Tech Companies Try To Be Romantic But Still Look Clumsy
by
on February 13, 2009,
Earlier this week I have already talked here about quite an interesting move from Facebook: offering scheduling gifts to be sent as many as 7 days in advance under wraps. And while this sounded romantic as the receiver was supposed to have two surprises instead of just one it was quite obvious that Facebook had a simple reason of hoping to significantly boost its revenue generated off virtual gifts for this Valentine’s Day and the future holidays as well.
So looking romantic had clear financial reasons for Facebook so the entire move looked more clumsy than anything else. Why not introduce it a few weeks in advance not to pretend romantic where they obviously thought about money only, not romance - which is in fact quite normal for a business. But it looks like tech companies like to make such pseudo-romantic moves on the Valentine’s Day eve so I have collected a few examples of what tech companies do to celebrate the Valentine’s Day - with some of these examples looking very clumsy.
The largest example is Yahoo: the company is trying to kill two birds with one stone - both celebrate the Valentine’s Day and draw attention to the ads they display alongside search results (and make money off helping people notice and click these ads): for the Valentine’s Day the search company is running a heart border along all the Valentine-related ads in the search results for everything from candies to cards. This looks like a nice way to capitalize on the holiday for Yahoo - and hopefully it will help improve the company’s financial position a little.
AT&T has been generous enough to carry out a whole survey to prove that SMS may be a very good addition to traditional ways of demonstrating love like sending flowers and chocolates. This obviously is intended to encourage subscribers to send more SMS messages to each other for the Valentine’s Day - and bring more money to AT&T itself.
Also for those who are happy with gifts that are only virtual, Remember The Milk has an interesting idea of buying one Pro account and getting the second one for free which sounds like a reasonable option if you are terribly late with buying anything as a gift - after all, a very good part about virtual is that it is delivered immediately. I can imagine your sweetie will be very happy to get a gift of Pro account to a to-do application!
Another funny thing is TrueScoop, a new Facebook application, that announced its launch just in time for the Valentine’s Day in order for everyone to get real scoop on your Valentine. Basically it helps anyone determine if he or she is exactly who they say they are by matching their data with their database of criminals. How romantic it is to do a background check on the person you are in love with!
And the most original gift idea was suggested by the team over at Flock, the social web browser. Instead of giving a usual box of chocolates the guys offer you to invite the person you care about to download Flock because it is the browser that “inspires people to stay connected”. And of course a personal tutorial on how to use the browser will go pretty well with this generous idea. Truly, a totally recession-proof idea though I can still hardly imagine anyone who will be happy to receive a gift like this and users already complain that releasing a pink or red version of the browser could at least make this gift more reasonable. Allen Stern has an excellent sarcastic post about this idea by Flock.
I don’t really know what the conclusion here should be. On one hand, I think it is not really bad to see tech companies trying to be romantic at all. On the other side, it is funny to see how they don’t get the difference between romantic and clumsy - after all, many of them have good community managers and even hire PR agencies to help. Is it so difficult to come up with some moves that are actually romantic for the day?
