by Kristen Nicole
Diddy knows how to market his brand, and that ability has leaked further into the realm of social media with the latest promotion. An iTunes application, which is free to download, turns to users to submit photos of themselves that may end up being used for Diddy’s upcoming album, Last Train to Paris, which will be in stores on September 22, 2009.
The album cover will actually be a mosaic of photos submitted from the participating Diddy fans. Until then, submitted photos will be used for the application’s mosaic, which gives a good indication of how the album cover will look. From the app, you can submit photos and also tweet them (see Diddy’s Twitter stream here).
The application itself is pretty basic and lacks any other media integration, such as clips from songs to be expected on the album, or videos. This is quite unlike Pink’s iPhone application, which isn’t specific to a particular album or promotion, but acts as a mobile hub for all her media (music, videos, photos). But it’s the social media aspect of the application that Diddy is really relying on here for participation and promotional purposes.
Sending in photos of themselves and the Twitter integration works, but is it enough? It makes sense that this app would have Twitter integration, as this app will be used mostly by iPhone users. But what about the rest of social media? Facebook and MySpace both have platforms that could be leveraged for support within this app, and could spread Diddy’s promotion even further across the web. Facebook would be a particularly interesting integration as its platform is now fully compatible with Apple’s mobile platform.
The good thing for users is that the world of social media is getting so intertwined that you can set up most of your activity on one site to appear on another. Twitter can be fed into any service that supports RSS, and a plethora of third party apps have made the redistribution of your tweets an automated afterthought. Most the status updates on my Facebook home page are now imported tweets.
So it’s perhaps for this reason that Diddy has no qualms with the fact that Twitter appears to be the sole form of direct social media integration for his Last Train to Paris application. This really demonstrates the growing influence of Twitter as a platform, and its mobile-centric design only further establishes Twitter in this position.
note: image credit Gizmodo
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