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.
I really hope that writes a follow up for Gottaquirk, where the idea was first published, to share the results of the initiative.
I’d really like to read about the traffic stats on the various channels, what traffic it generated on the company’s site, and the effect it had on generating new leads. I’d imagine it would make a great case study.
Update:
Gottaquirk have posted a preliminary reportback from Winston on the buzz (or should that be the flutter) generated by his heroic defeat of Telkom ADSL (thanks for the link, Kat).
A follow up post is on its way. I look forward to reading it myself!
I had little doubt that you’d be on it, Kat
What if the pigeon nicks the micro SD card? ha ha – This is classic!
@Bobby I’m sure Winston would never do such a thing. He’s a pro!
Twas a great PR stunt. They got loads of free media exposure out of it.
But truth be told, why don’t we use pigeons for this sort of thing? Much less risky that the post office, and for a tiny micro SD, it can easily be carried across the country even.
The Unlimited Company says they need to transfer 4gb per day down to Durban, they should seriously get 20 pigeons (1 for each day), and send their data like that.
We used to race pigeons, and this really is an option in reality. They should do it.
That will free up the internet line for other uses (like say… facebook… haha)
@ John Gore. Pity it hasn’t resulted in any particular urgency on the part of broadband suppliers to improve their results. They’re never going to beat the bird carrying 4GB, but there is a huge amount of room for improvement.
I got the impression that they were seriously considering using pigeons from now on. Even if they just had one for each day of the week, there’re probably enough trips between the two offices to return the birds every week.