Chalkbot Closes the Loop
On July 2, I tweeted about a very cool real life application for Twittter during the Tour De France – Nike’s @chalkbot. You could send a 40 character tweet to the @chalkbot handle and the message would actually be chalked onto the road during the race.
Given that the race is now over and our attentions focused on the upcoming LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Summit in Ireland, I had kind of forgotten about this. Last night, however, I got a Direct Message from the Chalkbot with a link to this:
This is a photo of my tweet from 6 weeks ago in “real life” on the TdF raceway. If you could read the fine print on the bottom, it actually gives the GPS coordinates of where it was chalked and the date and time it appeared.
This is a great example of creating another opportunity of Nike + LIVESTRONG providing additional conversational capital and opportunities for engagement. The way that this principle sometimes plays into our lives at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence is that we will create assets from events with influencers – interview videos, photos, etc. They become an additional way to provide value and a great opportunity to keep the conversation going.
And on the LIVESTRONG front, the Tour is over, but the fight goes on. Follow the road to the Global Cancer Summit in Dublin and beyond at livestrongblog.org.
(Disclosure: LIVESTRONG is a client, but the Chalkbot project is not in our purvue)
We see PR Blackout Week is a timely call to refocus all of us who love blogs on the value exchange that must take place in order for them to maintain their magic. This sounds soft, but it is very real – the whole notion of “Digital Influence” is the changing sources and forces of influence around us. If blogs went the way of infomercials, we would start blocking them with our 



