Back in the salad days of ecommerce, I worked for a website that sold cars. Sounds a little odd but it worked, though not well enough to best its competitors, one of whom absorbed it. As the only marcom guy there, I was approached often for the inevitable side-projects my co-workers were launching. One gentleman was leaving in order to start his own company and wanted to hire me to edit his web copy. To this day, I am proud that I was able to master my expression as I looked over his draft. His company was an online dry-cleaning service. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence. It was the dumbest idea I had ever heard and it remains my hallmark for dumb ideas to this day.
Now we are in a new era, that of the Social Web. But just as we take our positive qualities with us through time – intellect, compassion, inventiveness – we also take our dumbness. Today I came across two ideas – one a process, the other a product – that shot me back in time to the moment I first read about online dry-cleaning. Both, horribly enough, are food-related; and both are profoundly dumb.
Photo by Ed Schipul
Article source: RRW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/_wLA9IV11X4/the_social_webs_dumbest_ideas.php