My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 3

It’s time for another Pitch Log Mashup and after South by Southwest, I’ve got a ton of new tools and programs to tell you about. There will be some tools I single out to write about more extensively, but this give me an opportunity to share more and more often. This is volume three of that effort. See Volume 1 here. Volume 2 is here.

And if you’re interested in pitching me something, increase your chances and read the “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re wondering why your pitch didn’t make it on my list, see the, “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re still not sure, re-read the, “How To Pitch SME” page.

My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 3

Canadians Get Cubed

Nissan Canada is giving away a cube®, which is compactly reminiscent of Scott Monty‘s favorite vehicle, the Ford Flex, to winners of an on-line competition for creative thinkers and talented folks. Yes, you have to be Canadian to win. If America has anything to say about it, Celine Dion comes with the car so long as you promise to keep her locked in the trunk.

The cool thing is that the entire campaign launch is centered around social media. Nissan will reward what they’re calling, “social creativity,” which I was certain led to several of my friends getting venereal disease, but I digress. Their campaign, called “Hypercube,” is a competition for people to, “demonstrate their social creativity and audition for a chance at driving away in one of 50 new cubes.”

I don’t know what that means, but it’s worth checking out here, particularly if you’re Canadian. Or would like to save the world from Celine Dion. They also have Twitter and Facebook locked in for this thing. There’s even a social media release. We’ll see how many entries they get on something that sounds really vague, but certainly interesting.

What A Croc

My son loves his Crocs. So does my father-in-law. I haven’t tried on a pair yet, but I might after meeting and hanging with George Smith, the shoe company’s social media specialist. It’s not that he convinced me or anything, I just like to be supportive of cool folks and George is that. Crocs has a blog that includes a deal of the week, but much more content than just drive-to-buy crap.

One interesting bucking of the trend George has overseen (perhaps accidentally) that I really like is they don’t identify the company as being on Twitter. (The twitter.com/crocs page has two entries that are over a year old.) Instead, the company is engaging folks on Facebook, YouTube and, of course, Flickr, where lots of folks are displaying pictures of their pairs.

The Social Atlas

Dopplr is launching a new set of features called The Social Atlas. It appears to be a more advanced and easier customer review feature for their already useful travel tool. The collective input on places to eat and places to stay will be aggregated, anonymized and visualized into an overall view of a city’s locations. I haven’t seen that part, but it sounds neat. Little of this sounds ground breaking, but they’re expanding into the mobile space with the feature, so it’s worth noting if you’re a Dopplr user or would want to check them out.

Some Real Estate Real Estate

Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate has made a splash online now. They have a blog, a Twitter stream, a Facebook page … yada, yada, yada. Their blog is actually rather engaging with a wide variety of topics related to their business, but not hard sell. Their Twitter stream is yet another “Click My Junk” blog post feed with no engagement, though. So, some good, some not so. But they’re out there. Bravo.

¿Hablas español?

Livemocha and Pearson (the education company, not Chris of Thesis and other theme fame) have agreed to partner and offer a direct-to-consumer, conversational English language learning experience on Livemocha’s on-line platform. The products are supposed to appear in August. I’m not sure if there’s a social media angle to it, but with Livemocha’s on-line communities, which have about two million users, I’d expect so.

Zemanta Update

Zemanta, the semantic blog plug-in that offers suggestions for images, links, tags and more in your blog tools has added a bunch of new features I was just plain oblivious to until Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta’s community manager, sat me down at SXSW and showed them to me. The images and links sections now have search features added in so if the relevancy of the items presented puzzles you, you can search for more specific keywords. Also, you can login to the Zemanta tool and set up your profiles so it will search your images on Flickr or other networks. Very cool additions to a very cool tool. Zemanta does, however, have some competition for parts of their tool. More on that in a later post.

Speaking Of Blogs

I don’t normally review bogs. In fact I never do other than to recommend a few I read now and then. But I met Steve Guzman, editor of TheScooterScoop.com at SXSW and wanted to throw his out there. He does news, reviews and commentary on scooters and microcars. I dig it because moving to more of them will not only eliminate a good deal of traffic congestion, it’ll help lessen our carbon footprint and save the environment. Good on you, Steve. Check it out.

Let us know what you think about these sites, platforms and programs in the comments.