I attended a networking event last week and ran into a Senior partner at a Toronto-based agency gave me shared some upcoming projects they are working on as well as a brand new tool they plan to bring to marketing in Q1 2009. I recall seeing Blastradius launch Sutori back in 2006 which seems to be an online community (side project) the agency built that allows members to share stories. Ahh, isn’t Digg already doing that? There never seemed to be much pick up on the project and the blog hasn’t been updated since May 2007.
As I’m glancing through my RSS feeds I happen to catch a recent posting from Geoff Teehan over at teehan+lax who’s sharing a preview of their up and coming product, Image Spark. According to Geoff, “We’d describe it as a creative resource pool that helps you collect and find great examples of design. In addition to traditional tagging it also incorporates a unique way to let you organize these images using moodboards – more on these in a later post.”
Advertising budgets are being cut, margins for agencies will start to diminish so what is an agency to do? Maybe the next logical step is to look for alternative revenue streams.
Hi Dave, admittedly sutori hasnt been a main priority, though it does seem to keep moving along. I just wanted to comment on why we built it – the idea wasn’t specifically “sharing stories” as it was using an aggregated voice to create the goodwill score of companies rather than just a one person rant. By adding up all the scores (vetted by the community) you could create a ranking of who is treating customers well (and not).
Brian Mitchinson
Blast Radius
VP Marketing
I would like to clarify that Image Spark was not developed as an alternative revenue stream. It was an idea that we had that seemed worth pursuing for our own interest. We currently have no plans to generate revenue from it. We need a tool like this for ourselves we figure others might as well.