Some minor issues

Look at this carwash receipt

It says: “Bedankt, tot volgende week” – Dutch for: Thank you, see you next week.

This is a very classical, and good, example of persuasive copywriting. Yep, that short, this is all it takes.

What the carwash is doing with this sentence, is setting a standard. What they are telling you is no less than: if you care for your car, you’ll have it washed on a regular basis. What they’re doing more, is quantify this regularity: really considerate drivers come back every week. They make you aware of this, and tell you something you never really thought of.

Simple, effective and genius.

Here it is

Made by @crusty

If you want to read the explanation, see his post. But that’s a bit unnecessary, cause the slides says it all. Nuff said.

This blog post is mainly in Dutch, but I’ll do an English intro. After the read more, I’ll continue in Dutch with .. a recipe!

What’s a recipe doing here. Well first of all I really enjoy cooking, and I’m asked to participate in a cooking contest, so how could I say no? Second, it’s actually a good campaign, so apart from the recipe, the case fits this blog anyway.

The brief: can you come up with a recipe using brown shrimps, post about it on your blog and link to http://blog.grijzegarnaal.be – in it for me: they pay the shrimps and I can win a trip to the Wadden sea and do all shrimp related things.

Euh yeah, I love this idea. It’s a great and engaging campaign, build around the product (the shrimp), involving people, let them be creative. You know, the brown shrimp (we call it grey actually) is a very tasteful shrimp, nothing like this pink crap they serve all around the world. It’s a local here product, and it’s been fished in the North sea, mostly in the Netherlands, and Germany, but also in Belgium. So Belgians know this shrimp, and they like it! For us, it’s the default shrimp.

Anyway, the campaign is set-up or supported by the great adhese folks.

The rest of the entry will be Dutch, but I’ll show you a picture of the end result. It was very good if I might say so

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You know, we always tell our clients that if they want to do something on social networks, it’s critical to follow the dynamics of that network. If you reach out, reach out. Don’t try to force people into doing stuff they don’t know, have to learn, doesn’t make sense for them, .. they probably won’t do it anyway.

It’s not always easy to properly translate these network dynamics into a proper campaign. Something that feels perfect for the brand. Ideally renewing.

Today, I saw the perfect example of this philosophy. It’s a campaign for IKEA, apparently done by the agency Forsman & Bodenfors, Gothenburg. I love it.

(hat tip Patrice Fleurquin)

Here’s a tip that could come in handy if you ever do email communication. It’s rather obvious, but I see so many emails fail against it.

>> MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL IS FINDABLE!

As on the web, search is becoming big on email. The reason is obvious: storage is getting cheaper, more mails are coming in and search functionalities are getting better.

How many of you get emails on a regular basis that you want to follow-up not just right now, but a bit later? Then forget about it, till suddenly you remember it, having a hard time finding back that particular email .. I know I do!
(Yeah, there are tricks, but they stopped working for me years ago. + it’s not about me/you. If I fail in finding emails back, you can be sure your audience does even worse ..)

How can an email be non findable? There are 3 ways I see now (might be more).

1. You use only images, or have the core of your message in images.
2. Although you use text, somehow the text doesn’t contain the keywords people might search on. Think about the message of your email, what search terms might people use to find it back? Maybe you can just add some tags at the bottom of the email?
3. Gmail, Google’s email service, which is quite popular nowadays, for some reason only finds whole words, at least default. If you for example search for “poker”, gmail won’t return emails with the term “pokertable”. Microsoft Outlook is doing better here. Not sure about other popular clients.

I believe in the not too distant future it will pay off to apply some SEO insights on emails as well.

A social media addict that is. That probably why I don’t blog that much lately. Not that I don’t want too .. and I do have as many bad ideas as before .. but I just waste all my free time on twitter and facebook.

Luckily I’m not alone. If I was, it would be very lonely online, and it never is
Recently, some guy named Jerry started a self help group. If your even close to using social media, I recommend viewing this video of a meeting. It is truly inspiring, and .. yes, recognizable.

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See it here:

Yes, this embed is the site. Just go to www.BooneOakley.com to see how serious they are. I mailed them to say I’m in love with this, curious to see if they’ll get back to me.

BTW: views are adding up swiftly. Great marketing, guys!

Should it be promoted? Well, yes! Glass is by far the best choice if you care about nature, your health, and so on. If you want to read more about this, check out the 5 good reasons at the friends of glass, they explain in better than I can!

And now, this recycling part, is illustrated very well in this nice funny movie about a bottle named Hank. He keeps on reincarnating

He’ll be back! Made by These Days.

Exactly this:

One of the things that can make me angry is short-sightedness, and that’s exactly what happened just now. I read in the paper Apple withdrew an application from the Appstore called “baby shaker”. The application did what it says: you have a picture of a baby and can shake your phone hard enough to get brain damage.

Some woman named Sarah Jane Brain, complained, Apple canceled the application and apologized, and that’s the end of the story.

Obviously, I fully sympathize with everything than can help avoid shaken baby syndrome, and I feel very sorry for everybody ever involved in such situations. However, an application like this is in my mind a perfect mean to draw attention to the risks and possibly avoid some cases.

Suppose you’re a teenager, installing the application, having some fun, ignorant, .. and you grow up, one day confronted with a crying baby yourself. Don’t you think you might recognize the situation, know the risks, an NOT shake the actual baby? Because I believe you’ll learn something in the end.