These days, with the internet, IM, Twitter, and all sorts of technologically advanced ways to communicate with each other, the concept of sending a letter via the mail seems outdated and quaint. Yet, despite that, or perhaps because of it, a personalized mailing catches one's attention.

In a box usually stuffed with bills (ugh), magazines, and, let's be honest, lots of junk, a hand-addressed padded manilla envelope from Canada stands out.

What the envelope contained was a company's pitch, but cleverly disguised as a welcome letter to a new company called Tubetastic, where, apparently, I had accepted the job of Tubular Webmaster. An enclosed organization chart showed where I was in the company hierarchy, circled in yellow highlighter. Among my colleagues at Tubetastic were fellow journalists and bloggers. I even had a barcoded nametag.

Tubetastic Org Chart

Additionally, a username and password were provided to the company's intranet web site. And there came the pitch. Subtle, but intriguing enough to try out.

Tubetastic's Intranet, Brought To You By ThoughtFarmer

The actual product being sold here is not a web site for Tubetastic (Motto: "We Make Tubes. A whole series of them."), but the software running the intranet.

The software, called ThoughtFarmer, is actually an easy-to-use platform for creating a company intranet. The feature list is fairly comprehensive, providing users with tools to have conversations, tag pages and documents, manage photo galleries, create PDFs from web pages, monitor news via RSS, transform emails into web pages, share announcements, search the site, control revisions, perform rollbacks, create an employee directory, maintain libraries, link lists, and polls, and much more.

Intranet Homepage

Learning About ThoughtFarmer's Product

Unlike many companies pitching, the ThoughtFarmer team didn't just tell us what their software could do nor did they ask for our time via an on-the-phone walkthrough. Instead, they appealed to ego and curiosity to intrigue us enough to take a look.

And that look didn't just lead to an empty template of a site - they built out Tubetastic as if it was a real company's intranet, complete with fake logo, their own domain name, and content - lots and lots of content.

Here, all Tubetastic "employees" could see the ThoughtFarmer product in action - the feeds, the changes, the photos, the news, the departments, etc. There was also an intranet page just for me, with the Read Write Web feed on the side, my contact info (fake, whew), and darned if they hadn't mined my posts to retrieve quotes about social media in the enterprise, each featuring my very own words.

Creative Marketing Still Works

Although we've pleaded for the RSS feeds (or the twitpitches) from companies when being pitched to, this "Tubetastic" campaign goes to show that creative marketing can still work, too.

In saying this, I'm not worried that next week will find my mailbox filled with more of the same. What ThoughtFarmer showed was an investment of effort, something most companies won't take the time to do.

Not only was an effort put forth, they even took the time to be funny. The slogan alone was clever enough, a hat tip to United States Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous metaphor for the internet, but they went on to fill the intranet with articles about the company's progress, like the one titled "Our Tubes Are the Shiniest for the Third Year Running." (Sample quote: "For the third year in a row, our tubular QA experts have come home with the trophy for best tube polishing.")

However, what's really great about the campaign, besides the creativity in their approach, is that anyone reviewing their product didn't have to imagine what it would be like, they could try it out for themselves on their own time. 

ThoughtFarmer noted on their blog that they knew they took a risk, saying "In our experience, the best campaigns are the ones where we feel queasy about their launch."

Well guys, put down the Tums, the campaign worked...and the product isn't too bad either.

The Liveaps Toolset Comes in Two Versions:

Free Version:  The free version offers one page and a liveaps.com domain name. This version would work for someone who just needs a simple site, like a one-page sell site or a simple family page. The free version also has a Liveaps toolbar at the top of the page.

Pro Version: The Pro version is far more useful, with unlimited pages and 2 GB of storage space. Pro page members can use their own domain name for their site and pages can be set to public or private as desired. Small business owners who want to be able to maintain their own websites may find this service useful, especially since Liveaps will copy their existing sites for them and make the live on Liveaps. The Pro version's pricing has yet to be determined.

How It Works

You can start with a unlocked template or a blank page and then began drawing shapes or lines, inserting text, links, pictures, and video all of which can be dragged-and-dropped onto the page. A floating toolbar gives you easy access to create and edit page objects and this toolbar can be moved around your screen while you're working.

Liveaps Toolbar

Building a Page

Who Is It For?

Of course the ultimate target market is simply anyone who wants to build and maintain their own sites. However, Liveaps will be pushing their free version as a place to build and maintain a central web profile. With a provided template, you can customize your profile page and then link to it instead of your LinkedIn public profile page, for example. This is similar to what NetVibes is doing in their Ginger release with the customizable public profiles they are offering. However, with Liveaps you would not be as limited since you can really design whatever you want. There may be an upcoming contest where users are encouraged to build web profile templates for others to use and prizes for the winners would then be offered.

Get In on the Beta

Read Write Web readers who want to get in on the beta can get a free upgrade to the Pro version by using the invite code "RWW." There are 100 Pro invites available if you would like to check it out for yourself.