Tuesdays with Media: A Danfoss Valentine

One of the responsibility of Danfoss North America's marketing department, of which I am a member, is to increase brand awareness with our customers.  Part of that means improving product packaging and making our website more user-friendly and part of that means being more active on social media.  To help do this, every week, we meet to discuss what's planned for the week's Facebook updates and Tweets in order to fill in any gaps that may exist.  A few weeks ago, Valentine's Day was brought up and I suggested that I could take a picture of a product bent into the shape of a heart.  Magda, my boss, really liked the sound of that, so I put aside some time for the photoshoot.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a red background.  In an office where the main color is red, the closest I could find was a burgundy tablecloth (according to one of my coworkers in a different department, we have red tablecloths, but they keep disappearing).  Still I did the best I could and was able to get this out of it:

It took more work to get it in the right shape (I used a coffee mug to help make the curved top), but I'm pretty happy with the outcome.  And while the background's not the ideal color, it's still reddish, which isn't too bad.  Still, I thought I could do better, so I played around with the picture in Photoshop.

Not only did I manage to make the red more crimson, I also made the product (a thermostatic expansion valve, if you're curious) more silver-colored, making that more accurate as well.

It was fun to have something silly to do, but to my surprise, the tweet that used the final picture performed the best of all of our social media posts since we started tracking them in November.  Apparently HVACR technicians like cheesy pictures appearing in their twitter feed.

Valentine's Day is a weird day for those of us not in relationships, so I'm glad that I was able to celebrate the day in a non-romantic way.