Nothing sells the value of a product or service better than demonstrating its utility in the context of a popular social cause. This marketing tactic not only illustrates the functional capabilities of the product or service, but also helps the vendor build goodwill in the marketplace.

This isn’t a new idea. Companies have been giving away their products and services in support of popular causes for years.

Now, the ‘on-demand’ and ‘cloud computing’ industries are using this marketing technique to illustrate how their solutions can be utilized in real-world situations. One of the most prominent examples is Salesforce.com’s 1/1/1 model which dedicates 1% of the company’s employee time, software licenses and corporate equity to social causes, including nonprofit agencies.

The most recent example to cross my radar-screen was Axeda’s “Where’s Leslie?” promotional campaign in association with this past weekend’s Pan Mass Challenge (PMC) bikeathon.

Many of the followers of THINKstrategies know that I’ve been participating in the PMC for the past four years. For those of you that aren’t aware of the PMC, it is the largest and most cost-effective athletic fundraising event in the U.S., raising over $31 million over a two day event which attracts over 5200 riders and another 3000 volunteers covering multiple courses which span 192 miles from the middle of the state of Massachusetts to the tip of Cape Cod.

Axeda is a Foxboro, MA-based provider of a cloud application development platform which enables manufacturers, solution providers, and system integrators to rapidly build powerful machine to machine (M2M) applications to connect products and systems to create new business models and revenue opportunities.

Leslie Baker, a technical support engineer at Axeda, decided to ride in the PMC in honor of her late father, and Axeda capitalized on the opportunity to show how its cloud-based application development platform’s advanced rules engine, geofence capabilities, and Axeda Custom Objects can be configured to track her progress along the route.

Specifically, Axeda used an Enfora Mini MT edge device with a Wyless SIM card to create an application which sent latitude-longitude data via location-based services to track Leslie’s exact location during the ride.

Axeda also created a microsite which integrated with Twitter to send tweets as Leslie reached pre-defined milestones, and displayed local weather updates along the course based on zip code information leveraging Yahoo Web Services.

In sum, it was a timely and practical use case for Axeda’s cloud-based, M2M application development platform capabilities.

(Click here to learn about my PMC ride and to contribute to this extraordinary cause.)

Axeda cloud computing Pan Mass Challenge PMC