Some atypically good stolen bike news

Photo ©: SF Examiner

I had heard the other day that Lance Armstrong had a bike (along with a few others too) that was stolen out of the back of his team truck at the Tour of California. This bike was a one of kind track bike, so I expected that it would be returned, because really, unless you've got access to an out-of-country sale... who's going to buy it? Oh, who am I kidding, unfortunately, someone probably would.

Anyway, the interesting part of this story is what happened after it was stolen. So, the first thing that happened was that Armstrong tweeted the theft. Then someone started a Facebook group "1 Million Citizens Looking for Lance Armstrong's Stolen Bike". A few days later, the bike turns up. While that's good news obviously, the other bikes that were stolen with it have not turned up yet. While I'm sure they are high-end bikes,they probably aren't one and only custom bikes and therefore, are a lot less likely to turn up. This is the fate of many bikes in America (3,000 bikes in America are stolen every day (pdf)).

I will be interested to what impact the facebook and twittering had to do with the return of the bike (and hopefully, the other bikes as well). This interconnectedness should be a boon to the National Bike registry, it seems. Hopefully, better coordination comes from the NBR, social networking, and sales sites such as craigslist and ebay.

I am hopeful that perhaps this greater awareness and usage of these networks to will help to better cooridinate on bike theft and help others have more luck with returned bikes.

Photo ©: Sacramento Police Department via cyclingnews.com

Meme you. Meme me. Meme everybody.

Let's start with a little background: Facebook now has over 150 million users. In terms of size, this would be the 8th largest country in the world and more users than there are people (in total) in France and Great Britain combined.

There is a meme burning through the Facebook society. According to wikipedia.com, a meme is "a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet, much like an inside joke" In this case, the "25 things about me" meme is basically a little quiz that is spreading organically from person to person. You write 25 little "facts" about yourself, tag people in the message and then it gets passed along to the next person and so on. There are a lot of memes out there, and most professionals consider memes to be the basis of viral marketing. Youtube.com, blogs, twitter, and really anything you can hyperlink is essentially the concept of memes - things getting passed along to friends. But what had my interest was these quizzes, these lists that many people spend a lot of time and thought on.

I completed my "25 things" yesterday (a little late to the party), and as a marketer, this had me thinking "are there new ways I can exploit leverage these quizzes for branding purposes?" Seem far fetched? One of the previous memes was an iTunes quiz that asks you questions about your music library in itunes. Before that, there was one whose first instructions asked you to "Put your iTunes (or any other media player you may have) on shuffle." As a marketer, I read this and think, "wow, great marketing for Apple".

The facebook community has gotten so unwieldy large, that it makes sense to think about these in the same way we think about other marketing... locally. Why not start a quiz that asks specifically about your product? It may not get 100 million responses in 50 countries, but wouldn't it be better if it gets 100 responses within 1 mile anyway? There would be a fine line (obviously) between a fun quiz that people want to pass along to their friends vs. overt marketing, but if you think of it as a joke that you are passing along it seems that this may offer a new avenue for building brand affinity. Another option is to use it as a way of getting others to promote your product for you. Create a quiz that your product, website, or store would be the answer to some of the questions. Of course, there is a population out there that hates these memes (maybe you're one of them). They don't like to fill them out, but my experience has been that most of these folks read them anyway. For the purposes of branding, really, that's all we need.

Of course, measuring this is pretty much impossible, but with the exception of the time you'll lose writing, answering and reading your friends responses, it doesn't really have many other costs (that time cost shouldn't be underestimated, though). So, what do you think? Could you write a meme promoting your business without promoting your business? Maybe this will be your first foray into viral marketing. Give it a try, I'll fill it out!

Are Spokespeople really Tweeting?

After having a discussion about how twitter is actually used for business purposes yesterday (something I'm still not sold on), I was reminded of this op-ed piece by Jonathan Salem Baskin in Ad Age. Baskin says:

We live in an era when people find time during the business day to tell one another what they've just put in their coffee, yet it's still possible for an executive to be "unavailable for comment" in a news story.
I find this intriguing in a quaint sort of way. It's like saying, "Sorry, he's buttoning his spats" or "Sorry, she can't come to the phone; she's busy sorting punch cards."
I think corporate communicators need to invent a better excuse, or perhaps altogether revise their approach to unwanted inquiries from the media.

As I re-read this, I had to wonder, are there really spokespeople out there who are updating on twitter and facebook, while having admins tell the press they aren't available? I'm sure there are a few, but I have to think this is the exception, not the rule. I suppose that they think their privacy filters are enough to block media folks who seeking comment, but I'm not sure this something that I'd trust. Besides, as Baskin points out, others in the department are likely to be busy blogging, tweeting, facing, etc. about it anyway. I like Baskin's idea of dumping the "on the record" concept altogether:

What does "on the record" mean anyway? It's an archaic idea. Today's social mediaverse means every tidbit of content gets captured online by somebody, with or without veracity or attribution. To paraphrase Tom Friedman, the world is hot, flat and noisy. Nothing is off the record.

As I read this is threw my brain into an interesting historical parallel. My wife and I were pretending like we old last night and watched a history of the White House during Lincoln's presidency on C-SPAN. One of the most intriguing things from this was that Lincoln used to have several hours during the week that the public was welcomed into the White House to give their opinion in-person directly to Lincoln. Talk about tossing out the concept of "the record"! Can't imagine that these days, though I wish we could.

Wouldn't it be great if a president (of either the U.S. or a corporation) set up a feedback opinion loop like that, that was actually monitored? And no, it doesn't need to be twitter - sheesh, talk about minutia overload!