Archive for June, 2010

Social Media to the (Dog) Rescue

Posted June 25th, 2010 at 11:22 am in Pet Adoption

Photo of a dog behind a chain-link fence at th...

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Last March when I was making jokes about the new Twitter toy by Mattel called Puppy Tweets, describing in a post about how your dog can make money online with this cool new toy, I was only half kidding about the whole thing. Although stranger methods have been known to cause things to "go viral" and go on to succeed at making money online using the power of social media. Any device, toy or not, that professes the capability of detecting what a dog is up to and then turns that into pet micro-blogging on Twitter with 140 character pet witicisms, is going to get MY attention!

So I am thinking that this could be a huge marketing tool for animal shelters. I keep thinking that if a dog could make money online for his owner (which is a stretch unless the dog can talk or count or something) why couldn't he make it for a good cause as well – supporting his fellow dogs, homeless dogs like little Beatrice here and ones in shelters that are in need of a good home?

I think there is an interesting concept taking shape here even though Mattel keeps saying that it's only a toy, Puppy Tweets just may have the potential to really help our shelter pets by raising more awareness of adoption versus breeders or pet stores.

Puppy Tweets is not available until fall 2010, my pre-order with Amazon was made months ago, this for a toy that resembles a dog-tag that your puppy wears on his regular dog collar. By communicating puppy "tweets" from the dog tag via your computer, some 500 unique micro-blogs such as I'm hungry, I want to play, scratch my tummy, let's go for a walk, guess what I'm licking now, etc can be posted to your pooch's Twitter account. The logistics still need to be worked out for this crazy idea of mine but the time it's taken waiting for the toy to debut has given me food for thought. (more…)