Pepsi is going social with the pepsi refresh project, several reports talked about a major shift in Pepsi’s marketing efforts from Super Bowl to social media, which is a really great and promising step.
The project is an opportunity for people to submit their ideas that can make a difference in the world, 32 ideas can win $1.3 million a month, winners will be determined through users voting. Ideas can be in one of these categories: Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Education, Health, and Neighborhoods.
People can start uploading their ideas on January 13th 2010, and first voting will take place on 1st of February throughout the month, and every month.
It’s a challenge getting people to vote, but since there is a cause in it, I guess it will go viral, but the y key thing is to get many people submitting their ideas, people are active on social media. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a success, if Pepsi is behind, it’s gonna be big, but I would love to see what is Coca-Cola’s action after this announcement.
LYNX is one of my favorite advertisers, I love their sense of humor and they way to play around with the whole sexual attractiveness caused by their products. Check out this cool mobile application that can be used to break the ice with girls to hook up with wherever a guy meets them. Actually they have couple of cool applications, like spin the bottle application, pretty wicked and I love it
Here is what Levi’s came up with for a social media campaign in Australia: iSpyLevi’s, the idea was to release hundreds of pairs of pants in the streets of Australia and New Zealand, and then to use twitter as a communication channel to give people heads up about the location of people who are wearing those pants, once anyone locates them, all he/she has to do is to ask: “Are those Levi’s?” to win the same pants the person is wearing! This actually reminded me with Kramer’s crazy story in Seinfeld when he was going to return the same pants he was wearing to their original owner!
The campaign is cool and according to their video they have generated a lot of buzz and managed to reach 300,000 people in the first 6 weeks, how ever they have only 2,000 followers on twitter, I was expecting much more, but the idea is really nice.
Here is an interesting initiative, be part of the Google Map Maker competition and you could win $50,000 for UNICEF’s projects that aims to empower the youth in your homeland through technology. Basically participants are supposed to add hospitals, medical clinics, schools and universities in their own countries, the idea is have complete and accurate maps to help organizations such as UNICEF, and other parties to have a better source for directions.
It seems like this competition is not running in all countries, for example if you zoom to countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE or Egypt, you won’t find anything there, but even main cities, but if you go to Iran, where users are banned from being part of this competition, you will find a detailed map, I’m not sure why. Anyway, it sounds interesting, check it out, it’s open till 31st of January 2010.
2009, the year when Obama was inaugurated as the President of the United State, and won the Nobel Prize as well, it was the year Michael Jackson died, and Google launched the Wave, it’s the year when twitter scored a huge milestone with the Iranian elections. Recession got even uglier this year, but we hope it will disappear in 2010, by the way, if you are on Google Wave, you can join the discussions about 2010 here on discuss2010.com
Do you miss your family and friends? Are you bored with facebook and myspace? Here is an interesting way to get rid of all that and go back to reality, with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine it will take 52 minutes to commit suicide, compared to 9 hours and 35 minutes with the manual suicide, I don’t think it takes that much to delete a facebook account.
So far 147 people committed suicide with this machine, I think I might join them and delete my facebook account.
