No, this is not about McFly and their 2005 Comic Relief single - despite what you may have heard about my taste in music. Some exciting developments here in Teddington focus on the most important people we know - you.

At this precise moment that means web users (unless you've found a way to transfer thoughts directly from my mind into yours, which is a bit disturbing) as this is web content and you're reading it.

It’s not often that you get inspiration from a car park, but I couldn’t help sharing with you the charming way that those nice people at Boden extend their brand well beyond the walls of their London store.

Boden is a bright, contemporary brand. Not particularly edgy or ‘street’ (I shop there for goodness’ sake), but it has a freshness about it - lots of flowery patterns, stripey shirts, and models who are more wholesome than chic. So, as a brand enthusiast and copywriter, I was delighted to see the same values came through in something as humble as their car park signage, as shown below.

They deserve credit because it is something we can all learn from in B2B. Not just that all writing should reflect the values behind the company brand, but that we should use every opportunity to ‘live’ the brand. It costs nothing and, if the brand has been accurately defined, it should be pretty natural anyway.

1. Put your ipod, mp3 player, or digital music library on shuffle or random mode.

2. Resist hitting the fast-forward button for a whole hour's worth of play.

Easy? Or not so much?

Whatever music you have in your library, it's something you once wanted. Something you were open to. But how many of us skip anything that didn't settle into our top picks the first time?

Why is it so hard to make the most of what you've got, as my copywriting comrade JB urged us to do with brand assets recently?

What does it take to make us revisit the mental playlist of ideas and methods?

How do you make sure you're getting the full value of what you accumulate from so many sources: email, RSS feeds, Favourites, webcasts, roundtables, internal sessions, colleagues, trade press...

Why revisit anything that once caught your imagination, but failed your greatest hits filter the first time?

Because everything changes.
 
Because what you filed away back then may be useful to you now.

Because maybe some of those filter-failers scared you - or at least unsettled you a bit. That's always worth exploring.

Go random with a little thing or link (already) in your life.

Tell us if you find a hidden gem. Me, I didn't even know I had any KT Tunstall. Now she's top of my workout playlist.

The 'unprecedented' snowfall of the last 36 hours has demonstrated many things about us in the UK, some more revealing than others. We always knew that our kids would rather play in the snow than go to school. We always knew our Government would fail to plan adequately. And we always knew that people would phone their local radio station to complain about it.

But when I looked own our street this morning, at the row of cars - most still covered with 8 inches of undisturbed snow, but among them the occasional shiny, recently driven vehicle - you can see who bothered getting out and about yesterday. And it made me wonder if there is a way of seeing which companies are working their way out of a recession.