Viral Marketing Implications for Telecom

There’s a post on the Insitute for the Future blog about a viral marketing campaign for “The Ring 2″. I like the premise of it quite a bit, tying together playing the video with calling the phone. But it also calls to attention the need for the telephone/cellular system to become better tied into Internet services. Sure it’s just an advertising campaign in this instance, but I think it’s probably indicative of a general trend. Just think for a second about how to setup a system that does this. It’s relatively simple conceptually. I’m sure the download link that gets mailed has a unique ID that’s associated with the phone number that the sender put in. When that download link gets requested the server kicks off a call that plays a prerecorded message. The part of that that’s somewhat hard and nonstandard is making a call from a server. There’s been a whole lot of interest in the area of telecommunications in general, fueled mostly by IP telephony recently. Telecom, either services enhancement or hacking, was a pretty common theme at BARcamp. Additional services offered by Skype and Vonage, open source projects like Asterisk, and gateway services like VoicePulse and Virtualphoneline.com who will provide the POTS number to IP forwarding as a discreet service – all are driving to the phone system being broken down into bits and reassembled into a form more suitable to the subscribers. The tools and services are relatively primative now, but there’s a major current driving this stuff.