june 2007

A few weeks back I complained about not having anything to stand for or a movement to really get behind and make my own. I have plenty of ideas and many opportunities that would most likely lead somewhere if I only just committed to something.

Well talk is cheap, time is money and I don’t feel like wasting talk or time anymore.

I have narrowed it down to 2 finalists.

I have 2 core concepts that have been dancing in my head for way to long and I am prepared to move forward on either of them. GiveAndGo.org and LocalCasters.com.

These are 2 completely different ideas with the core linking concept that they are social media projects which require a large community of participants where all are compensated for their involvement in one way ore another.

GiveAndGo.org

The GiveAndGo.org concept was born of perspiration and inspiration. Keith Cassell of Cassell Design (I sublease space in his office in Durham) was telling me about a web page he has setup to track the progress of an incremental cross country bike ride he was doing to raise $ for a good cause. At the end of it all, he had traversed the equivalent of a cross country trip without ever leaving Durham and the surrounding areas. He also managed to raise a nice stack of cash for a good cause.

It got me thinking, we could absolutely create a system to allow people to raise $ for charities through goal based physical action. If I wanted to get sponsors to give me $1 for every game of ultimate Frisbee I played over the net year to raise $ for Urban Ministries of Durham. I would be able to set it all up at GiveAndGo.org.

We would handle all the cash and would create a system that would help them track progress, raise awareness, find sponsors and whatever else we can do help them in their journey. Keith and I talked more over the following 6 months and we already have a preliminary business plan in place. Now we need to polish the idea and get our proposal into circulation for investment.

LocalCasters.com:

If you couldn’t guess by the URL, would be a local media outlet for Indie producers who want to cover the happenings of their favorite haunts. We would allow them to upload video, pics, text from their cell phones in order to have the most timely content available on local happenings. Yahoo and CNN are already doing things on a national level to this effect but I have yet to see a craigslist for local, user generated, journalistic media. Revenue would come from 2 sources and would be shared with the producers based on % of overall page views of their content and our total revenues for a given time period. There are other details of this project that are already worked which will remain under wraps for now.

I figure we will need to launch in one market and partner with local media outlets for phase 1 in order ...

About 6 months ago I made the move over to an Intel Mac from my PC. I couldn’t be more happy about it. I love my mac and it has preformed for me with no questions asked.

The only Microsuck thing that I still used on a regular basis was Entourage. It’s the mac version of outlook. The funny thing, is that Entourage was the only program on my Mac that had performance issues. It would cause the computer to freeze up on occasion as well as not allow it to shut down because of a 5 minute long spam deletion process.

Well, I am finally rid of that final vestige of Microsoft oppression.

How did I do it you might be wondering.

I switched over to Gmail and Google Calendar. I was already using Google docs for my word processing.

In the immortal words of Darth Vader, “Soon the transformation will be complete.”

Now the only product I still use is excel. Sometime next week I am going to dig into open office and rid myself of that vex as well.

I wonder how long it will take for Google to loose it’s appeal and become the next dark lord or computing environments?

This post started as my third comment in a string on a post over at MarketingHipster.com sparked by news that fans pulled all kinds of stunts including sending 45000 pounds of peanuts to CBS offices to bring a TV show back on the air.

Cord was pissed that people would raise that much ruckus and mobilize so well for a friggin TV show rather than putting that time and money into something more meaningful. He was totally on point.

I was commenting my outrage there for a while but my latest comment was to big for that little comment window.

Where is the political action campaign where we send 45000 pounds of cow shit to the white house to give back some of the BS he has given us over the past 7 years? I don’t think Move-On.org would ever send out a bulletin asking users to do that.

(Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Anyone want in?)

As marketers, we need to find a way to rally people around something that both reactivates this nerve that has gone numb and their need to pay attention to online entertainment.

Here are my first 4 Ideas
Find a way to create an online reality TV show that follows an activist group trying to raise awareness and make change in the country on issues ranging from homelessness to ousting Bush.
Try to get one of us (net brights) to run for political office where the entire campaign and then the whole time in office is transparently published and openly discussed on a day to day basis allowing the community to see and interact with the day to day political challenges.
Create an online network where all we do is create shows and interactive environs supporting this kind of programing utilizing net distribution like Joost, YouTube, Democracy instead of traditional broadcast.
Mobilize a community that will somehow deliver cow manure as close to the White House as they can safely get without getting arrested or thrown into Git-mo for a chemical attack on Our Nations Capital. “We are just fertilizing the lawn man, where is the law against that.”

(I am sure that idea 4 will get me on some no fly lists or at least a secret service entry in my log files)

Now what?

If anyone wants to help me with some of these ideas, I would love to put together a little squad under the Bold Actions banner to see what we can accomplish. Let me know if you are interested.

Be sure to comment your ideas, what do you think we can do to make a difference?

How can we stand up and fight for something meaningful. UPDATE - 06-12-07 - After further consideration on idea 4 and a log file entry form the US Postal Service, sending fertilizer in the us mail might actually be illegal. So instead, I’m thinking little plastic poo. We could attach little messages to it. We might even be able to get a novelties company to donate the poo to our cause.