Remember that Sprint Contest?

Man, I'm a loser. I promised weeks and weeks ago to announce the 'winner' of the Help Sprint Go Pinko contest....and then I went to Bangalore, got busy working on cool, new Riya stuff and became generally swamped. And I totally forgot about it.

This morning, I was looking for something and I came across a fancy, new phone, still in it's box. Oops. Damn, I thought...time to pick a winner!

Okay...so, there were sooooo many amazing suggestions...from Mark, Elohim (aka God - you know you are doing something right when God reads your blog. ;)), Lagbolt, Greg, Paul, Chris Houchens, Joshua (don't have your blog...sorry), and many more via email, etc. but there is one in particular, that I think, you will agree stands out:

Sprint needs to realize that they have more network bandwidth than anyone. They also need to realize that unutilized bandwidth doesn't help their consumers or the company. If they would cheapen their data plans they could capture large marketshare almost immediately.

by Joshua...why? Because Joshua is thinking about really practical, solid ways to deliver value to the customers instead of just how to deliver messages. However, Joshua (whose contact info I don't have 'cause his blogger profile is locked down...so email me if you still read this), used to work at Sprint...which brings up two points:

1. Didn't the Cluetrain tell us that your employees, especially those who deal directly with customers daily, need to have more of a voice in the community? Joshua worked there for 5 years. A Pinko would add that the employees you have working in customer service are probably some of your greatest assets for ideas. I'm sure that some Stockholm Syndrome happens after helping people everyday. Even though CS doesn't start out being part of and understanding the community, it doesn't take long for them to really empathize.
   
   
2. I would add that if Sprint has more network bandwidth than anyone, why don't they start really appealing to niche markets? The ones that require major bandwidth? And I would assume that bandwidth doesn't cost them too much anymore...what about creating a phone for video bloggers? Helping them set up accounts where they can send videos in real-time to YouTube or FireAnt or Vimeo or Grouper or wherever they host or show their videos? For cheap. Support the growth of this community. Which leads me to:

Mark's kickass idea ... which could be utilized AFTER this is done:

...users want to share their content. Getting your picture from your phone to the Internet is way too difficult. Sprint could sign a partnership with an innovative company like SharpCast to get content to the Internet, a partnership with Riya and YouTube to store/tag the content, and SixApart to create blogs. Of course, Sprint would have to accept that most people already have blogs and photo/video-storing services, so they've had to make it easy for people like me to get the photos into my Flickr account and post them to my own blog. All the technology is out there for the taking. The details should be worked out with an eye to making it easy for users to share their content, not for other goals like "increasing page views on Sprint.com" or "creating a community of Sprint customers."

The third and last point is where it's at. A contest will encourage people to make cool, edgy videos with their phones. A voting system will encourage people to encourage their friends to vote for their cool, edgy videos. With enough good content, Sprint can even create a channel populated entirely by user-created content (with no fees from the networks). Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the user-created content was more popular than CNN or ESPN before long and a valuable asset to get people to buy the phone.

Okay...so seeing that Joshua already has the phone, I'm assuming he doesn't necessarily need it (but you can tell me that)...so, I'll let both Joshua and Mark contact me and suggest who gets it.

Thanks for all of your amazing ideas. I'll also try to find out from Joshua who at Sprint I should send these suggestions to...

[tags: pinkomarketing, cluetrain, marketing, sprint]