Thursday, April 20, 2006

Was It Viral Coolness Or Was It A Coder Easter Egg?



One of the top stories on Digg.com over the past 21 hours has been about a scene from the television show Family Guy appearing on the JetBlue.com Web site.

It seems as though if you viewed the route map (located here) and typed in "pbj" (think peanut butter and jelly), the route map would be replaced from a scene from the animated FOX television show.

Now, Digg.com is becoming the new Slashdot in terms of identifying what is "geek cool" and this story has received 2,162 diggs (votes) in less than a day. So, this story is very geek cool.

The offending code is now gone. Going to http://www.jetblue.com/travelinfo/routemap.asp now only provides a nice route map. Typing in "pbj" does nothing, other than show you that you have to pretty much fly thru JFK to get anywhere on an otherwise awesome airline.

My question is whether this was intentional (my vote - no). Did Jet Blue "do the right thing" and take the code down ASAP (my vote - maybe, maybe not)? Other than getting a "cease and desist" letter from the folks at FOX, what bad could come of this?

This story had some traction in viral-land. It was moments away from "jumping the shark" into mainstream, via company IT guys sending it around to people in their office (and then those people to others...) This is the type of viral phenomenon that could have been even bigger and beneficial, with just a little thought. What if they kept the "Easter Egg" up and replaced The Family Guy scene with another one, one that had been approved by the company? What if the new scene included a code for 10% off a purchase in their ShopBlue store? What if there was a hat in the ShopBlue store that included the Jet Blue logo and the letters "pbj" next to it?

Now that would be a way to capitalize on viral marketing...

Aside: This reminds me of some company (I can't remember which one) that had an option on their 800 phone customer support system with all of the typical choices (for English, press 1; for technical support, press 2; for questions on a bill, press 3) but also had another choice (to hear a duck quack, press 9). Funny.

-aB

UK Hand Spray Found To Kill Bird Flu Bug



Snippet from DailyRecord.co.uk:

An ordinary handwash costing just £2.99 can kill the bird flu virus in 30 seconds, tests have found. No-Germs, a simple hand spray, has been on sale over the counter for two years. But when the H5N1 avian flu outbreak gathered pace among birds, No-Germs owners decided to test it against the virus.

The results, revealed yesterday, were remarkable - the handwash was more tha 99.8 per cent efficient in killing H5N1. The discovery has been heralded as a "major breakthrough" - particularly if the virus ever mutates into a human form.


So, how soon until we see "Kills the Bird Flu Bug" tagline on every cleaning product here in America? This is the new "Anti-bacterial" starburst that began to appear on everything (from soap to detergent to mousepads to ink pens) a few years back.

Read the entire article here.

Gaming Women Outnumber Men



Yep, in the important 24-35 age group, the number of women gamers outnumbers men. Don't believe me? Snippet:

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire and puzzle games like Tetris.


We already know that male pre-teen and teens are spending more time playing video games than watching television or DVDs. Note that these gamers are more likely to play console games on their Playstation or XBOX.

Casual gamers are playing a different type of game - less competitive, less violent and usually less expensive games like solitare, Tetris or other puzzle games.

The opportunity for marketing sponsorships in these casual games is actually higher than with the traditional console game. Right now, the main sponsorship option in console games is product/branding placement, such as passing a McDonald's restaurant in a racing game or passing a cologne outdoor board in a skiing race game.

Then there's Burger King who went all-out with their sponsorship in EA Sport's Fight Night Round 3. The game starts out with traditional sponsorship like logos in the boxing ring and on-screen graphics. But then, you actually get to fight the King! (with his funny, albeit creepy King-head).

With casual games, the brand can be more woven into the game itself. Budgets for development/licensing are a lot smaller, too. And these are the games that are more likely to have mobile implications - such as a download game for a mobile phone. Think if you could "weave in" proximity into these games, a la GeoCaching...

The full story from GameDaily appears here. This should likely change marketers perceptions of this yet untapped medium for reaching consumers.

-aB

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Citysearch.com Traffic up 185% Over Last Year. Huh?



There is an interesting story on WashingtonPost.com today about where Internet traffic is growing and slowing.

No surprise - traffic to blogging and social networking sites has skyrocketed. Blogger.com traffic is up 528% year over year and traffic to MySpace.com is up 318%. Guess Rupert's $580 million gamble might be paying off...

Other interesting tidbits include traffic increases to Wikipedia.org (up 275%). I'll be interested to see if wiki traffic begins to cannibalize blog traffic and/or if we'll see a traffic plateau in the entire social networking arena. (I wrote about this topic on the PersonalizedMediaBlog.com last week.)

Google saw 21% growth, but Yahoo, MSN and AOL all saw relatively flat growth, under 5% each. eBay actually saw a 3% traffic drop. Interesting. Guess all those people doing auctions are now blogging and chatting up on MySpace.com... (Not really, remember that eBay still gets millions of visits a day.)

The most interesting part of the story for me was the Citysearch number. Most local Internet sites closed their doors during the Internet bubble bust. Citysearch was on life support. But there seems to be growth in local-oriented online content. Perhaps this has something to do with the emergence of local news video online (accessible in part because the majority of online Americans now have broadband). Perhaps there is a renewed focus on real community content (to complement online communities). I'll tell you - this is a very interesting stat. It will be interesting to see if this is just an anomoly, if it's just a Citysearch thing, or if we'll see more growth in local-oriented online content. If so, it will prove the point that the online communities are becoming an integral part of our entire culture and that the distinction between online and "live" is narrowing.

Check the story out here. ComScore actually provides some pretty detailed data.

-aB