Kittens, Humans, Nike ID & more

First newsletter within a new format. 
Hope you love it as much as I do!

Earlier this week, something past my timeline on FB. Kittens & music, a great combo. Laughed a lot with this. It’s so funny & well made, … and they got shared and viewed _A LOT_! I think (almost sure) it was initially inspired by Cats In Space On Synthesizers. In the meantime, this vid, although 5 months old, got almost 1 million views, over 10k and plus 30k shares.

Well… do kittens always work? I don’t know. But I haven’t come across that many people NOT liking kittens. 

In the meantime, BBC got themselves a viral hit yesterday with this video.
Things that move people + humor is an excellent recipe for sharing.

Although I haven’t been to New York _yet_, I’m fascinated how it influences people. Places in general. How people behave due to their surroundings. This page is just so clever in so many ways: ‘real talk’, it’s excellent local and city marketing/branding and has so much more context I can’t emphasize in this small stupid text. Follow the page here. I did a few months ago and I’m still intrigued by the stories and reactions on this page after all this time. People do care? Or is it peer pressure in a way?

Nike is definitely a company to follow. It always has been. I remember Nike being around when I was a kid and they’re still around, even stronger than ever. I had a crush on Adidas but I fell in love, a long time before that, with Nike. And this week… I’ve found myself looking for these old Cortez Nikes again when I stumbled upon their website, skipping the retailers due to the lack of stock & appeal. I discovered Nike ID and found myself, two hours later, still designing and assembling my own pair of sneaks. So cool, so awesome, so… this is what _I PERSONALLY_ want. And yet.. you know… deep within yourself, that someone out there will have the same sneaks. Well… Almost. Oh well; I’m buying a piece of history with personal attributes.

I LOVE THAT :)

I stumbled upon a very small reddit thread from three years ago that got stuck in the back of my mind since the beginning of this year. On top of that, I saw a very interesting talk with Alan de Botton passing by on the Belgian Television some weeks ago. Combining those two triggers, it got me reading this book below. It’s SUCH an interesting book!

This might not sound as rocket science, but essentially it all comes down to status if someone compares himself with someone else, within work, happiness, society, cashflow, you name it… something I already knew, but this book made it even more clear in my mind. Crystal clear.

Something I’ve been noticing on Linkedin in the past few months. People are opening up to real life situations and are adding “live your life” storytelling to their mix of hard selling / personal branding. See some of the examples below:

Keep an eye out on Linkedin. It’s such an underestimated platform. On the ad possibilities, it can’t keep up with FB, just yet, but it still is the best B2B platform (you can directly cut the crap and sell on this platform) out there right now. It has been bought by Microsoft btw, in case you missed that. That was in June. 

I guess someone was counting $100 bills that night (and then got back to work the next day). I would.

A very smart move! Microsoft will be back, very soon. Don’t underestimate their strategy. Buying a B2B netwerk when selling software for businesses to run a better business is a smart move to do. Only the integration of things will be challenging. Besides that, don’t forget as well that Microsoft has bought the biggest baddest data programming language in town. R. Combining a social network, data science knowledge and developing in the cloud software, … is clever. Those are about the three biggest assets currently ruling the internet on a pure hardcore business level.

That’s it for now.
Hope you enjoyed reading,

d