Coin Operated Nothing Machine
Around the corner from our office is a small Chinese restaurant. And next to the counter of this restaurant, are some of those “Love Test” machines, where you drop a quarter in, put your finger on a little sensor, and find out what sort of lover boy (or girl) you are. Essentially, some lights flash and it gives you some obviously bogus read-out. Beyond some basic blinking-light mechanisms, there isn’t much going on here.
It got me thinking one day, that it’d be fun to have a machine like this, that quite literally did nothing. Or more specifically, didn’t even claim to do anything that would even be remotely of value to the user.
Rather than a machine that flashes and beeps at you under the guise of providing some love-test results, I’d like to create a little machine like this that merely asks you to deposit a quarter and then nonsensically flashes colored lights at you for 5 or 10 seconds, with no other perceived value beyond just the flashing lights. Maybe call it “The Amazing Flashing Light Machine“. The end.
I can almost guarantee, that this machine, placed in a bar, would make money.
Changing The Dating Game
Think about online dating for a second. Even if you’ve never done it, you probably know a little about how it works. You create a profile (the bait), and you basically start fishing. Most sites make you pay a subscription fee, and some don’t.
It’s all pretty simple, and it hasn’t changed in 15 years. More or less zero innovation in this space, save for a few nutty angles on the whole thing.
Over the past few months, I’d been thinking about how online dating could be made better. Or at least more interesting. And here is where my mind was going.
- Online dating is pretty socially acceptable these days, but there are still a lot of people that have some trepidation about the whole thing. So how do you get around the social stigma that holds people back from getting into online dating?
- I also thought about all of my female friends, who aren’t single, but who LOVE playing matchmaker and setting people up. How could you get those people involved? If you could get not just the single people, but ALL people involved (in the broaden-your-potential-market sense), the size and scale here gets a lot more interesting.
- And in the offline world, the best way to meet someone, is to be introduced through a mutual friend. Someone that can vouch for both parties and clear that transaction so to speak. How could that trusted offline experience be re-created online?
- Which led me to think about an online dating site, that was more of a “game” than a dating site in the traditional sense.
- How could you introduce game mechanics whereby matchERS could be rewarded for successfully connecting matchEES?
- And by making it a game, where the single people (or matchEES) were passive users that were being matched up by other users, rather than actively fishing, it seemed to take a little of the social sting out of the whole process.
ANYWAYS…
Today I stumbled upon an ad for “The Matching Game“. The ad simply showed me two pictures and asked me to click to vote if I thought these two people should date. Out of curiosity, I clicked through, and was instantly thrown into a very simple, very slick little voting interface that allowed me to vote on who I thought would or would not be a good match.
And after I voted on the requisite number of couples, my results were displayed, along with an indication of how well I had done in predicting compatibility.
I love this concept, and I am glad to see someone was thinking similarly about this.
Measuring Social Media Marketing
Just read a post on the HubSpot blog entitled “7 Reasons Social Media Is Bad for Marketing“. Though the title is a bit more incendiary than the article is (HubSpot is good at writing juicy headlines to draw readers in), there was one of the bullets that I thought was dead on.
Focus on the Wrong Metrics – A fan or a follower isn’t a business objective. Social media has enabled marketers to chase metrics that don’t impact their business. The reason for most of the discussion surrounding social media ROI is caused by measuring the wrong metrics. Reach, leads and sales should be some of the tangible metrics that are measured as part of social media marketing strategies.
Amen.
So often I hear marketers say things like “We’ve got a gajabillion Facebook fans!”, and when I ask “Ok, so now what?”, I receive a blank stare back. It isn’t just about collecting fans or followers, it’s about leveraging those open connections you’ve made, effectively. Extracting (and providing) value through that channel.
Whenever there are random numbers thrown around in our office, I always think of the exchange between Jerry and George in the Seinfeld episode The Little Jerry.
JERRY: Hey, guess what! Little Jerry ran from here to Newman’s in under thirty seconds!
GEORGE: Is that good?
JERRY: I don’t know.
Hey, I’ve got 40,000 Facebook fans! Is that good? I don’t know.
Full article here. Link via @pc4media