A few days ago, one of my favorite blogs mentioned this interesting service, Valleyschwag. For $15 a month, will bundle up a package of the best schwag being handed out in silicon valley, and deliver it right to your doorstep. This really is a great idea, for a few reasons.
A new twist on Viral Marketing #
I really like this concept, from both sides of the coin. For companies, they can supply these promotional items at minimal cost to a larger, more targeted audience. While for the end user, they pay a fairly minimal service fee to receive cool stuff. What could be better, free stuff & nearly free advertisement.
This allows for some really creative marketing, getting the brand out without wasting money on sending products to those that have no real interest is critical. With so much money wasted on typical giveaways, for many companies with a lower budget, such promotions aren’t an option. A service such as this is great for these smaller shops, it allows doors to be opened that otherwise would have gone untouched.
Let’s face it, free stuff is great, and people love it. The $15 being charged is close enough to free for what you’re getting, at least one shirt, plus enough stickers to cover that ugly laptop. In general, people are easily bribed, and when good companies with good products do the bribing, it works out great for all involved.
The Future of Marketing #
These companies realize something important, traditional forms of advertising aren’t that effective, and among the web crowd, even less so. To get your name out, you need to not only have a good product, but give users a reason to talk about your product. Word of mouth is the way to go, and with lower-budget Web 2.0-types seeking ways to build buzz, this provides an excellent opportunity.
The companies that donate these items receive not only more, but better press than they could buy. If this works well, expect to see copy-cats springing up in other industries. This is certainly an interesting idea and I can’t wait to see where it goes.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this, I’ll post again once I receive my first package. 😉
Does your business model thrive as your customer thrives, or does it drain the life from your customers? After a recent1 conversation on the impact of improved privacy tools (i.e., the eventual elimination of third-party tracking cookies), I realized that the most significant effect of these improvements would be to companies with a parasitic business model. A business model which I see no problem in disrupting.
For many years, the web has existed as an advertiser’s dream2 — minimal privacy limitations, technical controls that had little impact, and a strong lobbying arm that has been able to derail many efforts to improve the situation.
It’s been some time since I last wrote about YAWAST on here, it was actually back in April when I posted the last update – that was for the release of YAWAST v0.7.0. Currently, it’s at version 0.11.0 and a lot has changed. It’s been rewritten from scratch, more people have become involved, it has moved to a (fairly) regular release cycle, and has expanded a fair bit in terms of functionality.
Last week Brandon Wilson and I gave the lunch keynote at the SC Magazine Congress event in Chicago. It was a fun, more executive level event – a big thanks to Eric Green and team. The talk was mostly an executive overview of what was discussed at our DerbyCon talk, with some updates, and some insights.
Here are the slides, and a rough transcript from the event:
This is based on the speaker notes – so it doesn’t include the discussion and other bits that were said.
Huge PGP files, an ancient version of PGP, and errors every time they tried to decrypt a file – that was my completely unexpected challenge on Friday. Dealing with file processing issues really isn’t part of my job description, but I’m the closest thing my company has to an expert when it comes to encryption, so the task fell to me.
After looking at the options and issues to get the server upgraded to a non-stone-age version of the PGP software, the easiest answer looked like decrypting the files with GPG – it wasn’t as easy as expected, but I did get some useful information that may help others.
I recently had an idea for a small web application, and seeing as I’ve not spent as much time as I’ve wanted to using Rails – I opted to build it the latest version of Rails. A decision that caused far more grief than I expected.
If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed VPS for those that don’t know), the seemingly simple task of getting a Rails 3 application up and running is actually quite complex.
