Usually watching lifestreaming is anything but lively — the banalities of a San Franciscan startup are only interesting to a very small niche. But yesterday, iPhone Day, was an inflection point.
Many folks chose to jack into the various live videostreams that covered the lead up to and the speedy consummation (in most cases - sorry, Kris Tate) of iPhone mania. Some of these folk were within driving distance, and elected not to get caught up in the frenzied gadgetry. While others were on the other side of the planet.
Hanging out in Bunbury, Western Australia, Duncan Riley tuned in and captured his thoughts on TechCrunch, for whom he writes regularly. Sometimes the clearest view comes from afar, from outside the maelstrom and Duncan hits the nail on the head in his post:
The difference on iPhone Day was that instead of turning to blogs or waiting for the mainstream media to report the facts hours later, we were all able to watch it all in first person. The promise of user generated live media was delivered. The seed of a revolution was planted.
The seed Duncan is referring to is exposure. Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, has confirmed this view. He notes that as a two person startup they don’t have a big advertising budget. I suspect, like most startups, they don’t have an advertising budget at all. So, together with his colleague, Kris Tate, he set out to cover iPhone Day and as a result promote the Zooomr brand.
His take on this is pure guerilla marketing magic:
…we have to be resourceful as we develop, grow and bring Zooomr to maturity. We have embraced grass roots journalism from the beginning. Blogs, podcasts, videoblogs, social media sites, live casting — all have been used on a shoestring to allow Zooomr to compete with much larger corporations who have at hire some of the finest and most expensive PR agencies in the world.
Zooomr is able to promote like this more than anything because of the generosity of the Zooomr community who understand what we are doing and what Zooomr is all about. Central to the success of yesterday’s launch was that Zooomr stickers were *everywhere*. People were wearing them, they were used as the rope tape to form the entry line into the store. They were prominently featured on CNBC’s coverage of the event. But we never would have had the stickers except for the fact that one of our photographers Randyman generously at his own expense printed up 500,000 of them for us.
The message here for brand developers worldwide is “be resourceful and be noticed” - exposure is there for the taking.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk. Yes, it was chosen intentionally - capturing Kevin Rose and crew outside the Palo Alto Apple store on iPhone Day using Robert Scoble’s Nokia N95 …poetic justice.
