The Backpack Blog

It’s all going to come flooding back soon. You’re going home this year, and all the things that made your childhood wonderful – mangoes picked fresh off the tree in front of your house, rickshaw rides on jaunty mornings, steaming fish at Cox market –is waiting for you. Doesn’t it seem only right that you should help out the community that gave you so much and made you who you are while making a bit of money yourself? Backpack, a recent tech startup, makes this idea possible by connecting travelers with people who crave items from overseas. Backpack’s popularity is growing rapidly, with 70.000 users from 80 countries making a total of 259 deals using the service in the first week. It is time for you to join the global community of travelers and shoppers Backpack creates.

While you are away from home, you likely crave cooking and fashion items from Bangladesh. Before you ever came to the U.S., however, you probably wished for an item from the States, whether it was an iPhone without the price markups you experience when tech shopping in Bangladesh or a pair of authentic Wrangler brand blue jeans. Like you used to, many of the people in your home community wish they had something from the States, and, by using Backpack, you can be the saving grace that makes those wishes come true. Of course, you will also receive a bit of money for the effort it takes you to buy and transport the item, but the most valuable compensation you will receive is helping out your community.

To do this, you can check out Backpack’s site and enter the date of your flight home. People who want a U.S. item can then search for people traveling from the States to Bangladesh and let them know what item to bring back. It’s that easy. On your arrival date, you deliver the item to the person who wanted it, earn a bit of extra money, and make a new friend. To make sure the entire process runs smoothly, Backpack implements many methods to ensure that both parties are 100% trustworthy.

Imagine a world where anyone, regardless of their location, could shop for anything. The world market, including every item one can imagine, would be as readily available as the items sold by the tong er dokan on your street. This is the world Backpack wants to help you create. Join us in bringing our diverse world closer together.

Log onto Backpack today and register your flight home. Share the world’s diversity with others.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup is coming up (10 days, people!), and most of us at Backpack are big fans. In fact, I did my senior thesis this past year on how the World Cup instills a sense of unity and comradery in people all over the world. Truly, football (a.k.a. soccer) is the game that brings the world together, as it is more widely followed around the world than any other sport, and the World Cup is the peak of FIFA's quest to instill those values. Recently, some of us at Backpack realized that Backpack's core values are similar to those endorsed by the World Cup. Like the World Cup, Backpack seeks to create a global community and bring it together. Both attempt to act as diplomats of a sort that enable a crossing of geographic and cultural boundaries. In short, both Backpack and the World Cup aim to bring out common desires and attitudes across cultures while providing everyone with a good time. Because they are similar in so many ways, Backpack wants to do SOMETHING having to do with the upcoming World Cup in Brazil. Whether it will be an ad campaign, a traveling featurette, or a series of interactive content is yet to be decided, but the wheels are definitely in motion. More to come soon.

As a consumer, you should have no problem identifying a business’s core values. In fact, it is a great idea for businesses to actually list out their core values and make that list readily available to the public. This will help the site’s content designers maintain a consistent tone in their content production as well as help consumers to understand the business’s “personality.” For instance, Backpack’s core values may be seen as:

Accessibility

First and foremost, Backpack wants to allow people to access things they would not be able to access without use of the service. This includes foreign-produced products and more affordable international travel. Joining the Backpack network allows you access to so many more of the products this diverse world has to offer, as well as makes your world travel dreams closer to reality.

Community building

Backpack wants to create a community, not just a network. In other words, the two parties in a Backpack transaction should not simply be strangers conducting a business deal. That is what Amazon and eBay are for. Of course, the parties will start out that way, but Backpack works to make the carriers and the buyers in its network into friends who know each other, trust each other, and will be able to interact, whether it is product-related or on a more friendship-oriented basis, in the future. You never know, someone you met through a Backpack transaction may let you crash on their couch and become a good friend for years to come.

Trust

This is somewhat iterated above, but the folks at Backpack want you, as a consumer, to feel confident and secure about your transaction from the moment you agree to the deal to the moment you have the product (or cash) in hand. We all know trust can be an issue when it comes to online transactions, and we don't want members of the Backpack family to have to worry about it.

We here at Backpack are currently in what is possibly the most crucial stage of our public relations: getting Backpack into the public eye. A big part of this falls under the banner of content marketing, which, as stated by Content Marketing Institute, is the "process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action." Because I'm having to work with content marketing a lot, I have been doing some research into the field. Below are four of the major points covered by content marketing, as outlined in a presentation by marketing consultant Mike Tekula, as well as a little of what I have been learning about the points.

1. The battle for attention is global

You are not just competing against your competitors when you are on the web; you are competing against all websites. This is because all sites are ultimately vying for the same thing: the time and attention of web users.In other words, we at Backpack can’t go into our site and product design with a mindset of “we need to offer an experience that outdoes our immediate competition (other similar sites).” No; we need to keep in mind that we are competing against all other web services that vie for people’s valuable time, or, in other words, every other website out there. This includes huge players, like Huffington Post, ESPN.com, and Facebook We need to keep in mind the goal to fill desires one cannot have filled anywhere else on the web, and to present content in a way that can win people’s interest when faced with even the most professional content on the web.

2. Your content needs a mission

Your site’s content is the face of your brand. If your brand was a person, the site content would literally be the face. In other words, the content expresses what the brand is about and embodies the messages and values the brand wants to communicate. Site content is not simply an add-on to the brand, not simply a device meant to fill space and add to the quantity of information the site offers. Rather, it is the brand’s mission and attitude in words. 100% of a site’s content should be aimed at furthering those needs or familiarizing people with the brand’s mission.

3. Your content must fill a need

Not only does your content have to be presented well, but it must be targeted towards a niche that has not been filled. Narrowing down your site’s focus is the only way to escape the world wide web-wide rat race I talked about in the first point and compete in a smaller sphere. Of course, a site should never forget it is ultimately battling all other sites for people’s attention, but a narrowed down focus makes thriving a more manageable goal.

4. Content does not promote itself

Good content does not equal an increase in interest. A lot of people who design content believe that if they produce killer content, the content will grow popular. This is absolutely not true! Imagine if a site had great content, but that content was not promoted. What a waste! Great content that is not promoted is about as useful as awful content that is not promoted. Of course, once promotion does occur and the content rises to the public eye, the good content will leave the bad content in the dust. This Is thanks in large part to word of mouth, but promotion must continue if that word of mouth is to be kept from dying out.

As I said, we're in the midst of a crucial public relations period, so I'm doing a lot of research on content marketing. More to come in a few days!