Wouldn’t it be great if you could get feedback not only on the content that you submit, but on the way you submit it? Maybe your angle is all wrong, or you misspelled the title, or any number of things? It could be useful for veterans as well as noobs. Have an idea for a press release, or a submission to slashdot, but want to try a few different angles? You could experiment with posting different titles, and bodies and have users rank and give feedback, with the focus less on the content, and more on the presentation.

Then when content is ready they can post to social sites (reddit, buzz, fark, etc.) through our site, and we can track who gets the most diggs/upvotes/etc. So you can see from start to finish what worked and what didn’t. Think of it a s a social media sandbox, a place to pitch your ideas before you pitch to the world. What do you think?

Known Implementations:

• Limited feedback can already be gained from comments from the posting sites themselves, though they aren’t always helpful, and rarely focus on how to better present the submission.
• PR professionals, and other pay for marketing consultants
• Various forums http://groups.google.com/group/Interactive-PR?lnk=gschg&pli=1 online, though most are not very helpful, and are filled with spam and people only interested in self promotion

Biggest Hurdles:

• Link spam, and self promotion would dominate the site initially, unless enough incentives are given to users, maybe users above a certain rank will get their links posted without nofollow…
• Is the idea too specific or is it too general? Can others do achieve the same result with another service, or no service? How does one market to the marketing community?

What exactly is that, you might ask? Well all activities have conditions that make them better or worse, the most obvious is the weather…you probably wouldn’t go swimming in the Atlantic in canada in january. But there are other datapoints as well, such as recommendations, traffic predictions, netflix recommendations etc.
I would like a very clean simple to use interface where users keep lists of activities they want to do, and plan trips using collaboration tools. For instance, I could list that I am interested in symphonies, wakeboarding, and roller derbies.  And when one of those events was coming up, I could get a reminder email listing off upcoming events for the week/month. I could synch artists from iTunes, and check to see if any concerts nearby are featuring artists that you listen to. And events would have pertinent data, weather information, traffic predictions (especially when competing large events are occuring at the same time in a close proximity), and tips and feedback from members who have been to the event before “make sure to bring a blanket!”.

In addition to large events, you could even add your own small road trips, and general activities. Like wind surfing, but want the weather to be over 70 degrees for a consecutive month first? Great, we’ll let you know when the water’s good!  So if you were stuck on what to do, you can focus on what you would like to do, instead of having to micromanage a whole lot of extra data.

You could plan other minor events, such as going to movies, dinners, or board games. You can leave yourself reminders of what works and what doesn’t “send out invites no later than one week before” with additional community tips. The end goal would be to make the service so useful, that the user wouldn’t want to plan anything without it. We could link into twitter, facebook and a variety of other social networks to coordinate communications and invites, and synch to calendars. Synch with netflix rankings to recommend movies in theaters.

Money would come from sponsored ads from activity planners, similar to mint.com’s mantra, we would want all ads to be targeted specifically to be helpful to users. It would take alot of tweaking to get right, but I think would be very useful.

Current competition:

Yelp – Has a good fanbase, and lots of reviews, not necessarily activity focused, but that may come in the future.

Hype Machine – Concert recommendations

Eventful – Looks like the serve as a directory for local events, don’t know what type of planning they have, you can subscribe to rss feeds.

Instead, what if i could make all the plans, select the tickets and put up a page with a time limit, lets say 48 hours, where people can submit a payment for their own ticket. They have until the end of the limit to back out, and when the clock strikes zero 12 tickets are purchased, and I don’t have to front money for anyone. The value to the initiator is obvious, they don’t have to hunt down deadbeats.  It will take the guess work out of all the participants, who can back out of the ticket at any time. Everyone wins. Throw in a link to a google wave, (is it possible to embed those?) and you’ve got a great little app with a mini community. Maybe you could even do this all through facebook. We would have to charge merchant fees to all charges, which would be a down side, but we could charge a small processing fee per payment (think a few cents).

Has anyone done anything like this? What do you think.

Known Implementations: N/A?