The people that read this blog might have picked up on the undertone that I’m not really a marketeer in the traditional way. I suspect that there are many more like me. I kind of rolled into this business and it stuck with me. Whether I like it or not, I became a marketeer over time.

People see us as sharks that will do anything to enforce the message upon you and sell the product. Where this is generally the goal of a campaign, it is not always the case. The place where I’m working now has a good product and I believe in it. Why I do what I do here is not about the hard sale. It’s about letting people know that our product is out there, that it really is better than the competitor and that it can improve their lives. It all might sound a little goody two shoes but I can assure you it’s true. That is why I went from working for an agency to working for the manufacturer.

Now the next question is: why is marketing so important for a company. Most people hate marketing, hate marketers, hate the way we convey the message. Again, the same answer: marketing works. Why does it work: because you let it.

By letting the message get through to you, you give in to the goal every marketer sets out to achieve: to spread the message to all targeted consumers. We inform you of our product and of the benefits for you personally or your company. We even make it more profitable for you to buy it when there is a special campaign going on. There is no gun pointed at your head. No one is going to die if you don’t buy. In my case, we don’t even bash the competitor. So no one is forcing you to buy our product.

If you have a problem in your life that can be resolved by buying a product, you can do research into it and make a well-considered purchase. Think carefully: how often do you do this? Not that much I reckon. When there is a lot of money involved: yes but most of the time, you just think of the most known products that can fill in the gap. If that product happens to be the one I’m marketing, than I have done my job well.

So don’t bash on marketers that just want to give you the information you need to improve your lives. We are just trying to make a living and as long as you let us, we will continue to do so.

Participants have seen it all nowadays. You cannot really surprise them with the greatest campaign ever. You just have to capture the moment and the demographic. Is there a crisis going on? We’ll give them part of their money back. Are there disasters around the world? We’ll give money to charity every time you buy. You don’t know our product? We’ll send you samples for free and if you don’t like it, you can always send it back to us at no charge. The possibilities are endless. And while this is a good thing for the end-consumer, it makes my life a lot more difficult but also a lot more interesting.

Where I used to make one mail, one form and capture everything in one database, now the situation is completely different. We have 7 push mails, 3 update mails, 2 databases, 14 forms and numerous possibilities for end-users to take advantage of.

The big question I sometimes wonder, if it’s all worth it? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
What do you think? Is the effort we put in our campaigns, in general, worth it?

This is not really a marketing post but more of a general awareness post of a subculture that needs to be known. In the coming years, this group of people will grow dramatically and it will be useful to know how to communicate with them.

I don’t consider myself a nerd; I’m more of a freak or geek. However I do know something about nerd culture and trends. Of course, these trends change hourly and I might offend some persons when describing different parts of the culture.  This is also a very very broad generalization, so if you have anything to add: please let me know!

Here are some things you might like to know:

Geek language

• 1337 speak
• Acronyms like:
  • PEBKAC
  • NOOb
  • Pwnage
  • PrOn
  • Uber-
  • Meh

Geek topics of conversation

• Comics
• Science
• Tech
• Computers
• D&d
• Rpg
• Star Trek/Wars
• Games (computer or advance board games)

Geek apparel

• T-shirts proclaiming nerd-hood. Mostly captioned
  • I’m only here because my server is down
  • I’m not a geek, I’m a level 12 paladin
  • 42
  • Jesus saves
  • There’s no place like 127.0.0.1
  • Obey gravity! It’s the law!
  • I failed the Turing test
• A Casio watch used to be the standard, now I don’t think a watch is necessary anymore.
• Sneakers
• Hoody

Geek Books

• Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Anything from Asimov
• Dune – Frank Herbert
• Lord of the Rings – J.R. Tolkien
• Ender’s Game series – Orson Scott Card
• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
• Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Any Terry Pratchett book
• Any Philip K. Dick book

Geek TV series

• Star Trek
• Dr. Who
• Serenity
• Buffy, the vampire slayer
• Batlestar Galactica
• IT Crowd
• Red Dwarf
• Black Adder
• Animated comics (Thundercats, spiderman, les chevaliers du zodiac, Dragonball Z, …)
• Anime series

Geek movies

• Flash Gordon
• Superbad
• Soylent Green
• The princess bride
• Office space
• Shaun of the dead
• The fifth element
• Darkman
• War games
• 12 monkeys
• All Monty Python movies
• Blade Runner
• Willow
• Sneakers
• Pi
• Existenz
• Akira
• Logan’s run
• The cube (series)
• Brazil
• Weird science

Geek websites

• Xcd
• Bash
• Qdb
• Slashdot

Geek quotes

• The cake is a lie
• All your base are belong to us
• We’re going to need a bigger boat.
• Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
• Kneel before Zod!
• This spoon is to big
• There is no spoon

Famous geeks

• Bill Gates
• Linus Torvalds
• Tom Anderson
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman

There will be many things missing, so please don’t be offended and just add them in a comment. I will try to keep the list up to date as much as possible.

Happy reading!

Ad words => advertising in the yellow pages

You are looking for something and your search engine gives you sponsored links that cater to your needs. When looking through the yellow pages, you will also find ads of the category you are browsing through that provide a solution to your problem.

Banners => magazine ads

The word itself says it all. Banners are very similar to magazine ads. You are browsing through a site and next to the content you are viewing, advertising is present.

In-house push mail => catalogues, targeted mail you asked for

A generated email to a list of contacts your company has gathered. These people have actively asked to be contacted and expect to receive communication from your company.

Push mail to an external list => targeted mail you did not ask for

This is a different type, mainly because your list doesn’t consist of people that have asked your company for communication but rather a third party. This company shares or rents out their contacts. The recipients usually do not know where you have found their information but they have on one occasion given the permission to this third party to use their contact details.

Oft mail => flyers handed out in stores

An outlook file template is something that you give to your dealers or distributors. They can send out an adaptation of your mail to their contact base. You provide all the information but the dealer tells their customer to buy it in their store.

Websites => catalogs / the store itself

A site on the internet is open to anyone who wants to see it, but you have to first get there. When you read a catalogue, you have taken it or asked for it somewhere. If your company has ecommerce, the analogy with a shop is quickly made.

Facebook/myspace etc => flyers/magazines about your products that others give you.

Social networking sites have the possibility to make fan pages, product pages etc. You can look for them on the specific site but mostly they will be referred to you by your contacts.

Twitter => Word of mouth

This is not really a marketing channel but can get the word out pretty fast. It is a platform where anyone can speak and if people like what they hear, they tell it to others.

Affiliate marketing => flyers that are sent with other brands

This is a channel that piggybacks on the contacts of one brand to promote another. The only big difference is that sometimes, the “pig” receives a percentage of the sales amount from the other brand when a sale is made directly through this channel.

Blog => a column in a periodical

Literally a web log, this channel is designed to give information to those who want it. You can read it and if you like it, you’ll read it again next time there is a post.

The main true difference to offline communication is that there usually is a click through possibility. True, it would be very convenient to have that in traditional ads, but we’re not there yet.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this. If you use it, please do not forget to mention this blog. Thanks for your attention.

• The difference between your first personal site and a full fledged international site with all the trimming
• A rant in favour of marketeers
• Comparing online channels to traditional ones
• Original uses of Twitter

I hope this inspires you to come back.
If you have any topics you want to see me tackle, don’ t hesitate to ask.

The reason giraffes have developed such a long neck is because the food that they eat is on trees. They need their neck to reach their food. A chameleon has developed it’s camouflage techniques because it needs to be invisible for predators. You can look up thousands of these evolutionary facts. The main basis for this is that the animal (or plant) adapts itself to it’s surroundings to be able to survive.

The last couple of thousands of years, mankind has changed this. Since evolution is not going as fast as we like, we adapt our surroundings to our own desires. So this raised a few questions with me: will mankind not evolve any more because there are no more necessary inherent traits needed to survive? Or even worse, will mankind evolve into creatures that do not improve their abilities but adapt the surroundings we have created for ourselves? Where will we evolve from their?

If we keep changing our environment to make it easier for people to do what needs to be done, I fear that there will only be a downward spiral until people are just brains in blobs.

What do you think?

This is a trend that I noticed some time ago. The originators think of a url and fill in the one page website with the most basic of content.

The biggest question that I ask myself is if these are at all interesting and more importantly purposeful.
What you mostly see are sites that are just a funny gadget or sites that give content that you can easily get somewhere else or even know instantly.

For those of you who do appreciate these types of minimalistic, redundant and just plain stupid sites: here is a list of examples:

http://isitchristmas.com/
http://amiawesome.com/
http://whatcoloristheempirestatebuilding.com/
http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/
http://khaaan.com/
http://istwitterdown.com/
http://www.purple.com/
http://yousneezed.com/
http://letsturnthisfuckingwebsiteyellow.com/
http://whatismyip.org/
http://www.isapplestoredown.com/
http://www.internetfirstpage.com/
http://areyoureallysad.com/
http://doesthemailruntoday.com/
http://isobamapresident.com/
http://www.isthedowup.com/

http://isbarackobamamuslim.com/

http://isitcanadadayyet.com/

Maybe this question is too far fetched, but here it goes anyway:
Are we going to a culture where you can just type in your question as an url and the web gives you the answer?
I certainly hope not.

What do you think?

Some are good, some are bad but everything is interesting.

Personal effects

As you see on these stats, the objective result is staggering. The visits to this very blog were multiplied tenfold in just a day. I can see very clearly in the rest of the statistics, that the most views were generated towards the articles that I actually registered on Stumbleupon. This is no shock at all. What did surprise me is that people tend to linger and check out the other pages as well.

Is this as good for you as it is for me?

Stumbling can, as you see, bring a lot of people to your site in a short amount of time. But is this the best course of action? Isn’t it better to create a reputation for yourself and get targeted hits from people who actually want to read what you write? Stumblers are people who don’t know what they are looking for and trust the social bookmarking site to make the choice for them. I want to compare them to channelsurfers on regular tv, just flicking through the channels to see what’s on instead of taking the tv guide and doing the research.
Well, you can go like this but in all honesty: f*** that. You and I both know that it’s very cool to see so many people visiting your site.

Take a chance

Chances are you, yes you, have reached this page through stumble. The fact that you are still reading this, confirms my suspicion that some people tend to linger and view more pages of the blog. Who am I to argue. There are some nice posts on here as I say so myself.
I hope some of you return here and there to check up on me.

If you like me to check up on you: comment.
If you like to know more: comment:
If you like me to check you out: comment
If you like me so much for other people to check me out: share this page.

Thanks for reading!