soulcreation

This is an open letter to the people from the airline company ClickAir.

Reason for this letter is that I already filled out the form on their website with a question to transfer my flight. The first time I filled out the form was on March 6, ‘over’ a month ago. The second time was 2 days ago. I received a simple standard automated message but no solution so far. What concerns me most is that I am willing to pay for the transfer.

Is this customer service? Oh, and it’s impossible to call customer service from Belgium.

The letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you,
Claudio Capodifoglia

Update (14/04/2009)
Via this way I want to say thank you to ClickAir’s customer service. They do read. Maybe they have technical difficulties with their web platform but they do track online conversations.
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How great is this. Some guy named Jason decided to wear a different shirt for 365 days. Not just ‘a’ shirt! A shirt you or anyone can send him. Days are sold at “face value” so January 1 is $1 and December 31 is $365.”.

A brilliant but so simple idea.

What Jason will do in return is blogging about the day with your shirt, take pictures and video’s. To be more precise:

• Daily Video on YouTube & Ustream.tv
• Daily Photos on the blog & Flickr
• Daily Posts on the blog & Twitter
• Calendar (You/Your Company’s Logo & Website)

So far, all days until the end of June are sold out. This means he already generated US$ 16.471 just for these months. (calculation can be found in the comments on Marc Bowness blog (see link below)). The rest of the year some more days are sold, which means Jason is making good money so far.

If Jason will sell out all days of the year, and I hope he does, he will make US$ 66.795. Which to me sounds like a great amount of money for a ‘fun project’ of one year. I am sure there is no stress involved.

Marc Bowness asks himself if this would work in the UK or indeed, in any other country. Or is this one of those typically ‘American’ projects?

In his comments I replied that it can work everywhere. If you only try to generate enough buzz, you will get through it. Nowadays we all have enough connections to spread the word: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, …, all of your contacts in your address book. Spread the word amongst colleagues, friends, neighbours or hand out pamphlets in your local bakery/grocery store.

The only question that we all might have is ‘why didn’t I came up with that idea?”

Other examples:
- The Million Dollar Homepage
- The Big Word Project

Paddy Donnelly (from The Big Word Project) replied via Twitter that he has an interview with Jason, from I wear your shirt, on his blog.

Thanks to Steven I read about The Big Word Project. A project from 2 students, Paddy & Lee, to sell words from the dictionary and give it another meaning by linking to the buyer’s website of choice. Words mean different things for different people, so I guess this is a fun way to redefine the meaning of words.

My word is:

Oneclickonemeal.com, wants to make money for 30,000 meals a day for starving people around the world. Please help.

This is fantastic. A master idea from the people of Improv Everywhere if you ask me. They made over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents freeze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Those 200 Improv Everywhere Agents were 200 random people.

Imagine a lot of people rushing through Grand Central Station everyday, accept for this day. This is one great stunt. I love it.

Last Saturday I went out to buy a new car. The nice thing is that I don’t have to pay for it myself. It’s on my company’s expense. Since I have enough budget to spend I did some preliminary research online and checked the sites of the brands that looked interesting: Audi, Saab, BMW, Volvo.

Unfortunately Saab, my favorite was out of the question since I was not allowed to buy this brand. A pitty because I really like the new model. I gave up on Volvo because I visited the showrooms of Audi and BMW. And wow.

Now I want to talk about the difference between buying a car. Near the place I live in Antwerp we have an Audi showroom from a company called Beerens. They have a huge showroom split into 2 areas. One for selling Audi and the other for Volkswagen. I entered the Audi showroom and walked around for about 15 minutes. No single soul to see to greet me or ask me if I need help. It’s not that I buy a car everyday so I really might need some help.
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A while ago I was in Barcelona with some friends, attending the Sonar festival, and we’d rented a very nice appartement. A not so big appartment, but just enough space for 4 people to stay for a little while.

While there was a strike at the airport on Sunday and could not return home, the owner – a very nice lady – let us stay for another night. We could stay 3 more if we’d liked without being charged. This was a very nice gesture for which I would like to return a favor. The lady asked me to make some publicity for the appartement: http://www.appartementinbarcelona.com.

The site is in Dutch so here’s a small translation:
It’s on only 100 meters from the Barceloneta beach and is big enough for 4 adults. It contains 1 bedroom for 2 persons and one sofa in the living room, big enough for 2 more persons. For the rest there is a small full equiped open kitchen, and a separate bathroom.

A very nice extra is the small balcony. It’s big enough for 1 chair. I’d love to sit there and have my coffee every morning while staring at the sea.

It’s also only a 10 minute walk to the Bario Gótico and El Born. 2 Lovely areas in the city where you can find nice shops, restaurants and bars.

The owner is looking for people who’d like to reside in the appartement from November until March or any time in between. I am sure she’ll give a discount for longer periods than 3 weeks.

Price:
450 €/week for 2 persons or 500 €/week for 4 persons (A week equals 7 days.)

For more information and reservations, please contact the owner. Her name is Gigi:
info@appartementinbarcelona.com
00 32 475 75 02 05

Now they have a new campaing, of course, again with a chicken. The more people will visit huckinchicken.com the higher the bird ‘Huckin’ Chicken Extreme Air’ will fly or even better, the more extreme the stunt it will pull on a motor bike.

If they surpass 1.000.000 they will even try to beat a world record.

Agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Visit Huckin’ Chicken Extreme Air

It seems it�s the talk all over town nowadays. The new Nokia N91, the iPod-killer.

Times are changing fast in the mobile world. Times walking around with a mobile phone, digital camera, MP3-player and organizer are over. The new Nokia has it all, built in one!!

Some of it�s features (please be amazed):
- 4Gb hard disc, the same as the iPod Nano, for up to 3000 songs in stereo
- Plays MP3, wmv, wav, aac
- Download using USB, WiFi
- Battery lasts for 12h before recharging
- FM-radio

And this is only for the music part. Besides that it has a 2 megapixel camera built in as also a lot of smartphone functions like most mobile phones nowadays do.

Target price: 649�.

And talking about buzz. In Belgium the Antwerp based agency These Days has started creating word around the new phone. 4 People in Belgium got a N91 for testing and writing about it on their blog. This seemed to be a perfect solution. Instead of spending a huge amount on marketing, the bloggers are doing the all promotion in exchange of this one N91. Then one person got the N91 for auctioning on eBay. Also a success as people started bidding from all over the world. The Nokia N91 got sold for 812 Euros.