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.

I need a multi-network social news/bookmarking site.

My challenge in identifying the best social bookmarking or news site for my purposes is that I want to share different links with a number of networks of people. I would like my colleagues in the DA and I to share political news and useful links. I also want to share useful Web 2.0 links with fellow nomadic marketers – class-mates from two different courses I’ve attended (and perhaps a few other contacts I’ve picked up along the way).

I find myself using different sites or channels to share links with different groups – Muti for Nomadic Marketing graduates; Facebook group and/or Del.icio.us for my FNF Political Communication in the IT Age class-mates; and I’ve just set up a Ning network for DA staff to share ideas and information. It’s not exactly efficient.

FB community honours murdered Professor

This afternoon, Professor Mike Larkin of UCT’s law department will be laid to rest in Rondebosch. He was stabbed and murdered for the briefcase he was carrying home from work last Friday evening, most likely resisting because of the exam scripts therein. From what I have heard and read of Prof. Larkin over the last week, the inconvenience the loss of these scripts would cause his students was probably foremost in his mind, instead of his own safety.

You might wonder why I am writing about this here on a blog about political marketing and new media (not withstanding the warning in my first blog that I might climb on a political soapbox from time to time), and not as a contribution to the DA’s Eye on Crime blog. There are two reasons…

Groups, Pages and Politicians – marketing the DA on Facebook

I’ve been playing around with the new developments in Facebook (you can read about them here). I set up a ‘Democratic Alliance’ page. First problem with Facebook (clearly due to the US focus on the personality rather than the party): ‘Political Party’ isn’t an option in the organisation types when you create your page. I had to select ‘Non-profit’ as the closest description…