason, I think.

Rather than succumbing to the possible knee-jerk reaction of preventing voters in future elections from voting at any voting station, the reason the IEC gave for the difficulties it experienced, the IEC should make better use of mobile technology to manage the distribution of materials on election day.

C2C’s by-election live blog a great success

Yesterday, the DA achieved a landslide victory in an important bellwether by-election in Mitchell’s Plain.

What made it even better was that DA Director of Special Issues and Volunteers Manager Gareth van Onselen live-blogged the day on our Volunteers’ Social Network, Contribute to Change.

The DA’s social media strategy

Last week, we launched our new DA official website, as well as Contribute to Change, our social networking platform for DA volunteers. A number of people have blogged about it, and I’d say the verdict is, on balance, positive. However, some of the negative commentary has generated some debate.

I’ve been trying to keep up, and comment, but I thought I would put a few thoughts down here that might provide a bit more clarity on what the DA is trying to achieve with its Social Media (SM) strategy.