Give the tribe a badge. The cool thing about marketing the iPad is that it’s a visible symbol, a uniform. If you have one in the office on Monday, you were announcing your membership. And if it says, “sent from my iPad” on the bottom of your emails…

Since Stronico is intended to a be a tool for elite salespeople, why not give them a physical token to reinforce that eliteness, say a challenge coin of some kind.  That would dovetail nicely with upcoming secret society marketing ideas as well.

Since I’m going to the Startup Atlanta Meetup tonight, I think that will be it for the blogging today.

1. All contact display photos and icons would initially be in black and white, and as more detail got filled out for that person, the color would gradually return.  One possible problem with this idea is a contact having only a black and white photo.
2. The size of the contact photo or icon would be proportional to their importance in the network, either by number of connections, number of unique connections, etc.

These features certainly won’t be going into the current version, but I thought I would record them publicly for feedback.  Thoughts anyone?

Then I had the thoughts:

1. Why not have a website (of course) where I could give away handmade prizes in exchange for information
2. The items made on the lathe’s would be one-offs, the best tip, tidbit, etc per month would win the price, which would probably be a gavel of some sort.
3. There would be a new topic every month, as well as a new prize
4. Later be the prize could be for the best entry on the free educational versions of Stronico as well (more on that to come).
5. The information would have to be in the form of short, freeform entries, or tips, on a particular topic, either mneumonics, cooking, woodworking, typing, or whatever.  Ideally there would be some voting involved, but initially I would choose the monthly winner and send out the prize.

The next challenge I suppose would be how to structure it to support Stronico, either as a promotional site, or as a freeware standalone part of the social networking/mnemonics/brainware part of the internet.

That’s my idea for the day anyway – I thought I would share my thought process with everyone.  I find it helpful to flesh out the idea in words instead of leaving it unformed in my head.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

1. Psychological profiling of contacts.  I’m thinking of a simple Type A, Type B snap judgment one can make after first meeting a person.  If I can think of working in the Myers-Briggs personality types that would be wonderful, but I don’t think the information is there to implement it practically.
2. A matchmaker feature – if two contacts have similar tags, friends, interests, life statuses, locations etc, but are not known to know each other, it would be a great thing to introduce them (as written about in the great book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi.  I realize that Facebook has a similar feature, but this would make the decisions based on information that only you, the Stronico user would know.
3. Archetyping – this is related to point 1, but it would be useful information to store impressions about someone, i.e. is that person a drama queen, unflappable robot (much like the author…), sports fanatic, sensitive artist, and the like.  These would not be that accurate, but it could come in handy, particularly for those people with large networks.  The use of broad archetyping is useful as a sorting mechanism.