Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku?

May

19th

Posted in Online Marketing, Technology by Douglas Karr at 12:08 pm

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Jaiku 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?

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Comment by Duane Brown

2007-05-19 15:16:22

Do people really want a Woot.Jaiku.com? You can already get a feed at their site. Doug, I don’t think it’s as simple as finding another way to promote your product/service to the masses. The idea for jumpline or another hosting company is cool, but that wouldn’t work for everyone.

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.

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-19 22:15:16

Hi Duane,

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

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Pingback by Affiliate Fortune Cookies » Blog Archive » Affiliate Marketing on Micro-Blogs?

2007-05-19 19:32:15

[...] Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku? | The Marketing Technology Blog [...]

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Comment by Chris Webb

2007-05-20 09:15:45

I’m with you Douglas. I mentioned this on my blog a while back, although I was specifically talking about Twitter at the time.

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!

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Pingback by Why Marketers aren’t Running to Jaiku (yet) | wpstar.com

2007-05-20 09:20:30

[...] post started out as a comment on Douglas Karr’s post about Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku. After 3 paragraphs in his comment box, I decided I’d just make a blog post out of it. So, go [...]

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2007-05-20 19:37:55

[...] Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku? | The Marketing Technology Blog (tags: marketing web2.0 twitter im jaiku) [...]

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Comment by Duane Brown

2007-05-20 19:59:15

I stop freelancing next week and start at an ad agency. My job is to live on the edge and bring things like twitter/jaiku to the company table. I hope my alpha geek cred gets the ad agency to adopt these bleeding edge trends/technology faster. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-20 21:45:03

Best of luck, Duane! New starts are always exciting.

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Comment by Duane Brown

2007-05-21 10:04:59

Thanks Doug. I’m so happy as I get to live AND work downtown now.

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Comment by Caroline Melberg

2007-05-21 10:50:00

Hi Doug – great post that really opened my eyes to the potential of Twitter. I’ll admit that I was quick to judge it originally as a foolish waste of time … your post on the potential of using micro-blogs from a marketing perspective is spot-on … you’ve changed my opinion and I’ll be experimenting with Twitter and Jaiku as a result.

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

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-21 12:33:54

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

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Comment by Scott Townsend

2007-05-21 11:29:17

We have been trying to figure out how to use Twitter to market the baseball team our company is sponsoring (www.unitedlinen.com) and for marketing the Baseball tournament that is named after us. We are thinking about posting real-time scores at the end of each inning during the 5-day torunament as well as posting scores for the baseball team throughout their season.

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…

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-21 12:39:56

Hi Scott!

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

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-21 15:14:30

Is Woot reading my blog?

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Pingback by The Lonely Marketer - a discussion for the small business marketing manager » To Twit or Not to Twit, That is the Question

2007-05-21 21:49:57

[...] Karr did a post about Jaiku (another micro-blogging tool) where he poses the question, “Why aren’t marketers running to Jaiku“. He has some unique ideas that will get you thinking. Chris Pirillo had an interesting post [...]

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Pingback by Marketing and Twitter | The Marketing Technology Blog

2007-05-21 22:25:16

[...] just wrote about Marketing and Microblogging a couple days ago and it’s a great conversation that’s starting. I’m telling you [...]

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Comment by John

2007-05-22 00:12:38

Like most posts about the incredible marketing potential of Twitter et al, this one fails to come up with much of anything useful to do with it that can’t be done more easily – and can’t reach more people – with other media.

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.

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-05-27 00:31:31

One note… woot is taking a look at this technology!
Woot on Jaiku

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Comment by Shaun

2007-08-07 16:40:32

Hey Doug.
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

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Comment by Douglas Karr

2007-08-07 19:19:18

Hi 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

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Pingback by Engagement is Nonsense | The Marketing Technology Blog, Indianapolis

2008-12-16 22:50:51

[...] It’s really not that difficult. One example is Dell’s recent acknowledgment that they’ve been able to leverage Twitter for over $1,000,000 in revenue! (Wish I had thought of that!) [...]

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