Seth Godin has a good blog post on how monks sell their beer in Belgium. The monks sell this beer that has no branding nor any labels on the bottles. And this is when it gets interesting.
There are two interesting aspects to how they create demand and increase their brand value without any logos or names. First, they strongly limit supply - you can only buy the beer through appointments with a monk. Second, there is a very secret, religious process behind the brewing of the beer. These combined have given them quite a cult following in many parts of the world.
Read more at the Church of the Customer Blog.
Posted by Antti at 3:53 pm on November 30th, 2007. No comments... »
Categories: business, marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth.
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.
Posted by Antti at 7:24 am on October 30th, 2007. 2 comments... »
Categories: academia, business, internet, marketing, social networking, viral marketing.
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.
Posted by Antti at 9:11 pm on August 22nd, 2007. No comments... »
Categories: business, internet, marketing, media, viral marketing, web2.0.
I let my Flickr pro account expire on purpose to see how the change would affect me. After the expiration I realised just how much I am into the service - although I don’t use it that much to be honest. Flickr has put its cashpoint (a term I coined for this) into an excellent spot to start cashing in on the user experience.
You can upload 100 MB a month, have the last 200 photos visible and a total of 3 sets to categorise your photos. This is just enough to get hooked onto the service, but not quite enough to feel satisfied what you get to do with the service. I have over a 1000 photos in Flickr (as far as I can remember, since I now only see 200 of them) and when you have that many photos you need good ways to sort them out - hence the sets. Three sets gets you nowehere - you need more, yet another reason to pay the $24,95 a year for the premium account.
Furthermore, Flickr has an excellent API that third party developers have taken full use of. There are hundreds of different applications that you can use to play around with your photos. For example, I have an Wordpress plugin that pulls my photos from the Flickr account to this blog. The plugin of course sorts out the photos and keeps them in a nifty order, just the way I want them.
I think I’ll have to dig in to my wallet and pay for another 2-year period of Flickr membership - it’s definitely worth it.
The lesson here?
Open up your services a bit, encourage developers to build applications into your platform and community and ultimately: give the users just enough so they get hooked (but there’s a lot more they get when they pay for the service). Another great example of opening up your service comes from Facebook - the all new F8, the Facebook platform. When Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old CEO of the company announced the platform - there was a lot of buzz created instantly.
No wonder, there are now 10 pages of applications available for the Facebook community. Also, small startups get extremely attractive market visibility for free. Facebook on the otherhand gets content and tools for their users to create more stickiness. Pretty much a win-win situation. iLike, a music network announced they instantly added 400 000 members to their databases, not bad a for a small startup. For the urgency of the matters, this letter gives some insight to the explosive growth.
Interesting times ahead for Facebook. Something that many web communities should take a note of, definitely.
Posted by Antti at 8:24 pm on May 28th, 2007. 2 comments... »
Categories: business, marketing, media, technology, viral marketing, web2.0.
Asmo wondered whether his latest blog entry would turn into a meme. I’m pushing it a step closer with this entry. Below a list of websites in alphabetical order that I follow on a daily basis. Some 10 news sites aren’t included (I follow my 150 blogs through Google Reader):
Is that really it? These probably the core of the websites I follow on a daily basis. Pingback to this entry if you participate :)
Posted by Antti at 9:34 pm on March 19th, 2007. No comments... »
Categories: blogging, internet, viral marketing.
Check this out - a very innovative and viral press release.
Posted by Antti at 1:34 pm on February 13th, 2007. One comment... »
Categories: internet, marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth.
Posted by Antti at 4:24 pm on December 25th, 2006. No comments... »
Categories: finland, internet, video, viral marketing.
Check out this site: http://www.helpwinmybet.com/
I know the whole story behind this is a bit …well questionable, but what I’m after is the marketing potential of internet’s word-of-mouth. Take a look at the entries the guy has posted and what the timespan between those entries is?
April 5th morning - just broke 10 000 hits
April 6th early morning - the guy breaks 2 million hits.
Today’s viral marketing at its best! :)
ps. Chevy Tahoe decided to let consumers do advertising for them. If your relationship with the consumers isn’t a healthy one; you’ll get results like these.
Posted by Antti at 12:00 pm on April 6th, 2006. 2 comments... »
Categories: internet, marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth.
These were passed around our office today - yet another example of viral marketing;
More… »
Posted by Antti at 4:33 pm on March 3rd, 2006. No comments... »
Categories: humour, internet, marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth.
