Monitoring Status Messages: Growing Gifts Brilliant Innovation

I was talking to Brian Balfour yesterday, CEO of Viximo, a virtual goods infrastructure provider, and he told me a feature of Growing Gifts that I thought was genius.

Most virtual gifts are bought for the purpose of birthdays, holidays or other special events. Since those events happen infrequently, how do you encourage you users to buy more gifts?

Growing Gifts set up a system to monitor your friends' status messages for negative keywords (crappy, sucks, sad) that might indicate that your friend was having a bad day. Growing Gifts sends you a message suggesting you send your unhappy friend a gift to cheer them up.

Brilliant. Selling is all about your call to action. Buy a gift to make you friend feel better is a damn good one. "Show them you care" is another one. First one to guess who's call to action that is in the comments gets a shoutout in my blog next week.