Taking Social Media to the Red Carpet

We saw another great example of the changing face of media at the Grammy's last night. Imogen Heap, the British singer and songwriter accepted an award for Best Engineered album, Non Classical wearing the much hyped Twitter Dress. The twitter dress was Imogen's way of taking her fans with her to the award ceremony. The dress had it's own live twitter feed. According to Timesonline.com, her necklace was a digital sign displaying messages that her fans were writing to her on Twitter. Those tweets were relayed to her jewellery through a wireless router — equipment that provides an internet connection — embedded inside her black dress. What a great way to involve fans and followers!

Imogen's Grammy win and the popular twitdress is going to skyrocket her album sales for sure. Watch out Lady Gaga here comes Imogen Heap!

Diaster relief with technology

The recent Haiti earthquake has left hundreds of people injured and homeless. To aid in the relief of the aftermath of the deadly quake, Red Cross created a Text Message campaign which urges people to donate $10 towards the relief efforts. According to Mashable.com the campaign has raised more than $1,000,000 through this campaign. It's amazing to know that people are donating in droves to help those in need.

And Red Cross sure has done a commendable job of coming up with a creative, easy and fast way to raise money for the victims of the quake. Google is also showing it's support by having a display ad on it's homepage with resources and donation links to UNICEF and CARE. These are some of the best ways of disaster relief using technology I have seen recently. With new technologies comes new and faster ways of helping those in need.

Additional links and resources:

1. http://mashable.com/2010/01/13/haiti-red-cross-donations/

2. http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/

What's your bra color?

New year, new beginnings, new resolutions. And after two months of spending time with family, friends and eating and drinking I finally decided to start updating my blog again. There's a lot that happened since my last blog entry but the one thing that surely caught my attention was the color updates on Facebook by my girlfriends. The last few days my Facebook feed was speckled with colors -lacy black, beige, white, red, orange..all supposedly bra colors. I couldn't for the life of me understand what was going on till I got this message from one of my friends: "just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness."

Huh? How does writing the color of my bra going to help spread breast cancer awareness? I didn't think of breast cancer when I saw the color updates. Nobody was talking a word about cancer or how it affects women. It was more of a titillation than anything else. I am sure whoever started this meme had good intentions and the tons of women who flashed all their Facebook friends did it for a good cause. But just talking about it isn't going to help the fight against this horrible disease. There should be some call to action, don't you think?

In a true marketing sense I thought this Facebook meme was fun and silly but not effective in what it was supposed to do i.e. talk about breast cancer. It's nice to see people coming up with unconventional and fun ways to promote ideas and awareness but I am sure if this campaign had more content than color, it would have been widely popular for all the right reasons.