Hats off to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (them what invented the internet) for an inspired tech PR stunt to demonstrate the power of social networking; without having a single downloadable white paper or littering its home page with tags for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like.
DARPA tethered a big red balloon at ten different locations across the US, offering a prize to the first person that located all ten balloons. A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology claimed the prize, pinpointing all ten in under nine hours thanks to its use of social networking and a promise of a share in the prize money. MIT called it a “recursive incentives,” programme but to the cynical it sounds more like a pyramid selling scheme.
“We can envisage deploying this system to find missing children,” said Riley Crane from MIT, although surely tethering missing children to balloons somewhat negates the need to find them.
Either way, our strategic PR input would be to make the experiment bigger; 99 red balloons has a nice ring to it…
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What a cunning stunt
Posted by Steve Loynes December 7 2009 05:37pm