'Cross The Breeze

What did Microsoft get from Scoble?

August 31, 2006 by geertd 0 Comments

Interesting interview on Twopointouch with Robert Scoble. Especially when asked what Microsoft gained from his blog:

(…) It showed that they were listening. Which is so rare. They got a lot of PR out of it, and I suppose that was the main thing. But it also affected the way the rest of the company communicated with users. I used to get technical queries about certain products and I used to just forward them on to tech support. I didn’t know who the people were who were really responsible and neither did any of the users. Nowadays, though, all of the product groups have their own blogs with the product manager in charge, and they’re engaging with customers all the time. (…)

Found thanks to Marketingfacts

blogging, microsoft

Free cell not so free

August 29, 2006 by geertd 1 Comment

The Safer Internet EU programme includes a campaign in Belgium for CelBel, which boasts a free telephony subscription for any youngster under 21. It seems to good to be true, and it is, as shown by the fake operator campaign which aims to raise awareness of the dangers of the Internet. Within a week 1,200 young people were fooled by the offer. The operation ends with an email warning subscribers that they have been tricked, and gives the address of a website about Internet scams. I’m curious to see if those fooled kids will have liked this one. Nevertheless a nice campaign, if you ask me.

The original site can be found here: Celbel

French article in La Libre

Dutch article in De Standaard

advertising, internet, marketing

Viral marketing at its best

August 28, 2006 by geertd 2 Comments

Excellent presentation on Viral Marketing with a lot of examples and cases. You can find the video here. Great Stuff!

Found thanks to Dutch Cowboys

advertising, internet

Blogsitting is hard!

August 24, 2006 by geertd 2 Comments

When Kris asked me to blogsit (is this the right term?), I immediately said yes. First of all because I wanted to help but also because I didn’t think it would be that much more difficult than just handling my own blog Brandopia and posting irregularly on our Windows Live Team Blog.

Boy, was I wrong! The hardest part is actually thinking about how and what you are going to write which might be relevant for a blog that is not yours. After just reading “Naked conversations” , which was recommended by Kris and indeed it’s a great book, one topic seemed contradictory to blogsitting. You have to make your blog personal and on the other hand you have to post regularly. Of course workaholics don’t have this problem but people like me need to recharge their batteries ones and a while, not only from work but also from blogging.

So what is best? Blogsitting or not posting for 2 weeks when you’re on holidays?

internet

Seth Godin at Gel 2006

August 18, 2006 by geertd 1 Comment

Another excellent presentation from Seth Godin at Gel 2006. This time the concept of the speech is: “if I think it’s broken, it’s broken”.

Found thanks to Coolzor and cross posted on Brandopia

advertising, marketing

I’m outta here!

August 17, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Ok, that’s it, I’m finally taking a couple (or more) days off and spend some quality time with the wife and kids (preferably somewhere where the weather is good) and I won’t do too much blogging during those days (probably none at all actually).

To keep things going at ‘Cross The Breeze, I’ve asked a good colleague of mine – and an avid blogger himself – to do some blogsitting while I’m out. Thanks for that Geert! Happy reading. Ciao!

blogging, travel

Happy Birthday!

August 17, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

WordPress.com is having it’s first birthday. Well have a good one Matt and team, I’m enjoying WordPress ever since I got on it 10 months ago! Congrats!

blogging, internet

Oberon Livebot Gateway

August 17, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Oberon Medialab has come up with a new way to make it easier for agencies to create bots for MSN & Windows Live Messenger. If you haven’t heard about bots before, they’re basically an innovative way to interact with the +200 million Messenger users out there. Here are some examples.

Oberon apparently gets a lot of requests from other agencies about creation of those bots since they’re an official ISV for this. Since most agencies that have been asking, could do an essential part of the programming themselves they come up with the Oberon Livebot Gateway.

What’s it about? Every agency can write the logic for the bot themselves, Oberon will deal with the specific MSN / Windows Live handling. Pretty interesting approach I think, you can read more about it on their blog (in Dutch).

Tags: msn, windows+live, messenger, bots, advertising

advertising, internet, marketing, msn, windows live

The worst of Advertising?

August 17, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

In online advertising we see an evolution where are getting more and more targetted if possible, and less intrusive. Think about AdWords from Google, or compare how ad-clean Windows Live Mail is looking versus the classic Hotmail screen,… All signs of less ads and more related to what you’re interested in whenever that’s possible.

In the offline it sometimes seems like they’re going the other direction. When I read about “ads on conveyer belts” of a store’s checkout lanes, then I can only find that really bad… or creepy as AdAge points out. It shows once more how well this movie by Studio Smack really was (I wrote about that one here).

“Conveyor belts have never been on anybody’s radar screen for marketing,” said Frank Cox, president-CEO of EnVision Marketing Group, a Little Rock, Ark., firm with a patented system to print digital, photo-quality ads directly on conveyor belts. “But a store with eight to 10 checkout lanes, well, you’re talking about 100 square feet of wasted ad real estate.”

Yeah sure, AdRants has another interesting idea, maybe EnVision can take a look at that as well.

“Perhaps Cox should start calling hospitals to place ads on the ceilings of patient’s room. Now there’s a captive audience.”

Happy shopping!

[Via AdPulp | Emergence Marketing]

Tags: advertising, intrusion, envision+marketing+group

advertising, internet, marketing, media, quote

Web 2.0 today: more of the same?

August 17, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I think I noticed it the first time at Micropersuasion, but now it’s starting to pop up on numerous blogs, it made me think of something. I’m talking about this funny little app that you can use to create your own web 2.0 logo. It’s like a sign of the times.

Looking at my own creation (which I haven’t kept) or the ones from Scoble, Rubel or Le Meur, they are all completely the same. And while this is just a funny little app to parody a bit the web 2.0 era, it’s actually not too far away from reality. Looking at all the new web 2.0 startups that pop up these last few weeks and months, how many original services have you noticed in between of whole bunch of digg-like, flickr-like and whatever-like services?

I think that, while we will see a lot more newcomers over the couple of months, and probably some really good ones as well, we might come to a new turning point. What’s the business model? How are we going to make this big? How are we going to make money out of it, because big or small, there are still investors in it in the end, they want only one thing: return on investment. Curious to find out how this will evolve in the next 6 to 12 months.

Tags: web+2.0, rubel, scoble, startup, le+meur, logo, roi