Jerry Bowles is getting excited about MingleNow. He asks Julia French an ex-pat Brit who is director of marketing at Silicon Valley advertising network BlueLithium to spill the beans. Why wait Jerry? Check it out as I did. I’m not a huge fan of the new breed of these social media sites but if there was one for Unplugged Ex-Pats in Spain, then I’d likely change my mind. The reason MingleNow sparked my interest was because Jerry remarked that Budweiser is financially backing the site. Woooo!
It’s easy to see why. MingleNow wants to know who you are (fair enough) including your age. It has a cute photo section called Clink where you can upload photos up. From here on I’m going to get speculative because I’ve not spoken to Julia about this.
One presumes that over time, Budweiser will be able to mine the data and start to discern people’s drinking habits on a geo-location basis. At one level I really don’t mind. I’d be pleased to find other Bud boozers because then I’d assume there’s Bud in the area. If not then Budweiser would no doubt be considering the economics of supply to where I live or invent incentives for me to travel. Of course I’d expect them to understand the cultural mores of living where I do and therefore the likelihood or otherwise of my traveling in the first place.
The curious thing about MingleNow is they have no qualms about showing what could be considered competitive information. In this case, there is a subsection called Guinness Clinks. You might think that counter productive but in fact it provides whoever is mining the information with more data to supplement existing competitive information. It might not be great information but in theory at least it will provide nuances and context to other marketing efforts.
Worryingly, the terms of service provide no real clue about copyright or re-use of material. Given that one of Julia’s uploads could be construed a product placement pic, one wonders what happens if Bud choose to splash Julia’s face around the country?
Nevertheless, this is a great example of marketing innovation that could be applied across a variety of retail segments large and small. The technology is now getting so easy to use, I can envisage Flickr offering this kind of service as a white label offering for any business that wants to take advantage of the platform.
Technorati Tags: flickr, innovation
