ideapark’s annual “Vernal Equinox Party” is a time to celebrate with our customers, employees, and business partners the transition from winter to spring and exchange insights on emerging trends in marketing for the new year.

We also showcase emerging uses of technology for marketing professionals. This year, ideapark partnered up with Michael Bragg and talented team at Digital Dialogue to demonstrate SMS in a fun and engaging way. One of the best examples is how American Idol uses text messaging to drive audience participation. How can we make this relevant for traditional marketers within a reasonable budget?

For example, let’s say you are a major sporting event (or a vernal equinox party) and you want to capture real time insights from the audience.

Here’s how it works, ideapark develops an engaging and branded SMS experience for your audience via cellphone or interactive kiosk. You offer the audience the latest product information, prizes (like a Wii), discounts, or an update about their order. In return, you can gain valuable insight into what matters most to them.

Here’s an example of one the questions we asked as part of the demonstration. The answers were surprising:

We also asked fun questions and almost 70% of the attendees knew the answer to: “What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow?”

We were able to turn this around in less than a week.

Also, congrats to Charlie, Maryanne, and Dennis!

If you’d like to see how we did this and the outcome to some of the more serious questions, just drop me a line at mark@ideapark.com.

I love my Wii, but Nintendo’s approach to online gaming is brain dead.

We’ve always believed in the Twin Cities (and Minnesota in general) as an exception place for entrepreneurs. The diversity in talent that Minnesota attracts means innovation becomes part of the local DNA. This has been going on for decades, but not necessarily getting the recognition. For example, everyone that uses the internet might want to pay a special homage to the Twin Cities. (Anyone remember the significance of local innovations like gopher?)

Check out the launch of www.GetGoMN.org site that connects Minnesota based entrepreneurs, companies, and supporters together. Similar to the sites like Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, GetGoMN is a great resource that showcases the talent and breadth of companies that get their start in the Twin Cities. We applaud this and it’s about time we started being more vocal and organized about sharing our collective experience. (Yes, we can still do it in our “Minnesota nice” way.)

By the way, we did a quick count here at ideapark on the number of organizations that we have started up ourselves. The tally: 19.

Lessons learned? Priceless.