The Inkwell

AlphaInventions.com is crazy. Crazy in a good way! Let me preface this by saying I am not being paid to say this, I’m not one of those people who blogs for marketers. I spent the last couple hours trying to figure out what AlphaInventions is, how it works and what the point of it is.

I still can’t answer those questions. So I’ll just tell you how it all went down.

I was looking at the traffic stats for my personal blog and I saw an incoming link from a place called alphainventions.com . It was an unfamiliar domain so I clicked on the link to see where it took me.

This guy named Cheru has figured out a way to drive traffic to hundreds of different blogs. I have no idea how he got the link to my blog, but after Googling alphainventions.com I gathered that it’s not a scam or bot. It allows bloggers to enter their URL and they drive traffic to the site.

I tried it. I entered the URL for one of my blogs and within minutes I went from those pathetic Saturday single digit hits to 83 hits. I don’t get it, but I like it. I will continue to use it to promote my blogs.

Oh, puhleeze! Are we not fat and lazy enough in this country already? TiVo and Domino’s Pizza have joined forces to allow TiVo broadband subscribers to order and track their Domino’s orders on television. Rob Weisberg, vice president of precision and print marketing at Domino’s Pizza, calls this the “on-demand generation” and has coined this marketing strategy “Couch Commerce”.

No doubt, this new technology is going to be a huge success for TiVo and Domino’s Pizza and a delicious convenience for subscribers. As an advocate for customer service, it makes me sad to see yet another corporate monster (two corporate monsters in this case) eliminating human interaction in favor of clickable technology.

Motrin has attracted exactly the kind of attention they were looking for when they created their “Babywearing” online ad. Moms across the internet are crying “I’m offended!” If you know me, you know I think “I’m offended” is a weasely phrase people declare when they have nothing better to do. Offense should be taken in circumstances of genocide, racism, abuse, etc. Not because someone doesn’t like baby slings.

What Motrin did was create the ideal viral marketing video. One which flies under the radar but then one blogger comments on it then another and another. Pretty soon everyone has an opinion on “Babywearing” and Motrin is being talked about. I mean, who really goes around talking about pain killers on a regular basis? They are now, thanks to “Babywearing.”

People are talking about the phrases, “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience”, “They say that babies… cry less”, “It totally makes me look like an official mom”. I’m confident no mom wears her baby because it looks cool. It’s ridiculously convenient to wear a baby so he won’t cry while mom vacuums or shops or eats. Motrin is simply saying, “If the sling hurts, take something to cure the ache.”

“Babywearing” critics need to lighten up. By making a fuss over it, they’re merely adding fuel to the viral “Babywearing” fire. The video has already received 5,000 hits on YouTube since yesterday and the Motrin website is down. Seems like they made themselves a household name, just like they planned.