Your inappropriate pictures subsequently create jobs.

That's right. Someones complaints that their keg stand photos were prohibiting them from getting a job sparked someone's imagination. Therefore, they started a potentially incredibly profitable business of cleaning up after your messes.

NPR tells us a little bit about a couple of these businesses. The first is Reputation Defender. This site finds your inappriate pictures and tells you to delete them. If you don't, they are more than willing to take legal action against any employer who won't hire you--freedom of expression, right? This appeals to both you and your parents, who are offered their own link to defend you in the workforce battlefield. The second NPR brings up is Naymz. This is geared specifically toward college students.

These sites, these weapons of self defense, are a great tool for college students especially. Hypothetical situation: you go to a party, you drink, you dance on a table, you do things you regret. It happens. Now the next day, you are not going to deny it! Because if you do, you are just not cool. Even the Naymz blog (see above link) would admit, "If you aren’t a complete nerd, odds are that you probably have some incriminating photos, dubious comments, and questionable friends on these sites." It is definitely a toss up..."should I do the right thing, or should I be AWESOME?"

I, of course, air on the side of capitalism. If you want these pictures up, by Jove, have them up. This is why we have lawyers with more and more new specialization areas every day! This is why some entrepreneurs have jobs! Take a risk, have fun, and let your grandma know that college is fun and you have no regrets (well, when it comes to the internet).

As a sidenote, I had to mention this.

MAD PROPS TO MYSPACE. I know that myspace is actually very annoying and trendy, but this time it did something right. My favorite band EVER, Nine Inch Nails, put up their previously unreleased songs onto the internet for all to hear via myspace.

Click here to listen to (in favorite order) "My Violent Heart", "Me I'm Not", and "Survivalism".

Ooh, NEAT, we could use this!

So, mobile communications as Rheingold talks about in his Smart Mobs seem SUPER FUN.

While the idea that I could find my soul mate while walking down the street seems like a good time, I think that we could use this technology to better society.

For instance, we could label certain people as criminals or offenders so that a person might know where to avoid people.

Could we also go so far as to put business information out there, so it would be like recieving a business card when you walk by a person? That would be like advertising yourself while you sleep! Of course, you'd want to turn off your phone while you are sleeping or in your house at all so as to avoid attracting stalkers....

Let me see

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Tee Hee Hee

I do love being controversial!

Guerrilla marketing, as described by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, is an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget.
(Sorry, but Wikipedia worked best in this instance).

I would like to clear a few things up...

So I feel that I have "stirred up some controversy" with the connections I made last time. I would just like to explain it a bit further.

I was making the observation that blogging is actually a kind of guerilla marketing. It's really unconventional if you think about it--it's not a commercial, it's not an advertisement--it's an opinion piece. If a company could get an Op-Ed about their product in some newspaper every week, imagine how great that would be. However, since the internet is not really that old, and blogging is relatively new, it is still innovative.

The customer loyalty part comes along with the "addiction" to blogs. Once you read something you like in a blog, chances are you will come back. Some people read these blogs daily to see what is new in the market. This builds customer loyalty within a blog--which is great for a company to know about. That way they can take advantage of this audience and focus on them to sell to.

I hope this helps...

What is "going too far" in marketing?

Reaching people requires creativity. Especially if a company wants to reach people for relatively cheap. Things like blogs really are taking over in some aspects.

Firstly, if you start visiting a blog site and are intrigued by what it has to say, chances are you'll go back. Heck, you might even get addicted. This builds up customer loyalty. Ben McConnell talks about the importance of customer loyalty in Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel. This has got to be a kind of guerilla marketing--the subject of my senior paper in high school.

Guerilla marketing has really always interested me: people reaching people in cheap and unconventional ways. People are turned on by new ideas. This definitely applies to blogs and the blog addicts. These people start reading, become addicted, and then tell their friends about it. Or they might see something interesting, share the link with one of their friends, and the process starts all over. Unconventional marketing could potentially be the greatest form of marketing for a company.

In Naked Conversations, the authors talk about how Microsoft started their blogs and that really impacted the company. I don't mean to be a downer, but couldn't they do more?

Here is another little guerilla marketing stunt Microsoft pulled...



Now you see, all this unconventional marketing is connected. AND effective. But are they going too far?

Intelligent, Well-Caffeinated, and Dangerous

Now, I really don't like to focus on the very beginning of a reading assignment, but it was the subject matter of the first few pages that really caught my attention. It was the whole, "What do people gain from virtual communities that keeps them sharing information with people they might never meet face to face?" in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs.

Rheingold was discussing that matter with a friend of his who works for Microsoft up in Washington state. It is people like these, these innovators, who are responsible for the ability to collect social capital without looking a new "friend" or colleague in the eye.

I definitely appreciate the ability to meet new people, find people with similar interests and connect with them, and have the chance to purchase books from people I never really want to meet who live in states miles and miles away. My mom always told me never to talk to strangers, on the other hand. Isn't it dangerous to trust people with my contact and/or billing information when I don't know the first thing about them? Is all this innovation taking away from the relationships that could be built and time that could be spent talking in coffee shops instead of email? How can you learn to respect someone without ever hearing the tone of their voice, or seeing if they can hold eye contact?

Social capital is very important, but we should remember that we will always need human interaction to keep us from becoming robots.