“The Nokia N97 is an important step towards our vision of delivering a highly personalized Internet experience,” said Jonas Geust, Vice President and head of Nokia Nseries. “Fuelled by a multitude of music, maps, games, media and applications via Ovi, the Nokia N97 transforms the Internet into an experience that’s completely tailored to the tastes and interests of its owner.” (source: Nokia.com)

Although a lot of the features announced in the press release have been worded as innovative, most of the applications mentioned have traditionally been available on previous smart phone series, such as E or N series. However, the tech specs of the phone do provide a step forward in terms of features available for the Nokia users, with 32GB of device storage, expandable to 48GB with the addition of a micro SD card, as well as the new bluetooth stereo headset also launched today.

Although not that spectacular technological breakthrough, the N97 smart phone does appear to be an attractive upgrade option for Nokia E and N series users. I would personally buy the phone to replace my Nokia E71 if the price would prove to not be prohibitive (in Europe, estimated market price for the Nokia N97 is somewhere around 500 Euro).

To get a glimpse of the looks of the new product, check these images taken from the Nokia N97 press page:

For more information about the Nokia N97, check these resources:

Nokia N97 Press Release: http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1319081
The Nokia N97 press page: http://www.nokia.com/press/n97
A full list of Nokia N97 features: http://2009.nseries.com/

Communication Olympics

Between March 23 and April 16 you can register for the 9th edition of the Communication Olympics, the most important national competition for youth interested in a career in Advertising, Public Relations or Political Communication. The competition is the best opportunity for young aspirants to get noticed by the professionals in the industry, because more than 70 of them have been invited this year to be part in the competition jury (you can find more information about the jury here).

For 2009, there are four main themes for the pre-selection of candidates:

Corporate Communication – Campaign to persuade the Romanian employees to do more sports.

Advertising – Campaign to convince the audience to buy mainly products made in Romania, as opposed to imported products

Political Communication – Campaign to convince the Romanian electorate to vote through a referendum for a change of the current republic into a presidential or parliamentary one

Public Relations – Campaign to encourage the population to recycle electronic waste

You can find more information about the competition here.

The teams that will pass the pre-selection process will have the opportunity to work on a real communication project for a company, a brand, a public institution or a public individual. After two weeks of work, the teams will be able to publicly present their projects and the best ones will be recognized and awarded prizes of 4,000 Euro in total. If you want to see examples of successful projects from past years, check out here!

For more information about the event, check out www.olimpiadelecomunicarii.ro.

While the idea sounded good, to give a present to a friend without the excuse of a special occasion, such as a birthday or any other anniversary, buying something to promote someone through it can cause quite a bit of mixed feelings. For example, I was wondering why I should be helping promote kdo.ro spending my own money (albeit, with e 10% discount), when it would have sounded more normal to have them pay me for this promotional service.

A few days ago, after Loredana told me about this initiative, I was looking on their website to see what would be an interesting and useful present for one of my friends, for whom I was planning to buy the present. Browsing through the items listed in the kdo.ro online store, I ran into something that I thought would have been extremely useful. However, the item was something useful for myself, not my friend.

Funny enough, a couple of days later I receive a package. I look at it and I cannot believe it. It was exactly the item that I was really thinking about buying it for myself! It was the present that Loredana bought for me and had kdo.ro deliver it to me. Although we never touched upon the subject of what I would wish for as a present, because she knows me so well it was quite easy for her to pick the right present for me.

Well, if you think about this in pure logical and economic terms, you are not actually spending your money to promote kdo.ro. Looking through their offering there was an item I wanted to buy for myself. Through this promotion, I actually received that item without paying anything for it. Since it was a present with a promotion request attached to it, I am now willing to spend the same amount of money that Loredana spent for my present to buy a present of my own for one of my close friends.

While I do spend money to buy a present for a friend (something you do anyways when you do this with any other reason), in the end, promoting kdo.ro in the process does not cost me anything more that the time spent to write about this. The benefit for me was that I received a present myself, while also being able to make a friend think kindly of me because of the present she will receive from me (I will only mention her here, after she receives the present, I want it to be a surprise).

Although it might sound weird at the beginning, do spend the time to look through the offerings of kdo.ro, you might find there things that you would like to buy for yourself or presents that you would like to give to your close friends. Who knows, maybe someone has already entered this online promo chain and you might find yourself receiving a pleasant surprise quite soon.

What All PR People Should Know About Journalists

1. Your BS is obvious.
2. Timing trumps all.
3. Reputation matters.
4. Features are not as important as an angle.
5. Speed and contactability can make a difference.
6. Peer pitching works.

and

What All Journalists Should Know About PR People

1. Our own client’s time isn’t always yours.
2. Sometimes we have to dump you for a better offer too.
3. Cancellations are worse for us than for you.
4. The angle you’re looking for isn’t obvious.
5. Your promises become our promises.
6. Remember all the great stuff we do for you.

Bonus:

What Reporters Should Know About The Dark Side – 451 Marketing

1. Free
   Ads that include messages about a free product or service promotions can work well during an economic downturn, but consumers need to see the products perform well. E-mail spam filters are tough on messages that include “free” in the subject line. While it might be tempting to use a subject line that says, “Open now to get your free widget,” that’s an e-mail spam filter red flag that will send your message to most recipients’ spam boxes. When the economy is tough, you can’t risk having your e-mails not make it to the intended recipients. Replace “free” with “complimentary” or “gratis” to sneak by spam filters without compromising the effectiveness of your message.
2. Guarantee
   Few people believe in guarantees these days. Unless you can prove your guarantee is real, use the valuable real estate space in your ad for a more effective message that consumers are likely to believe and act on.
3. Really
   If you want to waste space in your ads, include “really” in your copy. This word does nothing to help your messages. Instead, it slows consumers down, and they are not likely to wait around for the complete message. Don’t risk losing them by loading your copy with useless filler words. Make sure every word in your copy is there for a reason.
4. Very
   Does a message sound more compelling with “very” in it? Is “When you need very fresh flowers, call ABC Florist,” more effective than “When you need fresh flowers, call ABC Florist”? If you answered, yes, reread the last paragraph.
5. That
   Once you finish writing copy for your ad or marketing piece, reread it and make note of every time you use “that” in your copy. Chances are, you can delete 90 percent of them because “that” is a filler word that doesn’t advance the consumer through the message. Instead, it slows down time-strapped consumers. Deliver the messages your audience is likely to respond to, and deliver them quickly.
6. A Lot
   Don’t use vague copy with words like “a lot” that do nothing to differentiate your business from your competitors. Instead, quantify your messages. If you offer 20 varieties of roses in your flower shop, say so. If you respond to customer service calls within five minutes, tell people. Which is more compelling: “You can choose from a lot of shoe styles at Sally’s Shoe Boutique” or “You can choose from more than 100 shoe styles at Sally’s Shoe Boutique?” No doubt, “100 shoe styles” is more intriguing than “a lot of shoe styles”. A lot can mean different things to different people. Don’t leave room for guesswork in your copy. Make your messages extremely clear with no room for confusion.
7. Opportunity
   You’re not helping anyone when you offer “opportunities” in your copy. Consumers don’t want opportunities. They want to feel confident handing over their hard-earned money. They want to know they’ll get the results they want and need, not the opportunity to perhaps get those results. Don’t let them wonder what they’ll get when they pull out their wallets. Tell them.
8. To Be (or Not To Be, For That Matter)
   Write your advertising and marketing messages in the active voice, not the passive voice. If any form of “to be,” “has been” or anything similar appears in your copy, rewrite it. Writing in the passive voice doesn’t command action. Writing in the active voice does.
9. Synergy
   This overused piece of jargon has had a long life, but it’s time to move on. Leave jargon and 10-dollar words out of your advertising messages. There’s no room in copywriting for buzz words and words that consumers need a dictionary to understand. Consumers don’t care about your “unique value proposition.” They care that when they pay for your product or service, it will deliver the results they expect. Naturally, there are some exceptions to this rule, such as B2B copywriting, where jargon might be expected. In most copywriting, however, keep it simple.
10. Drinkability
    Budweiser is already using “drinkability” in its ads. Seriously though, the point is valid–don’t copy your competition. Instead, differentiate your product and business with unique copy and messages that your target audience is likely to respond to.

(source: www.entrepreneur.com)

The study explored ten criteria of conformity with the Nielsen Norman Group Report: Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations. The results were, albeit not surprising, pretty dissapointing. It appears that banks in Romania are not using their websites to communicate in order to gain or improve their credibility among their Internet enabled customers, their conformity with the above mentioned Nielsen Norman Group Report being on average around 22.55%. The top 10 banks and their conformity levels are displayed below:

(source: Selenis)

You can download the entire report here.

So, if you got any old mobile phones lying around forgotten in a drawer, do yourself and this planet a favor and recycle them. If you want to find out how much climate coolness you have, spend a couple of minutes and complete this quiz!

On an unaware customer, the company’s care for one’s financials might seem a wonderful thing. However, I was a bit skeptical, since I had a promotional package that was, albeit a bit expensive considering I wasn’t really using all the facilities I had, pretty good in terms of services and tariffs offered. I told the person that I will consider his offer and that I will get back to him via email.

I did some checks on Vodafone webpage and I found out that the subscription the Vodafone representative was trying to sell me had worse per minute tariffs than my promotional package. The problem was that this service set I had was a discontinued promotional service and they were probably trying to get rid of all these subscriptions in order to realign their services to the current offer as well as push more expensive per minute tariffs to customers who were actually benefiting from the promotional packages they had.

While the customer representative approach was a failure (he clearly didn’t walk his talk), I am pretty sure he didn’t act based on his own personal whims, but rather directed by a company strategy. I replied to him telling him I didn’t appreciate the company’s attempt to sell me a worse plan than the one I had, but I would be open to change my subscription since I wasn’t using it fully, as long as they were offering me a discount and some additional facilities.

The funny thing was that the only thing I changed was the basic call services subscription (downgrading it to a cheaper version), while I kept all the extra and promotional video and data facilities I had in the previous subscription plan (they were done in such a way that they couldn’t be removed from the subscription plan itself). Even though poorly positioned, the customer representative effort was in the end a good deal for me (for the same money I was paying on my old and not fully used voice and data subscription I got a better set of services, including a no limit, flat rate mobile internet connection).

The idea is that, indeed, the offer Vodafone was trying to make to me could have been better than what I had in the first place. They only failed at properly formulating it, positioning it and executing it. With a customer of my type (and I don’t know how detailed information they do have about their customers or if they do approach each individual customer based on it), as well as with most educated customers, I would have approached the whole thing in a totally different way (something I also recommended them in my reply to the customer representative).

If I were in their shoes, I would have told my customer that the subscription plan he had was a discontinued product and that the company would like to realign their services to the current offer. I would aknowledge the fact that the promotional subscrption was in some ways better, but I would make up for those benefits offering a little something extra in the new subscription model I was proposing, in order to make up for that loss for the customer.

I am sure that this type of approach would have worked positively on customers, most probably also generating good will from their side, since I guess most of us do appreciate honesty, especially in a commercial relationship. Be true and honest to your customers, because this is the only way you can earn their trust and can keep them with you for the long term.

Despite being the first mobile operator to offer new services and technologies in the past years, despite having some of the best marketing campaigns and despite being involved in a lot of CSR activities, Vodafone is still the second player on the Romanian mobile market in terms of number of customers and market share. I would dare to say that one of the reasons why this is happening is because there is too much discrepancy between their external and internal marketing communication. They tend to talk too much and not walk the talk enough.

Because of this difference between movies and games, one difference between communicating a movie and communicating a game relates to the intended response of the customer at a communication stimulus. In a mono-directional environment, communicating a movie that has a compelling plot and characters is done, for example, by interrupting the customer through an advertising message. In a bi-directional environment, you can actually engage the customer in a meaningful experience because a game has compelling things he or she can dynamically interact with. If you can only interrupt your customer from watching his TV news and show him a movie trailer, you can actually engage a potential customer to experience your game through a demo of your product.

Another difference between games and movies is the duration of their entertainment experience. Movies have actually short stories and life spans (their time span being the duration of the movie and their life span being usually a season) and can only be communicated as a time-limited experience. Games, on the other hand, have a much longer life span and can be communicated as a continuous and developing interaction between consumer and product that doesn’t really have an exact ending point in time. For example, positioning the Beowulf movie would most likely communicate “an epic legend… this fall,” while positioning the Beowulf game would most likely communicate “play the legend… starting this fall.”