We’ve met with quite a lot of companies in the last two months and it always amazes me when companies tell us that “Oh, we’ve had that feature/option available for a long time, but we haven’t found it very useful”. The feature in this case can be replaced with almost any sort of marketing activity, user feature or anything of that sort.
The problem with internet is that it doesn’t usually count how well you have hogged all possible marketing activities or features available to mankind, but how well they work together and how they are given to the user. Half of good planning is well thought out execution. Many executives still fail to see the difference in the way things are executed or shown to the user.
However, it still makes us smile when we’re told in a client meeting, “but we already have that!”.
I decided to do a quick videocast with my digital camera. Not too bad, but not too great either. Mind you, I hadn’t tested the video recording before so it turned out quite ok.
When I signed up to Dopplr a while back I thought, now here’s a cool service. A bit like WAYN, and Plazes, but with a more specific positioning towards business travellers. Although I can’t consider myself one just yet, I was a bit suspicious how it’d pick up. However, when I signed up, I sent out a few invites and talked to people about the service and to my surprise I see people taking it into their everyday lives (on top of all these other networks). Today I signed in to see who else is in Savonlinna as I’m here for Father’s day, I noticed a friend was in town and another friend who I thought would be here was actually in Espoo. So a small sign of usefullness there :)
Here’s a list of my blurry friends travelling places.
It’s extremely important how you position your service in the customers’ minds, if you wish to succeed. LinkedIn has succeeded as it has stuck to the business use and not go ahead and compete with more casual services. I’m sure they’ve had a few talks about expanding the core audience to grow the user base. However, sticking to the success factor that got you to the point might not be that bad after all - positioning yourself correctly inside the visitors’ minds is equally important in the online world as it is in the offline world.
Widescreen mode, a previously unknown band to me, has been quoted in a Kauppalehti article on their record sales online. They have been on the official downloads list for 15 weeks (src) with their single Everlasting Bomb. Kauppalehti has written that the 15 week sales add up to about 100 000 purchased downloads. That’s a very good amount in Finland.
Now, to the problem itself: the sales don’t generate a lot of revenues for the band itself. This is nothing new and something I have been preaching about for a long time. The problem in my opinion is the business model. It may have worked in the age, when record shops reigned and bands needed distribution deals to break it big time - not to forget a proper amount of radio play.
However, in the age of the internet, this model does not work anymore - at least from the artist’s perspective. In my opinion, there are too many useless middlemen. Widescreen mode has created a phenomenon online with the help of their Mikseri page (an online music community supporting amateur bands), their IRC-gallery community and lots more. With regard to a group of supporters, they have quite a solid fan base online already - they are reaching to them directly in terms of communication, why not in sales?
Currently Widescreen mode sells their music through online music stores, which sell the song for around 1€. Teosto, record labels, the government and the music store all take bigger proportions for themselves than the band itself (my guess, but I’ve done some work in this sector and the figures are quite strong). Needless to say, the business model is very distorted. Radiohead did what bands should have been doing for a long time already, they sold their new album online directly from their own website and went even further with it - they let the users decide on the price!
It takes guts to work on the edge and take the risks (and eventually reap the rewards). However, in some cases it simply makes sense to forget and dump the old ways of doing business and go ahead with new ideas and methods. Because, when you stick to the safe ways of doing business you’re taking a risk of staying behind and dying slowly.
(Seth Godin has a good post on why industries don’t break the conventions of doing business and stick to the old safe ways of doing business.)
Update:VentureBeat reports through Valleywag post that the price tag on the acquisition is rumoured to be around $12M. This is something that I’ve heard as well from a few people.
I haven’t had too much time to blog in the recent days about my career decisions. However, the secret is out and the new company I will be joining is called Oy Gyllene Skor Ab, it’s Swedish and means golden shoes. The company is brand new and was founded in September. We launched our company to answer the demand for a business oriented hands-on digital consulting company focusing mainly on strategy and marketing.
Be sure to check out our website - more news on the developement later.
Martti Vire has done a great job compiling a site, Wanhat Purjelaivat, with a lot of detail on old ships. He’s got an excellent coverage through history of the development in ships and their technologies. The reason why I am evangelising about the page is that Martti contacted me for some pictures he has on his page. Go to “Historiaa -> Höyryn Aika” to see my photos of a few steam ships.
It has taken a lot of thinking and hard decisions, but I have decided to leave my current job. I have left my resignation for my position as Sales Director of Apaja Online Entertainment and will be stepping down during October.
My little over 1½ years in Apaja have given me great ways to grow as a person and help push the company forwards. When I joined, there were 16 of us and we were all crowded into one side of our current office. What more, we were active only in a few countries and mainly beginning our internationalisation. Today, there are close to 40 people, Apaja has 7 sites open does direct business in 10 countries. Apaja’s product portfolio has grown from a simple gaming site to fully taking advantage of social networking, online identities, virtual worlds (something still coming) and combining all this with casual gaming and thus taking the service to a totally new level. I leave the company in good spirit and truly wish all the best to all of the great talented people I’ve had the chance to work with. I’m very happy to have taken this ride and seen where it has taken the company, however now it is time to go.
I cannot fully disclose where I am going - not just yet, but something I said earlier over here (what made me choose Apaja over larger companies) still holds true. Vierityspalkki.fi has heard some of the rumours circulating around and I only saw it best to confirm it.
While you’re at it, feel free to point people to this address - there will be more disclosures in the coming days.
Today a woman called from Fortum to sell me electricity at a fixed cost. I was quite busy at 3pm so I asked her if she could send me some more info on this by mail or e-mail so I could have a look at it when I have more time. I’m the kind of person that wants to take the time to make proper calculations even if it is about saving 5 to 10 euros a year (I’m sure this sort of thinking will payoff later on).
She began hesitating after I presented the question to think about this. “Well, you know you only have one day since the system forwards these tomorrow and the campaign ends”, was one reason she stated. Fair enough, but don’t blame it on the system - they’re built by us! She promised to send me an e-mail so I could go over this, even if I only had tonight to think about it. I asked her if I could ring her back about this when I had the time to do so, she replied no as the e-mail is a bulk e-mail that has no personal contact details and instead, she’d ring me back tomorrow to ask how I had decided. I can tell you now (without a lot of thinking) that I won’t change to Fortum’s fixed electricity (no matter how cheap it is to competitors), because the promised e-mail never reached me. If they can’t deliver me an e-mail, how are they going to deliver me electricity?
Question is - what went wrong and what could have been done better?
First of all, understand the customer behaviour - how many consumers make these sort of decisions on the phone? It’s a different thing trying to get you to change mobile operators or order a magazine than change your electricity supplier.
How did the seller support my hesitation? She promised to send me an e-mail, that never reached me. She denied me to personally calling her in case I would have more questions. Two show stoppers to actually selling me anything.
If I wanted to make the decision to switch my electricity provider - how would I go about without having to contact her (or in this case hope that she would contact me) to go through with the order? No way what so ever.
With a little optimisation, she could have been doing double cold calling if people could follow up on this online - instead of having to ring people back on their decisions.
Numerous obstacles in a simple selling process that prevented me from making my decision, following up on the sale/offer and actually putting through the change in electricity providers (ie. purchase). I’m sure there are better ways to go about this - for example, the internet wasn’t even touched in this. She could have given me a simple code that I could enter on their website to get more info on this (and at the same time feel I am priviliged as the information is not for everyone - giving some value to her interrupting my work day) and thus give me the possibility to go through with the order.
Another good example of a lost sale purely because of bad marketing (and the absence of internet).
