2009 October, 7th

Mihaela Lica

Jinni launched with a tasteful PR campaign. The launch was already covered by TechCrunch Europe, Killer Startups, and others, where Jinni was reviewed as a content discovery system, a video discovery engine, and a social search and recommendation engine that employs Movie genome (a system developed by the Jinni team). But Jinni prefers to be referred at as a “taste engine:”

“With a Taste Engine, you don’t search by what you’re looking for, you search by what you like. And recommendations are based on analyzing your preferences, not statistics.”

A taste engine cannot launch without a tasteful PR campaign: the company’s strategy to attract new users has an altruistic note:

“To celebrate our public beta launch in a meaningful way, we’re proud to be donating to Best Friends Animal Society, the largest no-kill animal rescue organization. For a limited time, we’re donating for each person who signs up FREE!“

If you want to support Jinni in this campaign, here is what you could do:

• Sign up free for Jinni here!
• Invite friends to Jinni – each sign-up adds to the Best Friends donation
• Blogger or writer? Love animals and/or movies? Email Jinni to let them know if you’d like to write about the donation campaign, and they’ll be happy to answer questions and provide materials.
• Tell your friends on Twitter to donate to @BFAS by signing up free for @JinniDotCom at http://www.jinni.com/join.html
• Tag Jinni and Best Friends in an update on Facebook (learn more about tagging)

This announcement appears only on the Jinni blog, and there is no mention about how limited this “limited time” will be, nor does the company mention the amount per user that will be donated by Jinni to the above named organization. No banners related to this campaign can be found on Jinni.com’s homepage. On the sign-up page, however, we learn that the campaign is limited to 100,000 new users and that “100,000 sign-ups= Food for all pets abandoned in a city like Boston for a month.” We believe however that these are small issues, that can be rectified within minutes, to avoid any type of confusion and misunderstandings.

PR campaigns that attempt to engage the community in helping noble causes are not rare – but what is surprising is that an Israeli based company decides to donate to an US based charity, when there are obviously causes that need help in Israel too – like Hatzalah Yehuda and Shomron for example, an emergency rescue organization. Perhaps someone from Jinni could answer the question: why is Jinni supporting the Best Friends Animal Society and not an Israeli charity?

Aside these obvious question anyone would ask, we salute Jinni’s approach to PR – the company delivered a PR boost to the Best Friends Animal Society while motivating casual visitors to become Jinni users. Some of these visitors will probably sign up just to help BFAS, while others will understand that Jinni is offering a valuable service, unique in its way.

• 2010/05/19 -- RCDb Jinni Marriage For Better Video Content on Cable

About the Author

Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 8 years in online PR. Mihaela writes occasionally for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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