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Segway Social - What You'd Never Want to Happen

Segway - that weird gliding thing that everyone would love to try - has rolled out a Segway Social, an online community dedicated to Segway owners and fans "and anyone interested in joining the worldwide Segway movement."

Movement might be a little over the top as a way to describe Segway popularity, but with gas at $3.50 a gallon, Segway is smart to showcase its odd transporter. Hopefully, they'll be equally smart about driving traffic to the site because just building it is not going to populate it. Hopefully they'll be smarter than the nine out of 10 companies that don't plan multi-media campaigns to drive traffic.

Since I've only seen three or four people riding around Manhattan on Segways in the past few years, I'm not sure the community will be huge, but no matter what, you need to be able to sign up, and when you try, the error message asks you to come back later.
Ooops! It could be a server blip; it could be a coding error. It could be a lot of things, but somebody needs to be watching the site - which launched Monday - for issues like this one.

God is indeed in the details, and it's sometimes scary how a little thing can scotch the best laid plans.

On Segway Social, users who can get into the site, can create profiles, start or join discussion groups, upload photos and calculate how much they are helping the environment by riding a Segway, and learn how long it would take to save up to buy one of the $5,000 thingies. Posted by B.L. Ochman

UPDATE: Eric Fleming of Segway Inc. responded almost immediately in a comment that the company saw the post and was looking into fixing the problem. Impressive! Take-away: I couldn't email the webmaster without navigating away from the signup page. Could someone email you from any page on your site? I'm going to make sure they could on my site and all of my clients' sites.

Categories: Alternative Marketing

BL Ochman | Apr 16 08 3:12 | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Hi BL,

We saw your post and just wanted to let you know that we're looking into the error you experienced. People are indeed signing up successfully and this looks to be the first reported incident of its kind.

We appreciate you taking the time to check out the site and hope others do too.

Cheers,
Eric Fleming
Segway Inc.

Posted by: Eric at April 16, 2008 5:20 PM

Eric - your quick response is impressive. Unless I left the registration page, I didn't immediately see a way to email Segway to say there was an issue.

The community looks like fun for enthusiasts.

I'd love to hear more about how you are driving traffic to Segway Social.

Posted by: B.L Ochman at April 16, 2008 6:38 PM

We got to ride a Seqway up in Santa Barbra where they rent them. Was very fun, and would be a great counterpart to our CNG powered Honda Civix GX. Saving my allowance for one now...

Posted by: Darin R. McClure at April 17, 2008 11:27 AM

Clearly, niche social networking has gone too far! I would imagine this community is ruled by traffic cops and postal workers...

Posted by: John Keehler at April 23, 2008 8:34 PM

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About BL Ochman

Blogger, social media strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and sought-after corporate speaker B.L. Ochman heads the creative team of whatsnextonline.com. She also publishes the Ethics Crisis blog for SRF Global Translations

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