CeeKue

Whatever you do, never forget your first words matter most.

• When people visit your homepage make sure it grabs them and makes them want to learn more about your products or services
   
• When people call you know what to answer before the question is asked
   
• When you design a brochure, make it a page-turner
    
• When you are on a business fair, make everybody stop and never leave again
   
• When you publish an ad make the readers forget about the rest of the magazine

Like you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, you get only one chance for your first words.

Ideas can hit you like a truck hitting you crossing the street. But an idea can also be as subtle as a light tap on your shoulder.

You will probably notice the truck. But the tap on your shoulder may be more difficult to notice.

Therefore you should always be on your guard when it comes to ideas.

Good or bad

There are good ideas and there are not so good ideas. And you can like an idea and think it is great, while somebody else may dislike that same idea and think it is crap.

A good example is Chatroulette.com, the new webcam site by the 17 year old Andrey Ternovskiy that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations.

I don’t know whether Andrey was hit by a truck or noticed the tap on his shoulder. The only thing I know is that the website – launched three months ago – has about 500.000 visitors each day. 

Looking at this figure, you can say the website is a magnificent idea. But whether you like the site is something you have to decide for yourself.

Having ideas and not letting them pass unnoticed is however always good and can never be bad.

It is all over the web. Marketeers have indicated they are going to spend more money on social media in 2010.

The question is where that money is coming from.

I cannot imagine the budgets for 2010 are much higher than they were in 2009. There is a good chance most of the marketeers have less to spend this year than they had last year or the year before. So if they want to spend more on social media, they have to spend less money on something else.

My guess? Less money is spend on print. Less shiny brochures, less full colour ads, less direct mailings, less everything that involves paper and ink.

The result? Publishers are in bad weather, magazines have to be closed down and old-fashioned media agencies and printers are struggling to survive.

Is that  bad? No, of course not. This is progress and it happened before many times.

And whether it is a matter of money or not, we have to move on. You cannot stay behind.

Today it happened to me again. I started to fill in an on-line questionnaire and I did not finish it.

Why?

It took much too long and I had no idea where I was and how many questions I still had to go.

So if you want me (and probably many other people) to fill in your questionnaire and finish it, you must make sure that

• it is not too long and
• there is some kind of  indication of where I am and how far I still have to go.

And remember that left is ‘no good’ and right is ‘good’. Unless you want people that write from right to left to fill in your questionnaire.