Ford is diving into the burgeoning social media world head first. Based on the success of its Fiesta Movement, the Blue Oval has decided to launch a new program called Fusion 41 – so named because of the Fusion Hybrid's 41 mile-per-gallon EPA estimate in the city and the fact that Ford is looking for 41 participants to take part in its new game.
A total of eight Fusion or Fusion Hybrid owners will be chosen from all applicants received based on their social media presence, and those drivers will each choose four friends or family members to join their team. Ford will then hand out assignments that must be completed with photo and video proof that is to be uploaded to the driver's Facebook profile. Ford is calling the program an "automotive relay race," whatever that means.
So, what's the incentive to participate? For starters, each team will be given a new Fusion for the challenge, and the winning team captain will have their own Fusion or Fusion Hybrid paid off by Ford. Not bad, eh? Plus, participating team members from the winning group will earn free gas for one full year. Want to know more? Click past the break for the press release and visit www.fusion41.com before November 6th to enter the contest.
Online dating is a somewhat static market. You have premium players Match.com and eHarmony, who seem to suggest at every commercial break that the person you've been looking for your whole life just signed up a few minutes ago. At the other end of the spectrum, there's Plenty of Fish which, although vastly improved from a few years ago, is still one of the least visually pleasing and user friendly sites on the web. PoF does ridiculous volume and traffic, is free, and doesn't do a stitch of marketing.
Enter new kid on the block, Ge.la.to. Launching today, Gelato takes online dating and mating to the social web. Incorporating your lifestream into the process of getting to know you, while paying a keen eye to keep privacy at a reasonable level.
Gelato uses your existing social web accounts in a couple of interesting ways. First, as a filter to weed out the creeps, married guys and anyone else who likely shouldn't be trolling a dating site for love, Gelato gives the power of validating your profile to those who know you on the web best, your social media friends. Gelato's "Social Confidence of Online Profile" score or "SCOOP" for short, assigns a rating to your profile based on how much validation Gelato has gotten that you're for reals. It's an interesting twist on the idea of building confidence through the social web. In real life, you take so many queues on whether or not you should trust new strangers from the environment -- Do they have friends? Are they well liked? Do they treat people well in public? -- and Gelato boils this down to the same kinds of inferences, only without the awkward noonday coffee date.
Second, Gelato integrates your social streams directly into your likes and dislikes. Steve Odom, founder puts it like this, "We call Gelato 'stream dating'. We use what your doing around the web - your Facebook profile, your tweets, Flickr photos, Netflix queue and more to quickly and easily build an online dating profile. Your profile is what you are actually doing, not some static, out-dated written profile."
So, instead of the books, music, movies and sundry that you happened to be thinking of when you filled out your profile, potential suitors can see that you're groovin' on the latest Yo La Tengo album, or that you like tweeting about TV shows. It's not a revolutionary step forward in the field of courting, but it does leave me wondering -- what took someone so long to do this right?
Whoo boy! We would not want to be on the business end of the Honda whip this week. In case your head has been in the sand, Honda put up a Facebook page showing off their new Crosstour. General reaction was, to put it Orwellian terms, ungood. What's the problem with social media marketing if you're a corporation? You give up control of your message. As it turns out, sometimes you even give up internal control, too. Which is exactly what happened when Honda's light truck product planning manager Eddie Okubo posted a defense (or is that a defenestration?) of the much maligned new CUV without divulging the company he works for. Well, he got caught.
In a novelstrangeunprecedented move, Honda has gone and posted a clarification on its Crosstour page – about everything. Here's the short version, all bullet pointy like:
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