Four Screens Media

Imagine there was a way to know what people are thinking while they’re looking at online media like pictures and videos. Think about how useful that information could be for data mining, or even for creating highly-targeted advertising campaigns. While a tool with that kind of power may be difficult to conceive of, Entertainment Media Works (EMW) Plink is a step in that direction.

Plink offers unprecedented capabilities to interact with media, allowing you to add information or annotations to your media, which you can then share it with friends. Plink takes social tagging and conversation into the picture instead of around it. Once a picture is tagged – or “plinked” as they say (and I like the sound) – the tagged part of the photo can be linked to another site. Interested in that phone the celebrity is using? Circle and tag it. Like the furniture in the family photo album? Circle and tag it. Literally.

Plink has the ability to create a vastly more social shopping experience. You can plink a picture while shopping to see what others said or to provide for others by putting in your own plink (similar to tagging). Except for live chat during shopping (which I don’t see working), it’s the closest online equivalent to asking others in the store what they think about the sports jacket you’re trying on. It also function as the photo equivalent of seeing something you like while walking down the street and having an ad for the item, or even the store that sells it, instantly appear right next to you. For example, you can tag a shirt in a picture with a question of where to purchase it and someone can respond by tagging it with "The Gap."

For marketers, Plink is a potentially invaluable source of user feedback, similar to user generated reviews. No longer are marketers limited to analyzing text conversations. Instead, with enough participants, they can analyze exactly what people are looking at in pictures and precisely how they are discussing it. This intelligence can then be applied, such as by targeting a new urban line of clothing against photos with tags implying the desired demographic of consumers.

Beyond conversation and marketing, there are powerful data mining applications. Plink will collect aggregate data so that marketers can see if and how their items are showing up in photos. For example, if people tag a lot of photos with a specific mobile phone model while also tagging particular clothing items, the marketer now knows more about the fashion sense of people buying that phone.

The same potential also exists for video. Where a lot of companies are looking at sponsored and product placement videos, the opportunity to see how people tag and click on plinked videos could provide valuable transaction and tracking tools for web video marketing and PR campaigns. I’m told by Chris Guerra, Plink’s vice president of business development, that this is in the works. While similar technologies are being produced by PLYmedia, Overlay.tv, Asterpix and VideoClix, we have yet to take a look at them from a social media and tagging perspective.

Of course, the big challenge is getting people to plink and then seeing if they get addicted enough to regularly plink items they see in photos. If – and that’s a big if – enough people try it, and if  – another slightly smaller if  –  the value of clicking through specific items to related web sites has enough volume, there could be a lot of potential. Chris Guerra added that they are also looking at both standalone and add in services, such as Yahoo BrowserPlus http://browserplus.yahoo.com/.

Like most companies asking people to provide data, Plink has pledged that protecting privacy will be a top priority. Individual user information will be kept confidential with only aggregate data made available to companies.

The first Plink application is in Facebook (Facebook seems to be the launch pad for any web based app these days) where people can tag parts of the photos in Facebook albums. You can try it out here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7544227845.