Engaging Your Customers in Unconventional Ways
Speaking of viral marketing, it seems that cell phones are not on the verge of being telemarketed to after all.
Emails that we’re getting from friends and family telling us to register cell phones with the National Do Not Call Registry before January 1, 2005 to prevent numbers from being provided to telemarketers aren’t entirely true.
There is however, a 411 directory assistance service for cell phone numbers being created. You can read more about it here.
The Washington Post had an interesting column by writer Leslie Walker on ‘citizen journalism’. You can read more about the article here. The article mentions the advertising opportunity for local, grassroots supported websites. For me, much of this article sounded like earlier days of online community building. Someones gotta crack the local ad model, why shouldn’t it be homegrown news sites?
Leslie also mentions the old Sidewalk business model. Consumer generated news and newspapers feel more genuine than Sidewalk did. Instead of trying to market a brand, there’s actually some value being delivered! I think a forerunner of the local community was the Blacksburg Electronic Village — the community network for Blacksburg, Virginia.
BTW, The Media Center’s Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin are up for an award for The Fast 50 (Fast Company magazine’s search for "ordinary people doing extraordinary things"). The nomination: We Erased the Lines Separating Media and Society.
The Media Center has been involved in participatory journalism for some time through vehicles like the ‘We Media’ project, CYBERJOURNALIST.NET, and the MediaMorphosis conference.
On a personal note, our almost 6 yr old made the front page of the local paper. The accompanying story is actually about soldiers serving in Iraq.