Lifelong learners are always in search of new classes to take, but finding them isn't always easy. TeachStreet is a new website dedicated to helping teachers and students connect.
Seattle-based TeachStreet launched into beta a few weeks ago with more than 25,000 Seattle-area teachers, trainers, tutors, instructors, coaches and classes. Students can search for teachers across more than 500 subjects and filter the results according to map-based location, ratings from other students, teacher availability, promotional pricing and more. The free site can be searched by keyword, or visitors can scroll by subject through TeachStreet’s extensive directory of classes. Classes and teachers currently available on TeachStreet cover popular subjects like tennis, piano and cooking, as well as less common ones like break dancing, surfing and Texas Hold ‘em Poker. For teachers, TeachStreet provides a simple yet powerful way to promote themselves online and manage their learning business. Free online tools for teachers include an online profile builder, search engine optimization, and scheduling and management tools.
“We have heard time and again from adult learners and parents how difficult it is to find relevant and up-to-date information to evaluate teachers," explains TeachStreet founder and CEO Dave Schappell. "At the same time, teachers are craving easy-to-use tools to help market themselves on the Internet, manage their student rosters, and find more prospective students in their neighbourhoods. One of our goals with TeachStreet is to use the latest online technologies to facilitate real-world connections and provide anyone who wants to either learn or teach a new skill with a rich, geographically targeted website that features a city’s best teaching resources.”
TeachStreet is currently ad-supported, but ultimately it plans to roll out premium, fee-based services for teachers as well. It also aims to expand to other US cities in the coming months. One to partner with in a city near you...?
Website: www.teachstreet.com
Contact: www.teachstreet.com/contact-us
Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann
Last summer we wrote about FreeHand Advertising and its initiative to give free, ad-supported notepaper to college students, and now ABS Notebooks is going a step further and handing out whole notebooks instead.
The Shadow Notebook is a five-subject notebook that gets cobranded with participating colleges and universities across the US and distributed by the school at the start of each semester. The university's logo appears on the cover, and pages of school-related maps and information get included within. Thirteen four-colour, full-page advertisements, meanwhile, act as subject dividers in each notebook, giving advertisers the means to engage students while they are a captive audience in the learning environment. Students, naturally, carry the notebooks with them throughout the day over the course of the semester, which from the advertiser's perspective amounts to 96 impressions over a four-month period, ABS says. So far, about 700,000 notebooks have been distributed to college students at campuses nationwide.
College students spend some USD 198 billion per year, according to Harris Interactive, so it's no wonder advertisers are going to new lengths to reach them. We've now seen free photocopies, free printing, free notepaper, free phone calls and now free notebooks—it all goes to show, there's no such thing as too much free love!
Website: www.absnotebooks.com
Contact: info@absnotebooks.com
We covered mobile virtual network operator Blyk both before and just after its launch last year. For those who have been wondering how the company is doing, last week it reported that it had reached 100,000 members in Britain in just six months.
Blyk targets 16- to 24-year-olds with its free mobile phone service, which includes 217 texts and 43 minutes every month. In exchange, of course, they get advertising—up to 6 messages sent to their phones each day. Britain's youth don't seem to mind, though—Blyk reached that 100,000-member target six months ahead of schedule. Response rates to the ads in question have also achieved a whopping average of 29 percent—far surpassing the norm, which tends to hover in the single digits.
Shaun Gregory, Blyk's UK CEO, explains: "Reaching 100,000 members is significant for advertisers because it gives them the opportunity to engage with a mass youth audience in a highly efficient and cost-effective way. In six months we have built up a deep knowledge of our member base, which now exceeds many established youth media players, and with over 7 million 16- to-24-year-old phone owners in the UK, there is huge potential for growth."
Blyk will launch in the Netherlands in the second half of 2008, followed by other European markets after that. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs and Industrial and Financial Investments Company (IFIC) recently joined the company's list of investors, which also includes Sofinnova Partners and a number of others. Free love, you're on a roll!
Website: www.blyk.com
Contact: membercare@blyk.co.uk — sales@blyk.co.uk
Spotted by: RK
We've already written about a number of efforts to crowdfund and crowdmanage music bands, and now in Scotland a crowdmanaged music festival is in the works that was prefunded by a local brand.
Last week Tennent's Lager launched Tennent's Mutual, a new music venture that will ultimately result in a live music festival this fall in which fans select artists, debate locations for gigs and call the shots on ticket prices. To kick off the effort, Tennent's created a start-up fund of GBP 150,000. Fans who sign up before June 30th will be given founder member status and the right to vote on the "who, what, why, where?" of all decisions as to how that start-up money is invested. Counsel will be provided by the Rolling Stones' Andrew Loog Oldham, Babyshambles' Drew McConnell, journalist and broadcaster Keith Cameron, former Scots chart-topper Ken McCluskey and local musicians Stewart Henderson of Chemikal Underground and Johnny Lynch of The Fence Collective. Tennent’s Mutual is a not-for-profit enterprise, and no booking fees will be charged for shows. Ticket income, meanwhile, will be ploughed back into the central fund, creating a self-generating amount that will grow and continue to create yet more live events.
Chemikal Underground's Stewart Henderson puts it nicely: “Generally speaking music has gone digital and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. This is a total watershed time that we're living in at the moment. It will change things completely—irreversibly. What Tennent’s has done is they’ve effectively set themselves up as patrons. It’s a positive thing as it allows things to happen that may not have otherwise.”
As fans and customers claim increasing control in the music industry and beyond, it's a smart brand that will jump to the forefront with funds and a supporting model. Imagine the transformation in Microsoft's image if it ponied up the funds and let users decide how they were spent! It's just a matter of time before this comes to other countries and other industries; who else will stand up and be an early leader?
Website: www.tennentsmutual.com
Contact: www.tennentsmutual.com/contact
Spotted by: Lyuba Stevasarova
Earlier this year, we wrote about a sympathetic initiative by Paris airports, giving weary travellers a chance to recharge with a dose of full-spectrum light therapy.
Last week, IKEA offered fatigued Stockholm shoppers a similar form of respite by installing a Sovhotell (sleep hotel) in one of the city's downtown shopping centres. After checking in at Sovhotell's front desk, guests were asked whether they normally sleep on their stomach, side or back, and were given a pillow to suit their personal sleeping style. In addition to single and double beds, the Sovhotell also featured a bridal suite.
Guests were welcome to snooze for 15 minutes, and were given eye masks and headphones with soothing soundscapes to help them benefit from their sponsored power naps. According to IKEA, inspiration for the Sovhotell came from Japanese capsule hotels and from the fact that the shoppers in its own stores are occasionally found napping in the bedroom section.
No word yet on whether IKEA is planning to bring this shopper-friendly campaign to malls in other parts of the world, but we think it's a great example of the tryvertising trend: marketing a product by letting customers try it out in a relevant setting, without pressuring them to buy.
Website: www.ikea.com
Spotted by: Frida Berglund
Wine may be enjoying new popularity, but that doesn't mean the average consumer isn't still daunted by the knowledge it takes to pick a bottle they'll like. We've written about several efforts to simplify the process, and now WineSide is taking a novel approach by offering wines packaged in sample-sized tubes.
WineSide offers both sweet and classic wines in patented, flat-base glass tubes with screw tops carefully engineered to protect the wines' flavour. The sweet wines—which include Sauternes and Muscat, for example—are available in 6cl tubes, while the Pomerol, Chateau Neuf du Pape and other classic wines can be purchased in 6cl or 10cl sizes. WineSide's collection represents a range of appellations and producers; tubes are available individually or by the box, which can be chosen to provide an introduction to a variety, year or region. Kicking off retail sales, the products are available exclusively at Colette in Paris this month.
In addition to giving consumers a new way to sample and discover wines, WineSide's tube format also promises to give vintners new tryvertising capabilities at relatively low cost. The French company's website is still under construction, but it says it is looking for distributors. One to get in on early!
Website: www.wineside.net
Contact: vincent@wineside.fr
Spotted by: Jean Friesewinkel
Put yourself in your consumer's shoes: you're walking down the supermarket aisles, kids are screaming, time is tight and you've got a long list to get through—is it any wonder you just stick to buying the same things week after week? Now imagine instead that you've had a chance to sample some of the new products out there in a relaxed setting, without any pressure to buy. Chances are, you'll make some new finds that will improve your weekly menu.
Australian Word of Mouth was launched in 2005 in the hopes of helping busy mothers make that second scenario a reality. The company is paid by participating consumer product companies to stimulate conversations about their brands and systematically collect feedback once consumers have tried their products. To do that, it makes presentations by invitation into established social and community groups—churches, school committees, etc.—with information about new products on the supermarket shelves. The presentations are given at no charge, and participants get a chance to try the products out themselves in a relaxed environment. Afterwards, Word of Mouth follows up with a survey to collect their feedback. It also invites participants to continue the conversation online by joining the Word of Mouth Club, which offers competitions, recipes and forums as well as product news; a classified section is coming soon. The result? Word of Mouth meets and stimulates product conversation among more than 200,000 Australian women each year; since the October launch of its Word of Mouth Club, more than 20,000 members have joined.
Word of Mouth currently offers its social tryvertising services just in Australia, but it hopes to expand in the near future, Foster says. The concept isn't entirely new, of course—other buzz marketing agencies have been working this field for years—but as traditional advertising continues to make room for other types of promotion, there's still plenty of room for innovative niche players. (Related: The perks of product testing and Nationwide tryvertising parties.)
Website: www.wordofmouthco.com.au
Contact: presentation@wordofmouthco.com.au
Spotted by: Emma Crameri
We've written about product life stories before—identifiers that link a commodity to its origin. The two examples we previously featured were for organic bananas and fair-trade coffee. Which makes sense, since consumers who pay a premium for organic or fair-trade products are often more interested in background information about the products they consume.
Which is why we were pleased to spot Iglo's Woher kommt Ihr Spinat program. Iglo, a European market leader in the frozen foods segment, recently added tracking codes to their packages of ordinary, non-premium spinach. Consumers can type in the code on Iglo's website and see exactly which farm their creamed spinach came from. Details displayed online include a family photo and a blurb about the farmer (Claus Bernsmann, for example, is 39 years old, has three children and has been farming for Iglo since 1990). Which provides consumers with a story they're likely to share with family and friends.
Since Iglo and other F&B brands already keep track of this type of data, it's a fairly easy way to add a sense of transparency and authenticity to mainstream products. The brands only need to give consumers access to part of an existing database, and display the resulting information in an appealing way. For many more examples of how smart brands are tapping into consumers' increasing demand for transparency and authenticity, check out trendwatching.com's current briefing about the shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers share status stories.
Website: www.iglo.de
Spotted by: RK
