E-Talker's Blog

Blogging on a brand new website called E-Talkers.com

wernerkalders — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:28:37 +0000

Hello everyone. I would want to let you know that, from now on, I’ll be blogging on a brand new website that I created with my nephew and which I’m going to run with friends and other bloggers. It is still under construction but it’s allready very nice looking and it keeps growing every day. It will be become a collection of many different blogs about games / tv shows / cartoons / retro gaming and more. For now it’s only about games but that will change in the near future. It’s a faced paced gaming blog to be exact.

Anyway I hope you’ll take a look. Because it is well worth the try, and don’t forget to bookmark the new website E-Talkers.com!

And if you’re interested in joining our new project you can mail us via E-Talkers.com. Don’t hesitate to ask.

5 Steps to Designing Great Logos

wernerkalders — Wed, 04 May 2011 09:11:22 +0000

Designing a logo should be easy right? You just make something beautiful and catchy… well… no you don’t. An interesting article about this can be found here. It shows five steps that you’ll have to consider when creating a logo, being:

Do your homework
Consider scale
Application of color
Typography matters
Keep it simple

Follow these 5 steps and in no time you’ll be able to come up with some nice logos, but take your time. More info about each step can be found in the original article.

Quote of the day

wernerkalders — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:14:39 +0000

The act of marketing is to focus on one benefit of a new product and to make it understandable and appealing.

Dear Microsoft

wernerkalders — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:40:22 +0000

Dear Microsoft or EPIC Games. I must admit your ad on Xbox Live Arcade about the Gears of War 3 beta is kinda cool. But I still want to point out a small error. “Kmot” should be changed to “komt”. While this of course is just a typo, it really doesn’t look professional this way so I thought let’s point this out for you guys. Oh and “vor” has to be “voor”.

For those who don’t know anything about games. Gears of War 3 is

the most anticipated Xbox exclusive game of 2011. Although it will only be released by the end of the year, this beta gives the fans a chance to enjoy the online mode a long time before the game will be available in stores. And it gives EPIC games the time to adapt things in the mean time so that they can deliver a better end product in november. Win win for both parties… and great marketing as well of course! Except for that small mistake I pointed out…

Dilbert’s Marketing Wisdom

wernerkalders — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 11:11:12 +0000

comic by Scott Adams

If you don’t get Marketing…

wernerkalders — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:57:05 +0000

Someone put my attention on the comic underneath today.

Seems like someone doesn’t understand marketing at all. But I hope you do.

T-Shirt of Firefox 4: For & by fans

wernerkalders — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:56:49 +0000

Many companies always wonder how to engage their customers / users while others just have endless inspiration. Just out on twitter is this new T-Shirt created by fans, dedicated to the launch of the new Mozilla Firefox 4. This was a contest run by Firefox to engage their users. It’s this kind of stuff that makes you stand out as a company. I like it.

Firefox about the shirt:

The new Firefox is fun and fast – it’s happy and snappy!

T-Shirt and description can be seen when reading the full article.

“Old-school design elements, a limited palette and a worn texture combine into a vintage, cheerful style for this logo.”

Would you wear one of these? And do you like this sort of actions where companies engage their fans?

Bing becoming a serious competitor to Google?

wernerkalders — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:14:02 +0000

What do you do when you don’t know something? That’s right, you Google it! Google has become almost synonymous for a “search engine”. Yahoo! was the only real competitor Google had for a long time. But a few years ago Microsoft re-entered the market with Bing, their very own attempt to become a big player in the search engine market dominated by Google worldwide. Bing tried to differentiate itself from Google as much as it could by offering a different style and different search results. But they entered a market where Google was allready dominating for a long time. The figure underneath indicates how powerful Google’s position is worldwide. Only in Russia and China they are not the number 1 player. But still, even there they are number 2.

In the beginning, Bing did not seem very successful and many people were like: “yeah, you could see from the beginning that Google is untouchable in the search engine market. No way MS can ever become a big player there. They’re just way too late. Case closed.” Even when Microsoft made a deal with Yahoo!, after many fruitless attempts to buy the company, to empower Yahoo! with Bing search engines, many people were very sceptical. Was Bing doomed from the start?

Many people at least believed Bing was not here to stay. But Microsoft understands how important the search engine market has become the last 10 years and they want their share in it. It’s just dangerous for them not to engage in this market. But what can you do if you keep losing market share? You just keep trying harder… is what they will have said at Microsoft. And at least in the US, this starts to pay off as you can see underneath:

About the effectivity of the search engines, Experian Hitwise writes:

“Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent.”

So it seems Bing is finally eating some of the market share of Google in the US. But as I noticed before, they give US residents many exclusive advantages. So perhaps it’s time to try to do the same in other countries as well, if they want to become a true international player in the end.

Any idea why Bing is on the rise in the US? Would or did you try Bing? What are your toughts about their search engine? Can they ever beat Google? Discuss it here underneath if you like.

Strange ad on Facebook

wernerkalders — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:32:57 +0000

On my dutch Facebook account I just recently saw a strange advertisement about motorcycles. It’s an ad of the website 2dehands.be, where you can buy used items. For the not dutch speaking, the ad says: “Want to buy a new motorcycle? Go to 2dehands.be. On 2dehands.be are more than 42.000 motorcycles for sale. See the offers here.”

So what’s wrong with this advertisement?
I’ll tell you, it scares people off! Who would spontaniously want to buy a motorcycle when looking at a crashed one? Yeah ok, you could say that this ad will make people with a broken motorcycle think about buying a new one… but is this really the group of people that you want to advertise for? I think they should have chosen another picture, for example about a family motorcycle event or something peaceful. But this ad just won’t do for me. What do you think?

Top reasons to unlike brands on Facebook

wernerkalders — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:08:26 +0000

These days each big (and small) brand gets it’s own Facebook page. Quite some people “like” these pages and show it by clicking the like button on that page. But a lot of the likes will be removed after some time. It leaves quite some managers and social media specialists thinking about what happened. Based on a survey we see the most important reasons why someone unlikes a brand on Facebook:

Most reasons of the ones above make perfect sense. I cannot really think of other reasons why I would unlike a brand, do you?