THIRD SCREEN: Mobile Voter Launches SFVote Campaign

From PDF:

Mobile Voter, the newly formed non-profit dedicated to providing voter registration information via mobile technology, launched their first campaign SFvote yesterday. In collaboration with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC) SFvote hopes to register voters using a text-messaging service developed by Mobile Voter founders Ben Rigby and Bart Cheever.

This is good stuff. Nonprofits and advocacy groups are notoriously un-creative when it comes to creative content, so mobile information services may be the best entrée for groups to get members and advocates on the mobile bandwagon.

MICROSITE VIRAL: Crony Jobs

Simple, clever and timely effort from the folks at Whitehouse.gov.

OPEN SOURCE MARKETING: AdAge Jumps On The Train

Good open-source marketing article from AdAge.

I think the point missed so often in these discussions is that the open-source movement does not represent a fundamental shift in what people believe in or what they want or expect from a product or service. Experts talk about open-source as a societal sea change where every consumer now feels they own your brand and is compelled to have a hand in marketing it. That’s crap in my book. That would smack of effort and damn it if we Americans have the time or energy to give a hoot on that level. We want information delivered just like we want our products delivered: in a convenient and tasty package. The open-source movement is more about the arrival of new channels and representatives of influence that can serve to compliment or undermine the traditional institutions of influence, not supplant them. Marketing is still a game of matching products and services to consumers through hubs of information and influence, there are just new channels to consider in the mix.

As the article mentions, transparency and feedback are important with open-source, but they have always been an important component of brand success. The only thing new under the sun is that your success or failure at addressing and accounting for them is now measurable. This represents a huge opportunity, not a threat. Not only can you now measure your brand efficacy quickly across these new channels, you can measure it on the cheap. That’s the real revolution in my book.