With all this babbling about the Super Bowl and the silliness over cellphone news, quite a few stories slipped under the radar. Fear not, dear readers. Here’s our weekly list of five things you might have missed.
1.) Wifi Names That Send Messages: We loved this article, courtesy of WebInkNow, about how Alexandra Janelli discovered businesses in New York who used their Wifi network names to communicate with their clients. Janelli is the founder of WTFWifi.com which chronicles the weird and wonderful network names people come up with to market to their desired audiences. It’s a clever and easy marketing idea any size business can try.
2.) That Razor Blade in Your Ice Cream: Thankfully Stephanie didn’t miss the sharp object at the bottom of her Wal-Mart Peanut Butter Stars ice cream cup. The east Texas woman cut her lip and called a Wal-Mart customer service rep who replied “I’m sorry, I hope your day gets better.” Uh, okay. By “better,” did she mean “I hope you don’t find battery acid on your pizza from Domino’s?” Regardless if the blade in question is a hoax or not, this makes the list for mind-blowing bad customer service and what-not-to-do brand public relations.
3.) Xoom Goes Boom: Motorola’s iPad rival surely didn’t slip past tech junkies or mobile marketers. But what you might have missed about the wonder gadget is the shyster-ish fine print featured on the stunning Super Bowl commercial. According to said fine print, in order to get the darn thing to operate on Wifi, Xoom owners have to fork over a minimum of $20 bucks to Verizon to unlock it. Confused? So is everybody else. The deal sounds shady to the average Joe and could thwart Motorola’s efforts to lure away iPad fanatics.
4.) Little Makeup Robots: Luxury brand Chanel produced the coolest video of the week with an electro-music-filled video which features robots made out of the company’s super cool cosmetics. It’s an accessible and bold move for a brand that is slowly embracing new media marketing.
5.) Content Creators Revolt: Lastly, this article featured in Good.com tells the tale of freelance writers who have been handing over their content for free to the Huffington Post. With the news of the $315 million dollar sale of the HuffPo to AOL, writers are wondering “Where’s our share?” While we love Huff like everybody else, we do think the value of content and what we pay the creators is a timely and long overdue conversation.
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