Category Archives: hotlist

Advertising hotlist

Recently I wrote about the top marketing blogs, these blogs that write good stuff on marketing on continuous basis. Today I’ll do the same for the advertising blogs, expect a bit less copy, but a whole lot of advertising!

There are 2 other great advertising blogs which didn’t make it to this list. The first one is Joe La Pompe, great stuff on copycats in advertising (but no RSS feed, which I really need for regular reading). The other one is Ad Mashup which is exactly what it says, but not very active lately.

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Daily del.icio.us

I’ve never been a big fan of the daily link/delicious posts you see on many of the blogs that I read, ignoring most of these posts. But that is changing a little bit the last few weeks. When in addition to that I saw Ine explain a new ‘thingy’ that delicious is trying out, I thought I’d give it a try. I’m not sure if it will work, how it will turn out, if I’ll like it and more important if you’ll like it, so feel free to comment… if I can get it to work in the first place of course :)

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Marketing hotlist

With top marketing bloglists popping up all over, from the ‘original’ Top 25 Marketing blogs from Mack Collier to Todd And’s Power 150. From the z-lists to Jaffe’s March Blogness, … I’m reading many blogs on marketing but if you would ask me which are the ones I like most, which are the ones that I think stand out on a continuous basis – this would be my list:

I’ve had a chance to meet few of them in real life or via email already, all great marketers really, and I can only hope I’ll get to know all the others on this list as well.

If you want to have a look at the other feeds that I check on a daily basis, I share them over here. I’ll probably do a hotlist on Advertising one of these days as well.

[Update: added Jaffejuice and Guy Kawasaki which should be on that list as well – note to self: focus!]

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Smile… tomorrow will be worse

Welcome to the Murphy philosophy. Since things are not really as planned this week, I though it would be a good idea to talk about Murphy’s law a bit. I’m an natural optimist though, so I do think tomorrow will be better :)

If anything can go wrong, it will – Murphy’s law

Corollaries:

  1. Nothing is as easy as it looks
  2. Everything takes longer than you think
  3. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong
  4. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop
  5. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse
  6. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first
  7. Every solution breeds new problems
  8. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious
  9. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw
  10. . Mother nature is a bitch

Back to my happy normal self tomorrow ;)

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Back to del.icio.us

Yesterday I gave up on Newsvine, cleaned up my delicious account and started using it again. You might have noticed in the sidebar of this blog as well that the delicious feed replaces the earlier newsvine feed. I was quite fond of Newsvine right from the start, funny enough exactly one year ago. The reason why I liked Newsvine more than Digg or Delicious was because you could have good conversations about the links you posted. Delicious doesn’t do this (although they do some other cool stuff of course) and the conversations on Digg are of low quality most of the time. So what happened? Lately the interaction on my Newsvine column is dead, no more comments. I hung in there for a while but after talking about it with Tom earlier this week, I made the decision to move back to Delicious. I don’t think the conversation will come back (not sure why it disappeared in the first place) but that means that there’s not much of a reason anymore to keep on using that. It sure ain’t easier. My Delicious feed can be found in the right navigation, here it is if you’re interested: http://del.icio.us/crossthebreeze

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Blog of the year

Clickx Magazine in Belgium organizes it’s “Site of the year” award again, and for the second time it has an award on blogs as well (note: all sources are in Dutch). The organization picked 100 blogs which their readers can choose from. Now it appears that not everybody is very happy with the nominations of these blog awards. What’s so special about it is that people are unhappy because they are on the shortlist, and not because they think they should have been.

And if you read some of the comments, I honestly can’t blame them either. It seems to be too much of a one-way project of the magazine, counting mainly on the blogs to promote the awards. And there’s the argument that the list doesn’t make sense. Curious where this is going… to be continued I would say.

Read more about it here and here.

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Nine million

I wanted to highlight this initiative of MSN Belgium (NL) supporting Ninemillion.org for UNHCR. Ninemillion.org is an organization that supports the 9.3 million refugee children in the world and for this MSN has set up an auction together with Ebay, selling some interesting signed items. Items being auctioned are:

  • Signed Michael Owen English team football shirt
  • Signed Gigi Buffon Italian team football shirt
  • Team Anderlecht Madonna Football shirt
  • Signed CD from Texas’ newest opus Red Book
  • Unique signed photo from Charlotte Gainsbourg

Support Ninemillion.org and make your bid at the Ninemillion auction on Ebay.

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The 10 truths on branded storytelling

I’ve always been quite interested in the whole idea of storytelling in marketing and PR. Also for me it’s a daily task to try and figure out how I can tell the best story on the brands I represent. And how much you recognize other brands that are doing a good job at this, that won’t make it easier for you to figure out how to do it.

About a year ago I had the opportunity to attend a workshop by Paul Abrahams, managing director of Waggener Edstrom in the UK and journalist at the Financial Times before that. He told us a bit more about their method of the MasterNarrative Storytelling method that learns you about the elements each story should have to potentially become a compelling story.

That was pretty interesting, but it missed something. Even if your story holds all the necessary elements to make it a good story, how can you make it stand out? Alain Thys wrote an interesting post about just that on Futurelab, which gives you the 10 truths on branded storytelling. Here they are:

  1. Seek the Story to Rule them All
  2. Great Stories Come To You, If You Listen
  3. Amplify Those Stories That Others Can Tell
  4. Connect your Branding Efforts to Your USP
  5. Connect your Story Efforts to Your Bottom Line
  6. Know Your Classics (yet don’t get hung up on them)
  7. Storytelling is Not Just About Words
  8. You Don’t Need to Tell it All
  9. Let Go of the Illusion of Control
  10. You Cannot Fake Authenticity

Make sure you read the full post from Alain Thys at Futurelab’s blog, where you will get some more explanation on all 10 truths. You will find it really interesting.

[Via Customer World]

More nifty Top 10’s

Only a couple of days after ‘Nifty Top 10’s’ I got more of them to share with you:

They forgot to include one of the best designed blogs of all, namely veerle’s blog, so just had to rectify that one. And I would buy other stuff when I was filthy rich, but you got to start somewhere of course.

kiniw2.JPG

Oh yeah, this is written on a Tablet PC, which I like quite a lot ;-) (See n°3 in Microsoft product flops).

[Via Personal Tech Pipeline | Collage]

Wildfire

I just got back from a presentation from Leo Burnett & Contagious Magazine called Wildfire: Ideas that spread and sell and it was definitely a good one. While showing some good examples – the usual and some new stuff – they called out to marketers to take a risk and start doing things differently. Is that new? Are they the only ones? Definitely not, but since a lot of advertisers don't get it yet, everybody who makes the call should be supported. And what I also liked is that they try to get the conversation going, which is the right way to do. So if you're curious about this, check out the Wildfire blog and see how it evolves. It's definitely worth a shot.

And just as a sidenote, it seems like LYNXjet is going to be the bigger winner this year at the festival this year… if they already aren't. Check out their campaign.