A while ago we had a company meeting outlining our goals for 2008. They were divided up into Business, Brand and Work goals. One of our Work goals this year is to do more high-profile projects with premium companies with the aim of having more fun.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing with FLSmidth. Our retainer agreement with FLSmidth means we get involved in some really interesting projects, work with many different departments in the company as their copywriting resource ‘on tap’, and essentially be an extension to the marketing department.

Working with the guys at FLSmidth means we are getting closer as a team, united in our efforts to ensure their international communications carry world-class messages.

Check out our press release to find out more.

I hate supermarket shopping. The aisles are always crowded. I have trouble finding the things I want. There’s always someone who wants to jam their trolley right up my behind. The overhead florescent lighting is too bright (I guess that says something about my Saturday mornings, or rather, Friday nights). I could go on. But the worst thing is how stressy it gets when I put my shopping on the belt at the checkout.

The nicely firm avocados, perfectly round tomatoes and painfully-fragile bouquet of flowers are thrown down the chute - along with bulky apples, the sharp-cornered carton of milk and a nice bottle of wine that just rolls down over everything like a boulder, crashing to a halt at the potatoes.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Then I have to cram everything into my bags as quickly as possible, packing the awkward heavy items on top of the light, squashy things. If I don’t do this quickly enough, my shopping will be relegated to the smaller, secondary chute where it all gets siphoned off and compressed together by a big metal bar. Then the process starts all over again for the next psyched customer.

So imagine my delight when I see that Danish supermarket chain, Føtex (or Funtex as I like to call it) is advertising that they will pack my shopping for me on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Although I don’t shop at Føtex that often (I suppose you guessed that already), this new service is pulling me closer to them. I’m going to check them out.

When a company offers pretty much the same as everybody else, it’s excellent customer service that makes them stand out from the rest. By introducing an intuitive customer retention programme (I expect Føtex to introduce a club card soon, if they haven’t done so already), you’re locking people onto your brand. And, unless you do something really stupid, you’ve got them for life.

I feel quite excited that I could be witnessing somewhat of a revolution in Danish supermarket customer service. It’ll be interesting to see how the other chains respond - and what the marketing executives at Føtex have up their sleeves.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are just the best. And here is a great one. Visit FreeRice.com and you can practice your English vocabulary and learn new words.

And at the same time, you generate grains of rice to food programmes through the United Nations. The connection between English vocab and rice isn’t clear to me - but it doesn’t matter because the site is addictive and for a good cause.

It’s simple, you are given a word and have to choose the correct synonym from four options. And the site adjusts to your abilities, so the more you get right, the harder it gets. And each time you get an answer right, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme.

The concept is simple, too. The rice comes from sponsors who advertise on the site.

Go and try it! If you already know the answer, someone gets some rice. If you don’t know the answer, you learn a new word. It’s win-win.

Here’s an interesting story about how a huge global organization was brought down to earth (and nearly to its knees) by a humble blogger. And how it decided that instead of fighting against the tide, it would learn to swim with it.

For the full story, click here.

While working on our recent WordSpin article “Can SMO help you grow?”, I thought a lot about the reasons for and against using social media to promote business.

Much has already been posted about this – concerns over secrecy, consistency, control. But another factor that might prevent a company from jumping on the social media bandwagon could also be – understandably – employee resources. It takes time, energy and planning to create and maintain all this stuff!

But here’s an argument to consider: starting a blog or forum – or simply producing more reader-friendly, useful, link-worthy web content – could actually be a great way to motivate employees both in and outside of your communications department (and as Aaron has already argued, an important factor in recruiting new people). It can be an easy outlet for having a little more fun at work. Happier employees = more motivated employees = more stimulated, productive and satisfied employees. A priceless side benefit of using a new tool to boost your brand.

As long as you don’t get too carried away – you shouldn’t expect your employees to blog around the clock – it could be a win-win.

Okay – I just bought a new frying pan. The brand itself, though well-known, didn’t mean much to me, but I liked the look and feel of the product. The entertainment started when I got it home, however, and read the little brochure that came with it.

But first, a little backgrounder. There’s an ad agency in Copenhagen which is known for its very simple formula, consisting of two basic words: “freedom” and “sense”. For a long list of clients, the agency has come up with the slightly altered versions of the same idea. It goes kind of like this:

“Free yourself”
“Free your senses”
“Sense your freedom”
“Free your creativity”
“Sense your creativity”
“Sense your delight”
“Delight your senses – for free”

I could go on with this mindless drivel, but you get the idea. It seems that, by seeking the deeper meaning in things as elementary as a frying pan or an ironing board, and presenting this to the advertiser in beautiful images and words like “freedom” and “sense”, the poor client can’t help but fall in love with this stunning new angle to what they had previously (and rightly) considered quite everyday. The result is text like that appearing in the frying pan brochure:

“Sense…Combination, Material, Form. We receive the information that enables us to make choices through our senses. When we cook we use all our senses – we taste, we use our sense of smell, we feel, hear and see – and we choose our utensils. The choice of utensils is part of the experience of cooking and serving food. Chosen with common sense and a reliance on our senses, this can become a great experience.”

Who orders text like this to be written – who approves it? Only people who can’t see past their own ego. Now, I am just guessing that this text was written while the fyring pan manufacturer was a client of the aforementioned agency.

Here’s another of their gems:

I can’t remember the exact wording, unfortunately, but the company was a famous Danish household hardware manufacturer. The product was an ironing board. A lavish two-page, full-color ad in a leading lifestyle magazine showed the ironing board suspended across a deep abyss. The basic idea read something like: “An ironing board is a bridge between your shirts and your personality”. It then raved on about personal style, taste, whatever. People, it’s a friggin’ ironing board. Get a grip. If anyone’s interested, I’ll go back and try to find that ad, because it’s a legend, at least in my own mind.

Luckily, it seems the hardware manufacturer has recovered from its senseless drift into La La Land. And they no longer appear on the agency’s client list. Today, they focus on, and strongly communicate, a single and very clear positioning: developing “solid household products that retain their beauty and performance for up to 20 years”. This simple statement has become the central thread for almost everything they communicate. And that’s a fantastic example for many other advertisers to follow.

A final example of the agency’s propensity for lavish flights of fancy: I saw a pitch the company did to a US-based company that manufactures the green foam stuff you push flower stems down into when you are arranging flowers. That’s all – just a holding device for the stems. The concept for the pitch? “Free yourself”. Apparently, this humble material made it possible for the purchaser to realize their true creative potential.

And that’s how to make a ton of money on the perpetual readiness of many advertisers to fall madly in love – with themselves.

Recruitment . . . it’s needless to say that this is a vitally important issue for many companies.

But I guess I just said it anyway, so what does that tell us? Maybe that it’s so important that one has to resort to repetition to ram home the point. Who knows? Perhaps.

Moving swiftly on . . . recently I’ve been holding seminars with customers to discuss the potential business value of social media.

Denmark - and for that matter Europe in general - is really lagging behind the States in this area.

There, many companies are busy experimenting and finding real value with some or all of the many social media tools - blogging, video, micro-blogging, wikis, forums, networking sites etc.

As with many trends that originate across the Atlantic, the trickle-down effect is slow. But this one is rapidly gaining momentum.

Have you noticed the creep of articles about blogging in your newspapers? Berlingske recently launched an impressive network of 10 blogs, while more and more companies are dipping their toes into the blogging waters.

What has all this got to do with recruitment, I hear you bellow.

Well, my point is simple. The generation graduating from university live in a networked world. They are smart enough to see through glossy corporate spin. In fact they are bored of it. And it is from within this generation that you must recruit your future workforce.

These people pull the messages they want and reject anything too forcefully pushed at them.  

Marketing guru Seth Godin explains the impact of this particularly well:

“The new reality of the marketplace is that consumers have a choice. They can ignore you. They can ignore your ads, your letters, you web banners, and your salespeople. As a result, you and every other marketer face a choice: You can make something worth talking about or you can become invisible.”

For marketing and communications professionals, this means it is no longer possible to control your brand in the way you are used to.

If a new flavour of Coke is particularly terrible, that message will spread through the blogosphere, across YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, via SMSs, and instant messaging quicker than you can imagine.

This is how this generation communicate. It’s where they go for ‘buzz’ about the latest tech products, TV shows, music and pretty much everything else you can imagine.

And this generation - switched-on, in demand, web-savvy - will be researching your company, way before you can research them.

So what will they think when they look at your homepage and they see a company that is not blogging, that is not engaging with its customers in any kind of two-way conversation, that is not using video to showcase its offices and employees?

They will think that that company has not moved with the times and they will take their hard-won expertise and their first-hand knowledge of the new marketplace to a rival.

Pure and simple.

A frequent flyer, I often get to sample in-flight magazines from low-cost airlines. And let’s be honest, they often look as cheap as the tickets. Sterling was a case in point. The magazine was poorly translated from dull originals - in fact, a friend of mine had even suggested that Eye for Image contact Sterling to offer to improve the magazine.

But on my last flight to Copenhagen, I was amazed to enjoy reading the Sterling in-flight magazine. It was packed with well-written articles, in enjoyable and compelling English. Not only that, but the content was varied, from an interview with Anthony Hopkins to interesting takes on travel articles to Sterling destinations. It was so good, I took a copy home.

It seems that Sterling have outsourced the entire production of the magazine to an external agency. From content to layout to proofreading to editing - everything is done by a group of professional writers who know how to hook a reader and keep them entertained.

Some airlines treat the in-flight magazines as the forgotten son of marketing - and they are missing a trick. A good magazine will entice flyers to read further: once you’ve enjoyed an article you look for more - and so the special offers and promotions get extra attention and have a greater chance of success. And a well-written travel article will encourage the reader to visit the profiled destination (flying with that airline).

I passed my copy onto a friend who I thought would enjoy the article on Swing dancing in Berlin. It will be interesting to see if he visits Berlin as a consequence - and of course, if he flies Sterling.

Apparently the Danish army has evacuated around 200 Iraqis who it feared may have been targeted for the part they played in assisting the troops.

With the troops poised to withdraw next month, fears were growing that reprisal attacks were likely.

So now these Iraqis will presumably have the chance to build new lives for themselves here in Denmark.

While this is good news in itself, the part of the story that caught my eye was the quote from the officer who reports that “of course, we want to take care of our employees”.

To my mind, this is indicative of the Danish corporate culture as a whole. Staff are generally looked after very well here, at least in my experience.

I think back to the impersonal way I was treated at several large companies back home in the UK. I left those companies because I felt like I was little more than an insignificant cog in a very large wheel.

Speaking personally, my quality of life is far higher here.

Go Danmark!

That ‘About’ page on your website is important. Why? Because people like people. To put it as simply as I can, people want to know who they’re dealing with.

People want to put names to faces, they want to connect. It’s why social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook exist. We’re all just big gossips deep down!

But to get back to my point, I’ve seen some great ‘About’ pages recently. Companies that have obviously gone to the trouble to think a little bit outside the box.

I find the best ones are those which really emphasise the company’s human side. Take Pownce for instance, the newest information sharing and networking site on the block. With a little bit of thought (and humour) they have created something which, while achieving its aim of conveying background and context, also serves up a big dollop of personality.

The feeling I’m left with after looking at their ‘About’ page is : ‘They’re just ordinary folk like me!’

Now, not every company can take such a personal approach. But even the big boys could take a leaf out of the Pownce book.

My advice? Be direct, be a little light-hearted (if you dare!) and don’t be afraid to use pictures. Show your customers who you are. When you meet, it’s one less obstacle to break down.