The idea is, that Michael Mittermeier, who is a famous German comedian with a Bavarian accent, drinks Rivella and suddenly speaks Swiss German (effect of Rivella?). Well his Swiss German is not really understandable, but I guess that also makes it even more funny. There are a few videos that where done with an iPhone or any other smartphone, which is typical for a viral marketing campaign since in the beginning it should come off as “real” – done by bystanders. One video for example shows Michael at a German Bratwurst Stand trying to order somethings in “Swiss German” – nobody understands him. Naturally. It´s really hilarious.

Now there also real Rivella Spots were released, which are in high Quality.

Policemen: Well Mr. Mittermeier, were you in a hurry?
Mittermeier: >>Swiss German<<
Policemen: Mr. Mittermeier – Did you drink something?
Mittermeier: >>Swiss German<< A little.

Well done, Jung von Matt Switzerland (advertisement agency).

2011 was also the year of a big decision. I was asked to come work for a Swiss Internet company and help setting up their digital marketing department. A huge challenge. I was torn between a great team at an international bank, but with rather modest career choices and the big opportunity at a rather small company with great expansion plans. In the end there was not really a choice, challenges are what keeps me running. So from now on I work at netvision_ag, which is part of Centralway. I will be involved in the marketing of both companies.

So 2012 will be my year of pushing the envelope. I know I put a lot of things on my table, but I will do my best. I will also try to give you more regular updates here, but from now on the Germans amongst you will also be able to read some posts by me on blog.ch

Happy 2012 everyone! What are you up to?

The translation of the text is:

(in handwriting) “Store this cardboard carefully. It is the only bed. For you and your little sister”

(subtext) “No bed, no home, no protection from violence and exploitation – that’s the sad reality for millions of victims of child trafficking. We can bring those children to safety. Together with you.”

Logo of Terre des hommes and their slogan “The children need us”

Link: tdh.ch

First, when you remove this cardboard from the postbox it already feels different in your hand than all the other flyer and post you have in your hand. That triggers the initial interest. When you read the text on it afterwards you actually can put yourself in the situation described.

The back of the cardboard has a paper glued to it with more information and a payment slip.

The orange headline reads: “Together we stop the relentless exploitation of children.”

The white text in the orange box says: “With 50 CHF you help us bring exploited children to safety.”

It may only be my opinion, but I think this campaign might just be more successful than the others.

• My website, which involved:
• shorten my motivation statement – Who wants to read a long text really?
• update my résumé
• update my links – which ones do I still read, new ones I began to read
• Google Reader: cancel subscriptions of dead blogs and organize my folders (That took some time, I can tell you)
• Professional Networks: LinkedIn and Xing – it´s up-to-date alright, but I am still reflecting on the right contents
• Personal Networks: Facebook and Google+ – since I use fb for most of my private communication, it´s always up to date, but I sure need to work on my Google+ profile
• Twitter: Yeah, yeah I am still working on that.

In case you seek to update your web presence and need some advice on it, here is a list of useful articles I put together:

• Facebook- learn about the new privacy features and how to use them on All Facebook,  explore the site for more input
• Xing – since you are most likely German speaking when you use this network, just learn from example: Profile of Jochen Mai of Karriere-bibel
• LinkedIn – for beyond basics advice refer to the Personal Branding Blog, e.g. this post
• Google+ - Watch a Video Guide on it!

I will resume to updating my internet presence later and will go out enjoying the sun now, but please let me know if you can add something to the list!

When I got to know that Credit Suisse wanted me as their employee I was very excited. An international marketing department, global marketing projects and a diverse team, made out of Swiss, Indian, Russian, Italien and other culturally interesting people awaited me and I was in heaven. Zurich being a cosmopolitan and beautiful city located close to ski slopes and Italy at a lake was just the cherry on my cake.

Traveling the world I had bumbed into quite my share of Swiss people, if it was at 4.30 am at a hot spring on the tiny Green Island in Taiwan or the fanciest club in Shanghai. They not only knew were the great places are, they also were great company. How they felt about Germans coming to their country I did not quite grasp when a Swiss friend of an old friend said: “You are going to feel just like home in Zurich, there are as many Germans as it Germany”

Not being oblivious to his hostile tone and an interculturally trained person I asked another Swiss friend from university if she could recommend any books on swiss culture and so I started reading “Gebrauchsanweisung für die Schweiz” (Manual for Switzerland) by Thomas Küng (born in Zurich). It sure was fascinating: you should not use the Swiss hello “Gruetzi” until a Swiss person signed off on it and understanding the Swiss German with its many terms which originate in the French language were things to be learned.

After one year here I could add few things to the list of what I had to learn living in Switzerland:

• When calling someone and you say your name, wait until the person at the other line could say something like “Hallo Frau Rogge” before explaining your matter
• If you don’t have a German dialect at all (Bavarian or such) like me and speak a very clear German, it’s hard for Swiss people to speak in Swiss German to you, they tend to switch to high German
• Swiss soccer is just as serious as German soccer
• When coming back from Germany I realized that I had missed Swiss German
• It’s hard to make Swiss friends, patience is needed

Sure I could list a few more, but let’s stop here. I am convinced that every foreigner in Switzerland has a different list and only a few things may be the same. Truth is, that I never felt as much as a foreigner as in Switzerland. Maybe it’s the differences in the similarities of Germany and Switzerland, maybe it’s the Germans I meet on the street who are of the kind I also would not like to have in my country (I guess every country has countrymen they would rather not know of.) It’s hard to say.

What I can say is: I made friends, even if the percentage of Swiss amongst them is still small, but I am working on it. I also learn a lot at work being responsible for online marketing and Switzerland’s stunning nature is what I enjoy every day. That being said, it’s not so bad when a colleague is trying to make a joke pointing at a political poster with the slogan “Stop mass immigration” and then points at me saying “See.. mind that!”.

iButterfly

Now, at a rather private place, I was approached by the Swiss social party (since I am living in Zurich now). See what I encountered using the restroom at a bar and movie theater for independent films:

As you can see, this is a post-it on which the party printed “Do not forget: Elect on April 3rd” and “Yes” next to their party’s logo (SP). I translated this leaving out some Swiss specifics, because it would take some time to explain the election system here. So sorry for that. Alongside this call for action, they included to website addresses of their party for further information.

I thought this to be a quite clever (not to mention cost saving) tool, which can be chosen for a lot of different marketing strategies. Two things are certain, it is not possible to use it for premium products. An example: I do not think Chanel could convince their clients to buy more bags by putting post-its in certain places. Even if they would stick post-its to a bathroom door at the Hilton Hotel in Monaco (Although printing some notes with “Would you not prefer French chick? Yours truly Chanel” and stick them inside Changing Rooms at Tommy Hilfiger… might be fun to do!).

To sum it up, I thing this post-it idea is pretty genius. In my opinion best suitable for a young target group (18-37 years old), a product that is in a low price segment and the communication message should be short. By choosing specific locations, where the post-its are put up, the target audience can be adjusted. For example in my case they put up the notes in locations where people in their 20ies and early 30ies would hang out. People who are of the middle class and most likely not conservative (the neighborhood was rather alternative). Let’s think of another example: If you wanted to sell your new hair product, let’s say for body shop, you could print pink post-its with “Wanna smell like spring? – get 10% off at Body Shop” and put them up in the female restrooms at big shopping malls, cosmetic studios, ladies-only fitness centers and more.

Are you inspired for your new company’s campaign? Got some ideas here? Perfect. See what others did here:

Source: technabob.com

Source: technabob.com

Source: guerillamarketing.it

First thing I noticed when standing in line at Starbucks was the little boy in front of me fascinated with something on display “Cake Pops”, which practically look like 2000 calories on a little stick aka two thirds of your daily calorie requirement. Sure he got one, but I was just awed and continued to the other end of the bar to pick up my coffee (No, I am not telling you which kind.. it would just take too many words..). First thing I see is the new logo prominently placed on the cup as well as the coffee cup sleeve, which is now totally green. I thought to myself “Good Job”.. I was seriously doubting the concept of the new branding.

So that could have been the end of the story, but it turns out, that it was not. That’s what I encountered checking Facebook this evening:

Wow that is just good…Introducing the new logo with such a funny new product like “Cake Pop”. (Sure I can’t say if that was the strategy behind, but at least it seems so for Switzerland.) I am not sure if the Cake Pop will become an essential product, but it is extraordinary and therefore has viral potential.

The thing that comes with it is not having much time on the side to write nice and interesting blog posts, but soon I will try to keep up again. Like I just saw the move “The Joneses” and it really got me thinking. I really like movies, which do that.

So it’s about a family that moves to a new neighbourhood, but they are fake and they are only there to make people want the stuff they have and through that make them by it. But have a look at the Trailer yourself:

Trailer \”The Joneses\” on YouTube

In one scene the big boss (Lauren Hutton) gives Steve Jones (David Duchovny) a pep talk:

Steve: “Do the clients know how this works?”

Boss: “Of course not, that’s why it’s called self-marketing. If people want you, they’ll want what you’ve got.”

So from my perspective the term self-marketing is applied totally wrong, since it should be about you selling yourself (your expertise and skills) and not the stuff you have. Although she has a point. When you are so interesting that other people like you, they could want what you have. Although I always admired strong women in politics, I would never buy what Angela Merkel wears. So how much influence can a person have on what you buy? I say a lot. Everyday magazines create new needs for consumption in us and we know that, but what happens when marketing becomes personal and when your friend could have ulterior motives showing you their new watch, bag or whatnot?

Does this go too far?

It may not be happening just as intense as in “The Joneses” just yet, but there are blog authors who serve as affiliates of other companies, shopping platforms pay you for soliciting new costumers.. so when a friend conceals his motive the next time he makes a recommendation, it already happened. But that is not self-marketing.

I posted my first experiences with Twitter quite a while ago in May 2009. Since then it was difficult for me to actually participate in an effective way. Reading all the posts I was interested in and posting useful information myself. I still kept spending so much time on the platform, forgetting about all those other things I needed to do. Twitter became one of the tools, I loved to use for input, but I got overwhelmed by all the information, just like my google reader, which was stuffed with subscribtions of so many interesting blogs, that the “1000+” – sign is something I got used to an eternity ago.

Collective intelligence on the other hand was a term I stumbled upon in the beginning of this year, so while I was already using twitter. That there might be a connection between those two didn’t occur to me until month later. But how did I get to know collective intelligence? If I remember correctly did I watch a video from a German professor (Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse), who is engaged in research about collective intelligence.

In this video he explains what the term means (Wikipedia tells us: Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals.) and why it will be very important in the future, when information is free for everyone in the internet and only how good a person is able to  sort and evaluate this mass of information will determine how high someone climbs in a company’s hierarchy.

So when you think about it, social media, the internet and all of it finally offers tools to nurture the formation of collective intelligence. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) even has a center of collective intelligence. They mention Google, Wikipedia and Innocentive as the most important examples of collective intelligence on the internet.

A good article about the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo mentioning collective intelligence is from Heather Havenstein at Computerworld. She wrote: “While Web 2.0 technologies may have struggled in the past against criticism that they are self-indulgent time-wasters, Web 2.0 is now being touted as a collection of ground-breaking applications that can harness the collective intelligence of a multitude of users.”

So how exactly can Twitter help us sort / evaluate information?

Twitter is a way to spread information, which is useful to oneself to friends, colleagues or business partners. If the information is crap you either get called on it or nothing happens. But if the information is actually considered good in any way it will be shared = retweeted. Each person who shares this information read it and evaluated it before sharing, so you can say that a post, which got shared a certain amount of times contains valuable information.

BUT it is hard to say if 2 times is good or 10 times is already enough. I believe that information, which gets retweeted by a rather small group of people is likely to just be useful to them. For example the information, that you should add salt to water only when it is boiling and not in the beginning or the water will take more time to boil, might only be useful to hobby chefs, but not too a vast majority of internet users. As a consequence, information, which gets shared a really high number of times is information, useful to the majority of users. Objections?

So to see if an article is good. I could post it and count the clicks on my tiny URL or the RT (Bit.ly shows you both). Or I read a tweet form a person then copy the link or information and search it using Twitter Search. A problem is that people sometimes change the text of the message they want to retweet, even the link, so they can monitor it themselves. That makes it more difficult to know how often information got shared.

Some Applications can help you organize twitter, among others there are Twitturly (ranks most tweeted URLs), Tweettronics (monitoring tool, e.g. for brands), Tweetvolume and many more. But still leaves a lot to be desired.