Category Archives: blogging

About marketing media in Belgium (Cont’d)

Last week I mentioned the Belgian agency blogs as well as blogs from agency individuals. I was quite sure I didn’t capture all blogs, so thanks to everyone for commenting or emailing me with some ones I didn’t now yet. Subscribed.

Agencies (cont’d):

Individuals at agencies (cont’d):

Enjoy reading.

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About marketing media in Belgium

… and about the conversation. Since about a year or so we’ve seen Belgian agencies starting to share their thoughts and impressions on blogs. I-Merge was probably the first to go big on this, and they got the most momentum for it as well. But they’re definitely not alone. The rhythm of postings is different across all blogs, but on most you get quite regular updates. Only few didn’t manage to keep it going, like ClickFlux (Fastbridge) but still, the bad news is yet to come.

Here’s a list of the agency related blogs in Belgium, I might have missed a few ones, especially in the individuals category, I’d be very interested fo find out.

Agencies:

Individuals at agencies:

Related to that we also have the Digimedia Expert blog (Digimedia) who covers on digital media (as you could already imaging) and the new Feweb blog that is mainly related to web development.

So what’s the bad news then? (This part holds only Dutch links by the way) There’s absolutely no sign of the 2 major marketing/advertising related Belgian magazines on this. Media Marketing is running a special this month on “blogs, the new buzz” but that’s about it. Open up any issue of MM or PUB and there’s not much on it to be found, and don’t even get me started on their websites. If you compare that with what they’re doing in The Netherlands for instance with Molblog, MarketingFacts, Marketing Online, Dutch Cowboys, Frankwatching, Emerce and the newly launched Clamare! you really start to wonder. It’s a long, long road … (The Hollies)

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GreatNews & Windows Live Writer

I love it when tools that I use come together. This time it’s GreatNews (my RSS reader) and Windows Live Writer which I use to write my blogposts with.

Last week I convinced Arlindo ( a colleague of mine) to try out GreatNews. He installs it, likes it and writes a blogpost about it. Reading that one, I find out there’s integration with Windows Live Writer … we definitely need to talk more to each-other :-)

So whenever you’re using both these tools, make sure you check this out.

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Best of both worlds?

If you have been reading on my blog before you know that I think it’s about time for true integrated advertising. The faster we don’t have to talk about ‘both worlds’ in advertising, the better. But that’s the future, we ain’t there yet.

And yet, today, AdPulp noted what I see as a great example of integrated advertising. Chevrolet launched a contest in which college students from across the US will compete to produce a Super Bowl spot.

“The winning team will participate in the production process as their concept is developed and made into a 30 second television commercial. The spot will then air during Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007.

Chevrolet contacted advertising, marketing, and film programs at some 340 colleges and universities across the country, and reached out to hundreds of other schools, including community colleges, to give as many students as possible the chance to enter the challenge.”

I’m very curious to find out how they hopefully will be able to start building momentum with this, all the way to the Super Bowl. Supposedly – at least that’s what I expect – using a lot of the new communication ways to follow ‘the adventure’ until the end.

I find this a great example of combining maybe the summum of mass media – the Super Bowl ads – with the new ways of consumer generated media.

(Press release)

[Via AdPulp]

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Innovative online discussion

A few days ago I found out about a tool which provides the opportunity to do interactive discussions in a new way. It’s called Synthetron which sounds like it’s coming out of an old sci-fi series “hey Spock, the conversation got stuck in a vortex, let’s get the synthetron”.

Still – apart from the bit of fun here – it does look interesting. The idea is that you can have a live discussion where you are able to vote on everything the others are saying in the discussion. Normally – by doing this – some quotes, opinions should surface throughout the discussion so it sort of synthesizes the discussion for you.

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I couldn’t say if it really is so great yet, I’m hoping to test it soon. Emerce (NL) apparently has done a test which was seemed to have been quite good, and LVB (BE) is planning one as we speak.

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What did Microsoft get from Scoble?

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

I’m outta here!

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!

Web 2.0 today: more of the same?

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.

reflectmicropersuasionbeta.png

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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.

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Autosave in WordPress

WordPress.com seems to have been updated a little overnight. I just noticed while writing my earlier post that my post gets saved in draft automatically. That’s pretty cool, it has happened before that I lost pieces of blogsposts while writing and then I regretted not having saved a draft version.

I don’t really like the way this autosave in WordPress is done though. Everytime it saves a post, it will put your cursor right back in the beginning of the post – even while writing – and I guess I don’t have to tell you how annoying that is (every f*** minute!).

The other thing I don’t like is that even while you publish your post, their seems to remain another version of this post in your drafts. Don’t ask me why, it happened to the post I wrote before this one, and you basically just have to delete it because your post did get published alright. Weird, hope they fix this soon.

I think I’ll write my next posts offline from now one!