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.

Ice cream as an analogy for social media

Another gem from CommonCraft – Social Media in plain English

Back from a break

Compliments of the season to anyone who’s paying attention. I just returned to work, and the more regular internet access and activity that accompanies it.

I managed to go two weeks with only two visits to Facebook (to upload some holiday photos), and nothing else. I must say, it takes a while to re-immerse oneself. I did spend some time promoting blogging as a marketing tool to my parents (to be followed up, definitely).

My Google Reader was somewhat overloaded when I logged on this morning (mostly with unread news, thankfully – after a brief scan of the last 24 hours or so, cue “Mark all as read”). Then Seth Godin is prolific, and I find it difficult to simply skim the titles of his posts. Online Marketing Blog is not quite so frequent, and I read fewer full posts, but they tend to be longer, so it also takes some time. I read a good review of an e-Book called “Getting to first base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”, by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. It’s $29, so I didn’t download it immediately, but the review certainly piqued my interest. I’m just wondering whether it will expand what I know, or merely confirm what I’ve already learned.

Anyway, I may be “listening” for a while longer before contributing something more productive to the conversation (but you never know when inspiration might strike )