Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku?
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
If you’ve not heard of micro-blogging, you can visit my site and look on my sidebar where it states, “Doug on Jaiku”. Micro-blogging is simply posting a short statement of interest and/or your location. The two key players in the market appear to be Twitter and Jaiku. There are subtle differences in the two services, but I’m a fan of Jaiku because of its integration capabilities. I recently put this to the task with my WordPress Plugin for Jaiku which has just passed 500 downloads this morning!
Marketing on Jaiku:
What has really surprised me about Twitter, and especially, Jaiku adoption is that Marketers haven’t caught on yet. It’s honestly kind of dumb if you ask me, if I was a retailer, I would absolutely be using this technology. Woot has been an incredibly successful site, offering a single deal per day. Jungle Crazy is another site that seems to have legs, providing a RSS that you can subscribe to and get the best deals. Rumor has it that Delta Airlines is testing out Twitter, but in viewing their page - the results look pretty useless.
If I were an airline, I’d be automating the posting of specials to individual, location-related, Jaiku Feeds. Imagine Indianapolis-UA.jaiku.com where I could subscribe and see the latest specials popping up in my feed reader. Or perhaps junglecrazy.jaiku.com or even woot.jaiku.com. Where’s dell.jaiku.com or sony.jaiku.com? Hello? What the heck are you Marketers doing out there? This is a golden opportunity to adopt a new strategy and you’re all sleeping at the wheel!
Some additional uses outside Marketing:
- Monitoring - Imagine you’re a Hosting provider and you want to send out information posts on system outages or maintenance. Why not have a jumpline.jaiku.com or dreamhost.jaiku.com where Dreamhost or Jumpline hosting feeds its latest system status? The fantastic part of this is that Jaiku is hosted elsewhere… so the status can always get out there.
- 911 on Jaiku
- Homeland Security Threat Level on Jaiku
- Stock news on Jaiku
- Tornado Alerts on Jaiku
Where are all you people? Wake up! Do you have some other ideas?
Fox’s Drive is already using Twiiter and that is working out. They are using it as a way to create a community around the show, but more importantly, for those who are into cars as well. I think for anyone in marketing who wants to use Twitter or Jaiku, they should be trying to crate a mini-community and not just shamelessly flung their products. But that’s my 2cents.
I agree that it needs to be a part of an overall strategy. I’m simply surprised that the technology has been sitting out for a while, has garnered much attention, but marketers haven’t been creatively using it. I’m an ‘Integrated Marketing Strategy’ believer - and this is simply another piece that could be added to the puzzle!
As for Woot, I absolutely think that it would be a knock out! In fact, if I were Twitter or Jaiku, I’d be trying to get something going with them right now!
Doug
Alpha geeks like you and me adopt new tech like jaiku and twitter quickly and immediately see the opportunities. Unfortunately, we live out on the edge, and it takes the rest of the world a while to catch up.
Heck, companies are only now understanding the importance of blogs!
I also wanted to thank you for the link a few posts back - I was in the middle of a blog move over to WordPress which is why I haven’t responded sooner. If you have the chance, check out my updated blog at: http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing - I’d love to hear what you think. (You can also see today’s post where I am linking to your blog and this post on Jaiku in particular).
Thanks for the great blog - keep up the great content!
Caroline
I love the new look! I built my site off the same default theme (if you couldn’t tell). Thanks so much for the kind words!
Doug
We are trying to figure out how to tell people how to get to twitter and what they need to do to be a follower of the team and of the tournament. We’ve created a suername of ULBraves in Twitter, but that’s about as far as we’ve got. We’re trying…
That’s a great way to use it! You could advertise your Twitter feed and URL and also post those scores on your home page using their API in real-time! Let me know if you need a hand - that would be a cool experiment!
Doug
How many marketers does the average person actually want sending them tweets on their mobile phone? One of your commenters actually points out someone doing something reasonable with Twitter - using it as a community building tool - but that’s hard work and requires some creativity and thought. Whereas the gist of your post, and your examples, sound like a “hey, let’s throw everything onto microblogging platforms and see what sticks!” approach.
Finally, there’s the reason that most marketers haven’t run to Jaiku and Twitter: they want to talk to their customers, most of whom are not using these things. Nobody flocks to a technology that the vast majority of their customers aren’t using and don’t seem interested in.
Woot on Jaiku
Question hoping you can answer or direct me in the right direction. I have a website for teens for a local afterschool program that I am looking to use twitter.
1. We have a “live” page in the hope that we can have many students texting to it and then it could be splashed on a screen with a projector.
2.I would love to be able to use this same system for doing conferences where students/people could twitter their thoughts or ideas to a twitter account and as said previous, it would be projected onto a wall for everyone to see live. Let me know if you have any ideas.
Thanks, Shaun
This could be done quite easily. I even have some sample code that you can get started with.
I would just make a Jaiku Channel and then you can invite all your students to that Channel. Everything they post can be displayed - either by retrieving the Channel or by displaying the RSS feed!
Doug