How to announce an acquisition to customers?

Learn from Wufoo.

It's very rare that an email notifying you about a merger/acquisition makes you smile. Makes you care. Does a good job of explaining what's going on. And does all of this in plain English, not corporate-speak.

That's quite a lot for an email to achieve. But that's exactly what this email from Wufoo did.

Meru Cabs Online Booking Website - A Review

I'm a big fan of Meru Cabs. Always on time [1], well maintained fleets of cars, and appropriately priced.

My only grouse had been with waiting (for eternity) to speak with someone in their call center to make a booking. Well, with the recent launch of online bookings on the Meru Cabs website, even that seems to have been solved.

A big shoutout to my friends at DotAhead, Goa for solving this beautifully.

What's good

The home page is where all the action happens - as it ideally should, for a website focusing on transactions. No mugshots of founders & investors welcoming you to the "Meru family". No corporate-speak about our "fleet of cars", "since 2002", yada yada. Get your booking. And get out. Simple. Here's what the home page looks like:

8 types of bad creative critics

I hope I'm none of them. Or better yet - have evolved through each of them already :-)

[Via Indigo Consulting, which is originally via SkydeCartoons.com as indicated on the image]

How can Google beat Twitter at the social game?

Quick answer - Embrace blogs & RSS feeds.
Long answer follows...

Twitter is a micro-blog

The numero uno use-case on Twitter is that users publish content (opinions, links, etc.) and broadcast it to whoever wants to listen. (The content, for some unknown reason, is limited to 140 chars.)

There is a well established & easy way to publish content online – hosted blogging platforms. There is a well documented & well supported open standard for broadcasting one's content – RSS feeds. No wonder Twitter was called a micro-blogging platform when it started out.

Google's ITA acquisition: Impact on Indian OTAs?

Google has just announced on it's blog that it's ITA acquisition had been cleared by the US Department of Justice. Given that Google drives significant amount of traffic to the OTAs, this is big news for the market.

Even though it could take a while for Google to integrate & roll-out a travel search product in India, this is significant for the Indian players here as well - Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and Yatra.

How could this possibly affect the Indian OTAs?

At Goa, priorities are straightforward

Pehle duvva, aur fir daaroo. Nothing in between.

[Spotted at a beach shack at Ozran beach, Goa]

Main ZINDO balm hui...

...darling tere liye!

Move over Zandu balm, the new & improved Zindo balm is here :)

[Spotted at a general store in Goa.]

I'm sure you would've seen your share of candies & chocolates, which look same-same, but different. 'Much' instead of 'Munch'. 'Ecloors' instead of 'Eclairs'. 'Beamer' instead of 'Boomer'.

How does this work? How much extra money would the retailer be making to agree to such scams?

Who says offline advertising can't be contextual?

Spotted at a Delhi Metro station - bang opposite an escalator exit. Brilliant use of tying context with a campaign message.

Does copy with character work in India?

There's something to be said about products which have a certain character to them. The first example that comes to mind is MailChimp though they seem to have distanced their monkey quite a bit these days. Another set of opinionated products are from the  37Signals stable, but they don't try to dress them up in a character, in my opinion.

I was surprised to find FeedBurner, now a Google product still holding on to their quirkiness. I love how their their main navigation reads: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize

The "Troubleshootize" page carries forward the character and gives a fun spin to the standard FAQs.

And the dashboard tries to pull a page out of Flickr's book with random welcome messages.

It's a bit sad that their integration with Blogger is not smooth & completely frictionless, but that's a different story altogether.

Something that I've always wondered is whether such quirky copy (or "copy with character", as I like to call it) works with the general Indian internet audience? Or should one play it safe and produce plain-vanilla "transactional copy." What do you think? Any Indian products with such character that you know about?

Angry Birds Released for a New Platform...

...Real life!

Spotted over a weekend at the Phoenix 'Mela' for a Nokia E-series
marketing event :-)