For those of you who aren't religious readers of Mr. Rogue's blog, I'll give you the skinny. Tara received a product to review from Sprint. Instead of whoring out her blog like a Mary Meeker of Web 2.0, Tara created a contest: whoever has the best Pinko Marketing idea for Sprint will get the phone (which, in itself, is a Pinko way of promoting Pinko Marketing, woot!). I need a new phone, so here's my stab at it.
I did minimal research on the Samsung a920. Traditional marketers are touting the phone for its sleek design and streaming video from top content producers. Kinda neat when you're bored on CalTrain! Another feature of this phone, of course, is the ability to capture photos and videos. And, one of the things that bugs me most about most cell phone plans are the exorbitant prices they charge for multimedia SMS. Stir this all in a pot and you get. . .
*insert catchy name here* OK, so I couldn't think of a good name, but here are the basics:
- Make all multimedia SMS from this phone completely free (to encourage usage)
- Give all users a free photo/video blog/repository (to encourage sharing)
- Create a user-voted contest for the best videos and pictures of the day (to create buzz)
The first point is throwing a bone to people for a feature that they desperately want. The biggest restriction to sharing videos and photos with friends is how freakin' expensive it is.
On point number two: users want to share their content. Getting your picture from your phone to the Internet is way too difficult. Sprint could sign a partnership with an innovative company like SharpCast to get content to the Internet, a partnership with Riya and YouTube to store/tag the content, and SixApart to create blogs. Of course, Sprint would have to accept that most people already have blogs and photo/video-storing services, so they've had to make it easy for people like me to get the photos into my Flickr account and post them to my own blog. All the technology is out there for the taking. The details should be worked out with an eye to making it easy for users to share their content, not for other goals like "increasing page views on Sprint.com" or "creating a community of Sprint customers."
The third and last point is where it's at. A contest will encourage people to make cool, edgy videos with their phones. A voting system will encourage people to encourage their friends to vote for their cool, edgy videos. With enough good content, Sprint can even create a channel populated entirely by user-created content (with no fees from the networks). Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the user-created content was more popular than CNN or ESPN before long and a valuable asset to get people to buy the phone.
There you have it. Comments are welcome (especially on the catchy name!)
