Simple but genius App from Tesco Clubcard

Loyalty cards:

 
We all end up carrying a few of them around, or signing up for them and then not carrying them around.  I've usually got an assortment with me (usually the cardboard variety) and inevitably because they take up too much space in my wallet,  not got the more substantial plastic ones with me when I want them, as just happened to me in Waterstones book shop at lunchtime.  Dammit. But it prompted me to write this post having discovered a very handy Tesco app last Friday.

Tesco: a ubiquitous supermarket, but they have a great loyalty progamme which I imagine most UK households probably belong to.  Way back when I first joined  their loyalty programme (which must be well over 10 years ago) they gave me a plastic Tesco Clubcard loyalty card I had to carry in my wallet.

 

 Then someone got smart (or went to America where drugstore chain CVS had been using the key tag format loyalty card for years) and brought the key tag format idea over here.  Good thinking, it's not often you go to Tesco without your keys.

Or is it!?  On several occasions recently I've popped into the Tesco Express near the office, having only dashed out to grab lunch, armed only with my phone, and my wallet. So several times I've missed the opportunity to earn Clubcard points, and as we all know, points mean prizes (in Tesco's case cashback vouchers). Grrr.

But once again, Tesco have covered that base, and delivered a simple but useful iPhone app.

Brilliant.

'Cos I'm never likely to be out without either my keys or my phone, so all bases covered.  Takes up no space, and it's always on hand.

Every loyalty programme should have one.

The staff in Waterstones looked a bit baffled when I suggested it but I'm hoping they have a decent buzz monitoring programme in place and are paying attention. I'd happily give their app desktop space on my mobile.

Are you working on a brand, where such a simple app could be really useful to your consumers?

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.

These are a few of my favourite things...

So many to choose from, but hey, this is my very own publishing platform, the beauty of which being I can say what I want,when I want.

So here's a cheer and free plug (I do work in marketing and advertising after all!) for several sites/apps that I've found incredibly handy time after time after time.

If you haven't tried them do:

SnagIt: A fab tool (with a free trial period) that's incredibly handy for taking screengrabs with functionality well beyond ye olde "print screen" trick so you can capture full scrolls of web pages at a touch of a button, annotate them, resize them and all manner of things that make evidencing your point in presentations so much easier, and having consistent sizes to your screengrabs without hassle. Love it.

YouSendIt: My very own free FTP service - really useful for sharing large files, that otherwise won't go through some people's mail servers

LogMeIn: A brilliant (free) remote desktop application that allows me to provide all manner of useful helpdesk services to those a little less technical than I, saving a lot of heartache and frustration on all sides

NX Powerlite: In these days of creating Powerpoint files full of graphics and images, file sizes rapidly tot up, and this very cool tool, (also with a free trial period) does amazing things to crush down your file size without compromising quality (visibly) nor faffing about with winzip or similar.

Kiss YouTube: With more and more content taking a multi-media format, there are innumberable occasions where I need to be able to grab stuff to share at times where I might be in places with no interweb connectivity (shock, horror, indeed these still exist!), and this handy site allows me to convert most videos on YouTube into FLV's. Then I use this to convert them into something a little more universally shareable or friendly...

Media Converter: This is really handy (especially the Firefox plug in) to convert files from one format to another i.e FLV's to WMV's, MPEGs, AVI's etc

Pixlr: There are frequently times when I haven't got my own laptop with me full to the brim of editing software, but need to tweak something. Pixlr is a reduced down functionality, web based Photoshop equivalent that I find very handy.

And then of course there's Skype. VOIP calling is hardly new news these days but with 405million subscribers (May 09) there's a lot of people out there using it and it's amazingly handy to keep in touch with friends, family and business contacts near and far, without racking up ridiculous phone bills, and with the added benefit of video calling. I know of 90 year olds using it to keep up with their great grandchildren. I have a friend who was able to show off her new son to me at 3 days old despite us living either side of the Atlantic. And I have another friend whose 2 year old daughter thinks all phone calls work with a visual element and was recently applying a mobile phone to her arm to show off a recent bruise to her grandmother! Digital native!

Go play