I came across this one last week and I probably should’ve written about it sooner to capitalize on the all the iPhone mania but I wanted to sit back watch it for a few days. What Good is Your Old Phone, is the question being asked after 700k Americans purchased the new iPhone last week. That’s a lot of old phones. So Mind Comet, an interactive marketing agency, came up with the idea to have users submit videos of what they were doing with their old phones. One video shows a guy going at it with a jackhammer, another transforms two old phones into flip-flops, and the worst one is two guys breading and deep frying their friend’s old phone, yikes that can’t be good. 
There is a link at the bottom of the page encouraging people to donate their still functioning phone to Collective Good cell phone recycling.
The site was not commissioned by Apple. I can’t imagine any other reason Mind Comet would build the site other than to take advantage of all the iPhone buzz. So I started poking around and what I found was interesting. This site was intended to be a cute viral campaign with user submitted videos and the Mind Comet folks used all the typical tricks to try to get the ball rolling. The domain was purchased on June 18th, 2007 and presumably the site was launched a few days later since the first video was posted on YouTube on June 20th and one of their own submitted it to Digg on the 22nd. Then they hired a handful of bloggers to write paid reviews for the site via Pay Per Post, with the anchor text in the link “iPhone Review and Video”, to optimize on the term to their site, an old trick called “google bombing” (look it up on Wikipedia.) I strongly recommend the folks at Mind Comet read this:
Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. [via Entrepreneur’s Journey]
So they think they’re clever, but is it working? I’m not seeing any huge jump on Alexa or links to the site other than the paid ones. But considering all the chatter in the internet about the iPhone it’s damn near impossible to try and grab even 2% of that audience.
Like I said previously, the site is cute. The user submitted videos are kinda funny, albeit disturbing. I can’t imagine deep-frying a phone is very good for the environment or attempting to flush one down the toilet would send the right message for proper battery disposal or even good environmental ethics. At least they have that little link at the bottom of the page (below the fold) for donating your working phones. Personally I was waiting for the videos that were supposed to launch on July 4th at I Will Stomp On Your Cell Phone For You. So silly.
Of course, I think this is bigger news: The Only Phone You Need because someday all our cell phones will be VoIP and I will be buying the domain whatgoodisyouroldiphone.com.
Stats
PR0
Alexa 557,882
Compete N/A
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