Archive | October, 2007

Customer First at Belisol?!

October 17, 2007 by Kris Hoet 6 Comments

I received an email from Belisol today and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. A few months ago (in April or so) I was looking for solutions like sunscreens for my children’s bedrooms. These rooms have windows directed to the south and there’s only a curtain to block the sun which obviously is not the best solutions during hot summer days. Belisol is a company in Belgium that sells sunscreens so I wanted to find out what that would cost. Just like on many other customer unfriendly websites, there’s only one way to get in touch for this and that is to fill in a form. No telephone numbers or anything, just the form. So I filled in this form. By doing so you have to provide all kinds of data that is only of use for the company like ‘how did you get to know Belisol?’ but by then again, if they help me out I don’t have too much of a problem with that.

So what happens? Nothing at all. A week, a month, 2 months pass and until today I didn’t receive the quote I asked for. That obviously upsets me and at a certain point in time I was even wondering that the reason for that maybe is the fact that it’s not a really big job. In the form you have to fill in the number of windows etc you want a solution for so maybe there wasn’t enough business for them in my request. Anyway, they aren’t the only solution out there and we just looked further for other solutions. Luckily also the summer in Belgium was crap so we didn’t really need it this year. The search is still on by the way :)

And then today in my inbox: “jobs at Belisol”! Are they kidding me? I’m so totally fed up with companies that deal with personal data this way. Basically they figured out how to store my information, how to do some research on their most efficient promotion channels, … but actually providing me with the information I need is too much too ask. And then they start spamming me?! As I said, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Sigh. It shows again that we have to stop blaming the technology as the technolgy works most of the time, it’s our attitude that needs a fix.

Update: Some might have noticed that I’ve deleted a few comments on this post. Initially someone working at Belisol shop contacted me saying that it would never have happened at their outlet. Today this person requested these comments to be taken away. After some thought, I decided to follow the request and canceled the comments made here. There are 2 reasons why I decided to do so:

  1. The person that made the comments did track the Belisol brand (unlike their HQ) and did come back to me on the issue I talked about for which she might get into trouble, which is the last thing I want
  2. Although I agree that this person could have been smarter in the comment itself (saying they each operate separately), being asked to delete it sort of proves my point about that it still is one brand umbrella so that I don’t really care as a consumer if they did operate as separate businesses or not

Anyway, in the end, we’re 2 months after I wrote this and many more months after trying to get in touch with Belisol and I didn’t get what I asked (no need to bother anymore by the way), so still pretty ‘customer last’ if you ask me.

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belgium, consumer, internet

Birds Eye in 3D

October 16, 2007 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I’m planning on doing a longer review of some of the recent updates on Live Search, Windows Live Spaces and a few other services but this was something that I didn’t want to hold back until then. This video shows a new feature in Live Maps that combines the 3D view with the Birds Eye view. Both were available for a whole range of cities (unfortunately not a lot of 3D for Europe) but also I was wondering how these 2 would combine in 1 view. The video does a great job bringing that to live though, check it out:

I think this looks really great. Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

[Via LiveSide] 

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internet, microsoft, movies, pr, presentation, software, technology, windows live

It’s all in the details

October 15, 2007 by Kris Hoet 7 Comments

This morning I received my ‘invitation’ for Customer First 2007, the second edition of this “gathering of more than 2000 professionals in interactive marketing, mobile marketing, online media, SEM, …’. Well actually, I received the invite 4 times this morning, maybe I get some more tomorrow.

CustomerFirst

Although this is a free event for everyone, this invites you to pre-register to the event which should enable faster entry. It’s a personalized invitation and I always like that, because in the best cases it gives you the feeling you’re getting more than just a standard treatment, it’s like the sender knows you and acts upon it…. unless you get the invitation 4 times of course. In that case the so called personalization makes it actually worse.

CFinvite

Don’t get me wrong, I think Customer First is going to be an interesting event and I’ll be attending probably both days (and doing a presentation on Friday) but the invitation is a missed opportunity. My guess is that it should haven gone out earlier already (invite came in today and the event is on Thursday), there were probably a few partners (sponsors) involved to make it happen, addresses were gathered from different sources, etc etc… But how hard can it be to filter out multiple records of the same person, same address, … in a database? Funny enough, there is a personalized URL to register and even these start at http://…../kris.hoet to http://…./kris.hoet.3. The system even knew it was me every time again and again ;) My colleague Geert received it 3 times, anyone doing better?

It’s all in the details.

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internet, marketing, media, technology

links for 2007-10-12

October 12, 2007 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

internet

A few good creative men

October 11, 2007 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

You can’t handle the ads.

I’m thinking I should start a whole new category of little viral videos that make fun of advertising somehow. I’ve collected quite a few here over time. I’ll list them all up in a few days in case you missed some – all classics. Here’s the latest addition:

[Via Beyond Madison Avenue]

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advertising, fun, marketing, movies

When I grow up…

October 11, 2007 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

… I want to be so far removed from the day to day business that I need a crane to pull my bloated head out of my ass!

Brilliant, some of these kids do say the darnest things ;) I’m not sure if this is an oldie or something new, but I hadn’t seen it before and liked it so here you go. Check out this ad for Monster.com.

[Update: The buzzing bees commented that it's about a year old]

[Via Buzzing Bees]

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advertising, fun, marketing, media, movies, viral

links for 2007-10-11

October 11, 2007 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

internet

What’s holding you back?

October 10, 2007 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

There’s an interesting conversation going on at MarketingProfs Daily Fix about what should come first: the policy or the blog? 

“Should a marketer simply start blogging or wait instead until all of the blogging policies and procedures are established before beginning? Although the absolute answer is that it depends on the organization, the industry, the product or service, I suggest strongly that the blog come before the policy.”

I think that is very well put, especially by adding the notion that it does depend on the organization or product, but basically saying that you should just go and try for yourself. It’s how I started little over 2 years ago and I it really is the only way to really understand what this is all about. I thought I knew as well, but the experience learnt me different.

Stephen Denny adds to the conversation by saying the policy should definitely come first, and I see his point. but too many people use this lack of clarity, this lack of rules as a reason for not trying out for themselves. And that’s my main reason why I wouldn’t focus on the policy first. Ideally you have a small guideline, but like Cam comments: common sense should apply. I couldn’t agree more, remember my chapter in the ‘Age of Conversation‘: you get a long way with common sense.

Also don’t forget that engagement with social media already starts by reading, leaving comments, … so there really is not that much reason not to try this out for yourself today. Congrats C.B. for your first post at Daily Fix – it’s a really good one ;)

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ageofconversation, blogging, community, consumer, influence, pr, social media

links for 2007-10-10

October 10, 2007 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

internet

Online video advertising

October 9, 2007 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

It was no real surprise that this was coming, but it’s still interesting to see how every video service is trying out different kinds of advertising on and around their videos. I honestly expected it to happen earlier as we all know the daily costs for services such as Youtube are quite high and there’s little monetization just yet.

The solution that most services seem to bet on is the advertising pre-roll: showing a short ad before you see the video you actually chose/came for. Also here are some differences as some have a pre-roll for every video while on MSN Video for instance this is based on time spent on the site. So regardless of how many videos you watch, you’ll only get a pre-roll every 3 minutes. It’s interesting to see how ads are not tied to pageviews anymore although also this model will continue to improve. (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft)

Another solution is the advertising that shows as a partial overlay on the video. VideoEgg has this for a while now and it is also what Youtube introduced on their service not so long ago. After user complaints they made this an opt in for content owners since many weren’t happy at all. It would be interesting to find out how many content owners opted in for this.

And since online video is so popular, it attracts other types of advertising especially when people share videos. Google just introduced their Adsense Video Units which is basically a way of embedding video into your site/blog with ads surrounding it. People who do embed this can make a bit of money (similar to AdSense) but they could have done with a little bit less ads I think.

A last type of advertising with video that I found just recently is the Wildfire Network. It’s less related to advertising before and during online video, but I thought it’s still somehow part of this discussion. Basically it’ll pay bloggers to post videos on their blog, and it’ll show it’s a sponsored entry. Pay-per-post for video basically and I guess the whole pay-per-post discussion applies here as well.

Anyway, will any/more of these solutions attract advertisers? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I remember back in 2001 or 2002 (I still worked at Kinepolis Group, which is a cinema operator) we changed all online movie trailers from Quicktime to Flash (which back then was hardly used for video). At the same time we introduced the possibility of adding a 7 second commercial before each movie trailer and I always found it weird we were never able to sell that to anyone. And cinema advertising was big part of our business remember. Curious to see if that changed today, 5-6 years later.

Wait and see.

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advertising, beta, consumer, internet, marketing, movies, msn, technology
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