antti.vilpponen.net

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.

I’ve been talking about this to some of my friends for quite some time that we might see something like this in the near future and now I’m starting to see it in my own behaviour. I’m talking about Facebook being so powerful of a community that it’s disturbing the use of other social sites, despite it lacking the features of these other social sites. This is something that sites with strong social aspects should be worried about. Seriously worried.

The use of the social application I mainly see myself questioning is Jaiku. Now that it has closed registrations, it’s hard to invite people to use it and I only have about a bunch of people using the application. This of course results in the whole application not being very useful, even though I consider myself being in the innovator/early adopter groups with regard to the technology life cycle.

Facebook on the other hand is not that useful (especially from the mobile) and it’s not really micro blogging when you change your status line. However, it has severe social implications. My friends are able to see what I’m up to, and what’s really scary is that almost all my friends are using it to update their status. Those that use this feature know how clumsy and detached it is from your usage patterns - you have to open your browser, sign in to Facebook, change your status as compared to Jaiku’s take your phone and post a new Jaiku.

I find myself wondering if I should stop using Jaiku, because it doesn’t fulfil its social use anymore - Facebook is simply so much more powerful, there’s a lot more social pull. This of course will be a major problem for other sites with strong social aspects, such as LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth. Only when the social groups that dominate the applications in your own circle of friends are far enough from each other is there a chance of adoption for you with regard to that application. With Jaiku, it shares pretty much the same social group with Facebook and therefore I find myself questioning the use of it when there’s a lot more value in using Facebook (despite lacking the features).

What does this all add up to?
Well, it certainly affects the way websites and companies should see their line of business and strategy of growing as well as their product development. It’s pretty self evident that you have to have the features to grow and keep the user base satisfied, but these features should very strongly support social interaction in your service - only then do they create enough stickiness and glue. The power of the website and the business is definitely in the community and how well the company can hang on to, and develop, that community.

There’s also a big question to ask in terms of Roger’s theory of diffusion. Is the theory itself valid anymore or are the diffusion cycles dramatically shorter in social applications. Do innovators matter anymore, when you can directly tap into the mass market and due to the architecture of the application, spread very rapidly in that group?

Update: TechCrunch and VentureBeat are reporting on a “gang-up” on Facebook. Seems like I wasn’t alone with the thinking.

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.)

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.

Loic’s new company is called Seesmic. I love the way he is launching the company - through short videos, keeping people hooked, always coming out (and giving users) with something new. If you ever look into starting a company, be sure to watch these.

There’s more on the sites of Techcrunch and Ben Metcalfe.

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).

I went to Osuuspankki today to close my bank account I had to open for my motorcycle loan a few years back. Since then, a friend working at Nordea managed to get me a better loan with a slimmer margin and I switched back to Nordea, making my OP account obsolete.

I received a letter from Osuuspankki earlier this week stating that I had crossed my balance by 11,40€ due to direct debits from my account due to the web access to my account. (I don’t even want to get started on this, but who in the world creates a commercial product and thus a barrier of entry of a service that should be taken for granted and used as a marketing platform to further create benefit for customers and thus revenue for your company? It is a big business I know, but nevertheless.) I paid the amount I owed to the bank and went to the office to close my account.

The lovely lady at the desk told me I have 5 euros worth of service charges I need to pay before I can close the account. I asked her if I could pay them right there to speed things up. “Certainly, do you have any cash?” Of course I don’t, I’m all about cards and seldom have any cash on me. Furthermore, I couldn’t “pay” the amount with my Nordea card since they aren’t a store that can charge cards so easily. I would have had to go out to the ATM to get some money, walk back in to “pay” the amount due. I even offered to pay the amount by directly transferring 5 euros from my Nordea account with my mobile, but it doesn’t help since the cross-bank transfers take 2 nights to go through (yet another big business to get interest on overnight deposits to the Bank of Finland). Another totally “useless” illogicality that makes customers’ lifes difficult.

She asked me to pay the 5 euros and come back next week.

Ok, now hands up those who see any logic in this? I know it’s good to create obstacles so customers don’t leave you per se, but this is pretty ridiculous. This is what you get when you have stiff processes that you tie your customers to and make their life unnecessarily difficult.

I’m not very fond of the way they treated me, but I’m sure other banks would have made me go through the same procedure. Isn’t there seriously any interest in the management teams of these banks to honestly improve customer experience?

Sony has made a strategic move in it’s online music business and has decided to adopt Microsoft’s DRM as a technology for its online content. Sony had been trying push its proprietary ATRAC along with its own music player for PCs. Smart move, although I don’t support DRM that much. I guess Sony was trying to go the Apple way and create their “own” DRM that would create a technology lock on their customers - thus artificially enhance customer loyalty.

Apple has an incredible customer base, which is full of evangelists that promote Apple and support them in their products and decisions. Sony doesn’t have this. It’s quite obvious that even Apple was taking a gamble with their “own DRM”, but succeeded in it because they were the first to market with their iTunes music store (that actually took the customer point of view of shopping for music) as well as the sleek and cool iPods that were once again superior to products already on the market. Sony didn’t have any of this with their online strategy.

So why try to create a walled garden in very competitive market? Beats me. Sometimes these decisions are made so high up, based on figures and calculations by highly paid consultants that money is poured into the most stupidest of ideas.

(via Guardian Unlimited)

As I’m spending my evening in the office and trying to make deadlines, I found an interesting blog post. James Hong of HotOrNot, enlightened me to an entry on Facebook blog that will most certainly increase Facebook’s reach manyfold.

“Now, when you’re writing messages, you can send the message to people on Facebook, and to people not on Facebook. ”

Damn, of course! Why didn’t I think of this?

It’s the little things that you tinker with in every day life that will slowly change behaviour with online apps. Large changes are difficult to make, small are a lot more easier. Furthermore, creating virality in your service is perhaps one of the biggest challenges most web applications and sites currently face (unless it’s built into it, like in the case of LinkedIn). These sort of things nudge users a step closer to adoption and loyalty towards your service.