Technology, it’s an amazing thing.  But when you combine incredible technology with amazing creativity and the bold world of social media the possibilities are limitless.  With the boom of social networking over the past few years it is no surprise that the push is on to come up with creative ways of linking the social world online with the real world.  Coca Cola Village in Israel partnered with facebook to seamlessly allow the teens enjoying themselves at Coca Cola Village to share their experience online. The now famous facebook “like” button became a real life reality as vacationing teenagers were given RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) bracelets which were encoded with their facebook user name and password. When the wristband was ‘swiped’ over top of the real life thumbs up box their facebook status was instantly updated with what they were doing at the village. In addition if photographed by one of the official village photographers, the RFID bracelet would tag everyone in the photo and upload it to facebook automatically.

The video below tells the story. But what’s accomplished by this? Ultimately this is Coke partnering with a company called Promarket and Publicis E Dologic to utilize social networking successfully and to the utmost extreme.  The Coca Cola village holds 650 teens at one time, and in each cycle facebook was seeing about 35,000 posts!  That means every teen was posting Coca Cola branded content just under 54 times on their facebook profile, to be seen and liked by all their friends and family.

The CEO of Edologic, Enon Landenberg, is quoted as saying, “We are continuously looking for ways to connect the physical world with the virtual world. The idea behind “The Like machine” is an ultimate solution. It is an innovative and pioneering method, and through it the possibility to involve your Facebook friends in events and experiences that are happening to you around the world becomes a very true reality.”

What are your thoughts?  For me, it makes me wonder where this is headed next.  I can see this technology (which isn’t too complex at all) being integrated into a lot of other aspects of our daily lives.  Do you think that’s a good idea?  Or, perhaps like the few people I discussed this with, that idea sounds scary.  Share your thoughts!