Grown Up Thinking

Perhaps the coolest thing I’ve seen all week, yellowBird is utilizing a variant on Google Street View technology to provide a true 360º view in video. (Video!!!) By using six divided lenses, it essentially collects data of every possible viewing direction. I won’t get into all the gloriously geeky details on exactly how it works, but it is definitely pretty flippin’ cool. Nothin’ like soaring high as a bird…from the comfort of my cozy cubical.

Few things in the 2.0 era have received so much buzz so quickly as Skittle’s recent social media effort. I logged on to Twitter yesterday to a literal hashstorm of all things Skittles. I realize people get excited about candy, but this was ridiculous. What was going on? Obviously I did what any responsible digital marketing  professional would do–I went to Skittles.com.

Something wasn’t right–why did Skittles.com take me to Twitter’s search page with a little branded overlay on the top left?  Where’s the flashed out, high res animated page loader? Where’s the ambiguously organized homepage with different content engagement opportunities?  All I could see were different users’ tweets about Skittles. I clicked around the overlay, and was taken to….Facebook? This was something entirely new.

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So, much has been said about Joe Six-Pack and the newly famous Joe the Plumber but convenient store chain 7-11 actually conceived of an ingenious promotion to use Joe to predict the election. In this case, a cup of joe. The idea is quite simple, 7-11 created red coffee cups with McCain’s name on them and blue cups with Obama’s. They then track the cups that their customers are selecting on a nationwide map on their 7-Election.com web site, which even allows consumers to view results by state. Even more remarkable, the results of this poll were within 1% of actual results in 2000 and identical to final results of the 2004 election. Guess Joe really does play a big role in this year’s election.