Only a couple of posts into my Monday blog catch-up and this caught my eye from The Long Tail blog: Matterbox.

This plays well to Chris’ themes around Free: in this case free stuff in return for direct marketing. I thought I’d take a look at the website.

Most interesting is the sign-up pages, which include fuzzy questions around online social networking activities and how much of a maven you are around certain subjects.

Presumably this is being used to target content, and continue to sell the concept to direct marketers, but additionally it is probably being used to calculate your net value as a super-advocate: so am I going to get my Matterbox and then mention to people that it contained some cool stuff (like Original Source shampoo or whatever). You’ll notice I’ve put the keywords they’ll be looking for in this very blog post in order to help them along…

All of this stuff is important as any brand seeks to exploit and involve themselves in social spaces without attempting to control them (which will inevitably fail).

Much as I hate direct mail, I like the idea. And from the venerable Royal Mail. Who’d have thunk it?