Everything I’ve learned from marketing in 10 years (5 years later)

In the process of moving this blog from the old rusty diesel engine to the new shiny WordPress engine, old post drafts popped up like dead fish in a pond after an accident involving lots of chemicals. One was titled Everything I’ve learned about marketing in ten years. It didn’t have an ending or a beginning yet, it was just a sketchy list but surprisingly it made a bit of sense. So I dusted it off and edited it to be readable, but didn’t add or remove anything. Here goes:

  • Stand for something. A little bit better than the competition leaves everyone cold. If you have nothing to say, there’s no need to shout about it.*
  • One message at a time.*
  • When conducting market research, ask only whether the message you are sending out has been received as intended, and nothing else. The one thing you definitely shouldn’t ask your customers is “what would you like to have”. *
  • Always put 10% of your budget in risky channels and promotions ie. where they might bomb but, if successful, that generates a healthy ROI.*
  • Work for a boss that wants big change.**
  • Test where the limits that shouldn’t be crossed are, with advertising or whatever you have to play with. ***

    • None of the above tips apply if you just want to sell a bit of goods, and not do something remarkable.

    Footnotes AD 2012:

    * Fully agree to this day, I thank the year 2007 version of myselt for the reminder.
    ** 2012 addition: or be an entrepreneur that wants big change.
    *** Back in 2007 most of my marketing career had been in media or FMCG, where there’s hardly any disruption in the business itself. So it made a lot of sense to push the limits with communications, because this was all there was. With startups, you’re so much closer to disrupting businesses and business models and there’s much less of a need to do scandalous communications.

    Please help me complete the commandments of marketing. What have I missed?

    This blog has a new home

    As you might have already noticed, my blog is now here at purde.net. Also, it now finally runs on WordPress because MT stopped cutting it about 4 or 5 years ago. RSS feed remains the same and includes add-ons like my Flickr feed and the hip quotes I post on Other people’s thoughts. If you don’t like to see my photos (I don’t blame you), you can get the normal feed from the corner of the address bar. I guess that covers the housekeeping stuff. Shoutout to Jens who helped with the move.

    One thing I absolutely love about the blog move is that it brought old post drafts to surface. I just stumbled upon a draft from 2007 called “Everything I’ve learned from marketing in 10 years”. It’s totally worth translating to English and posting here as the first proper new post, to showcase both the wisdom and the naivety I possessed five years ago. Just watch this space.

    Pay a Blogger Day, a lost bet and 945 pushups

    As I’m writing this my hands are a bit aching from making 290 pushups (out of 945) which I said I would do if Pay a Blogger Day minisite doesn’t get one million unique visitors. I lost the bet, the site only got 45 thousand uniques over the first week. A shameful lost bet, but I’m doing these pushups with a victorious grin, because Pay a Blogger Day worked like a charm.

    Some background: my client Flattr provides a simple way to make small donations online, which is really handy for software developers, bloggers, charities, etc. It’s a service Dave McClure would call a vitamin rather than pain killer, in the sense that although it’s a good thing you never feel an acute need for that. There is not a single person in the world that wakes up one morning with a desire to make a small donation to his or her favourite podcaster and types “small donations service” into Google. So how do you find more users to a service like Flattr? One of the ways is to make people think (about the various people that deserve their money). Or so we thought.

    The basic idea for Pay a Blogger Day formed quickly and naturally, almost by itself. The thinking was that if we make more people to pay bloggers at least one day a year, more people would want to do it regularly, and of those, a share would want to use Flattr for that. Grow the pie kind of thing.

    So we created a minisite, prepared a video, got a few partners aboard and talked to some bloggers and journalists. So on Nov 22th Mashable wrote a piece about Pay a Blogger Day. GigaOm soon followed, as well as Telegraph and more than 50 other blogs around the world. There were lots of great quotes, like:

    While the day is obviously a great marketing ploy by the micropayments website it’s also an easy way to pay fractions on the dollar to your favorite writers.

    See them all on Storify (also embedded to the end of the post), along with many great tweets. Almost all of them mentioned Flattr too, so from purely from coverage point of view it was a (if not raging then at least growling) success.

    topsy%20flattr%20mentions.png
    Flattr needed more than just PR though, so how about other metrics?

    In terms of donations we don’t know how many more donations and purchases we drove that day. Looking at anecdotal evidence it’s probably a number in thousands of euros. One blog reported receiving 70 dollars, another one 150 dollars, Jeremy added a donations button just for a day and collected even more, this beer blog got about 10 dollars, and so on. Number of flattr clicks was 10-20% bigger than on previous Tuesdays, but this figure has been known to fluctuate quite a bit. So, in terms of donations this day bought coffees to some hundreds of bloggers, but (we hope) no one quit their day job just yet.

    In terms of Flattr signups Pay a blogger day added some hundreds of users, which is less than I personally expected but it’s still a decent number.

    So in terms of hard numbers Pay a Blogger was a moderately successful campaign. However, in terms of raising awareness there are now some hundreds of thousands of more people that have given some thought to the need to pay bloggers, and that now know about the existence of Flattr. As the numbers suggest, the vast majority of these people didn’t do much ie. they didn’t pay a blogger and sign up to Flattr immediately, but a seed was planted. Not everyone is an early adopter and most people need to be reached a couple of times with a message before they start taking action. Brian Chesky of AirBnB talked about their PR stunts at LeWeb this week, and he mentioned a similar dynamic.

    Other learnings
    Lots of tweets are no silver bullet. We planned (and built in) three main traffic sources for Payablogger.org site: tongue-in-cheek widgets people could create, tweets, and the video. Banners worked like a charm, Little Gamers alone generated more than 10000 visits to the site when they embedded the widget. But the huge amounts of tweets we got (at peak 4-5 per minute) drove relatively little traffic. According to bit.ly each tweet only got us about 3.1 visitors. So in our case banner/widget real estate on a blog or website paid off better than lots of tweets and RT’s. Video had the least impact, though people really liked it. Should have added some bare skin on kittens…

    Allowing users to interact in simple ways works, be it entering URL, Twitter name or doing the FB connect. Almost 10% of people that came to the payablogger.org site entered a blog URL and generated the forementioned banner.

    Invest time in doing press and blogger outreach. More than 10% of blog posts and articles came from people we reached out to, including the Mashable piece which sparked about a third of coverage. So even if your campaing is interesting for bloggers and viral, it doesn’t spread itself.

    Partners buy you credibility, especially if you’re a relatively small startup. Having Posterous and some other names listed on the site or in an email to a writer from Mashable greatly helped. Also, in our case partners added info about Pay a Blogger Day to their newsletters, which generated much more traffic than their tweets or blog posts.

    All in all a great campaign, with some great learnings. Shout outs to Flattr folks for buying into the idea and getting this somewhat risky campaign out. But I guess that’s what all startups need to do, take some risks and do things that are paid attention to.

    Continue reading →

    Kõrb, põlev mees ja põder

    Kunagi levis laialt nali tšuktšist, kes proovib Moskvast naasnuna seletada, missugune on loomaaias nähtud elevant. Põtra teate? No kohe üldse ei ole põdra moodi, otsib ta sobivaid sõnu.

    Burning Mani festival on mõnes mõttes väga põdra moodi, sest seda on mitte-põletanule (inglise keeles kutsutakse festivalil vähemalt korra käinud inimest burneriks) väga keeruline kirjeldada. Võibolla annab mingigi pildi ette see, kui kujutada ühekorraga ette katastroof-futuristlikku filmi Mad Max, popkunstnik Jeff Koonsi kogu loomingut, joogalaagrit ning väga raju pidu Ibizal.

    Kui see ei tekitanud mingisugustki muljet, siis äkki aitavad paar fakti. Burning Mani toimumiskoht on Nevada kõrb, kus pole jooksvat vett, kanalisatsiooni, elektrit, internetti ega mobiililevi. Selle eest on seal hulgaliselt liiva ning tugevad tuuled, mis aeg-ajalt liivekeeriseks või -tormiks ühinevad. Festival toimus sel aastal juba 25. korda ning oli sel aastal esmakordselt viimase piletini välja müüdud. Ürituse haripunktis viibis Black Rock Citys, selles vaid nädalaks rajatavas ringikujulises linnas, korraga rohkem kui 50000 inimest. Seda on natuke rohkem kui on elanikke Pärnu linnas.

    Festivali meeleolu kirjeldab hästi tõik, et kohepeal puudub kaubandus. Raha eest saab osta ainult jääd, nii et söök, jook ja kõik muu eluks vajalik peab endal kaasas olema. Samas, eriti hea tahtmise ja väikese rahakotiga saaks selle nädala elatud ka niisama. Asi on selles, et kõige hinnatum valuuta on nähtamatud teistele heameele valmistamise pagunid. Naeratusi ja tänulikkust võid välja teenida kas kingituste tegemise, joogi ja toidu jagamise, muljetavaldava kunstiteose loomise, meelelahutuse pakkumise või mille iganes muuga, mis kellegi festivali paremaks muudab. Kes ehitab festivali jaoks ringisõitva tuldlõõskava kaheksajala, kes korraldab aasta otsa tuluõhtuid, et saaks nädalaks kõrvesse tasuta jooke pakkuva baari avada, kes loob laserkiirte abil maailma suurima kella, kes paneb endale selga kostüümi, mis heal juhul tekitab vaimustunud aplause, halvemal juhul ehmatutuse ja unehäireid, ja nii edasi.

    Üsna lihtne oleks nii-öelda sirutada käsi välja ning olla kõige selle vastuvõtjaks, seda kas praktilistes küsimustes nagu söömine või siis meelelahutuse osas. Playal liikuski ringi ka üsna argise olemisega inimesi, kes niisama teisi vaatasid või neist pilte klõpsisid. Kuitahes häid kaadreid nad ka ei saanud, oli teisel pool läätse viibivatel inimestel festivalist kindlasti palju rohkem rõõmu. Burning Man pakub kõige rohkem nendele, kes tulevad seda kaaslooma, mitte kõrvalt vaatama.

    Ja see tekitab harukordselt nautitavaid loovaid doominoefekte. Üsna levinud festivaliliikuriks on läbi aastate olnud autost või bussist ümbeeehitatud laevad, sest ringisõitev laev näeb kõrbes kohe eriti äge välja. Sellel aastal oli keegi nende jaoks ka saja meetri pikkuse paadisilla ehitanud, ja kalastamise sõpradele lahkelt silla otsa ka õnged välja jätnud. Või siis see inimene, kes tsirkusekarkudel kõndijatele baari ehitas. Muidu baar nagu baar ikka, mõistagi tasuta jookidega, aga baarilett asus umbes kahe meetri kõrgusel, nii et ilma jalapikendusteta oli raske baarmani jutule saada.

    Täiesti omaette artikli võiks kirjutada playale nädalaks püstitatud kunstist, aga seda peaks pigem tegema keegi, kes oskab sinna juurde ka sobivaid erudeeritust väljendavaid omadussõnu valida. Kunsti on seal rohkem, kui jõuaks paari täispäevaga ära vaadata, ning oli selgelt näha, et kunstnike fantaasiat ei piiranud mitte lõuendi või galerii suurus, vaid kilomeetrite viisi kõrbe.

    Nagu ürituse nimi aimata laseb, on üheks festivali oluliselt komponendiks puust mõnekümne meetri kõrguse mehekuju põlema panemine, millest festival kunagi ka välja kasvas. Täna on palju olulisem ja emotsionaalsem sündmus templi, kõikide uskude ja umbsuskude pühakoja, põletamine viimase päeva õhtul. Burning Mani tempel oli hüvastijätmise koht, mis sel aastal kui festivali teemaks oli Rites of passage, tundus eriti olulist kohta omavat. Neli kuud valminud templi seinadele jäeti nädala jooksul tuhandeid hüvastijätkukirju, lubadusi, meenutusi, kahetsusi, fotosid ja mälestusesemeid – et see kõik tuhaks põletada. Näha kedagi templisse lähedase tuhka laotamas, ema ja tütart kallistamas või kirjutamas trepinurgale kirja, mille adressaat seda kunagi ei näe, oli pisarateni liigutav. Ja kuigi Burning Man on eelkõige lihtsalt meelelahutus, võib ta olla pisarateni liigutav meelelahutus, mille pärast nädalaks tuhandete kilomeetrite kaugusele kõrbesse sõitmine ei ole liiga palju küsitud.

    Kirjutatud Ekspressi, vaata kindlasti juurde ka sõber Mareki fotosid.

    Focus (or at least more focus)

    charlie%20sheen.pngI’m fully conscious that me writing about focus is like having Tiger Woods giving relationship advice, or Charlie Sheen blogging about the benefits of antioxygens. In the last 16 months or so I’ve been involved with Talentag, KnickerMail, Erply, Storymarks, Posterbee, Voxtrot, Pipedrive, Flattr, Achoo, Komeediklubi, Equal Media and a few other companies in some shape or form. Not the most credible person to write about focus, you may (rightly) think.

    The thing is, I quit my job at Skype in spring last year to try different roles in different teams for 6-12 months and find something I’d want to get involved with longer term. It was fun and educational most of the time, and stressful some of the time. I learned that if you have a nagging feeling of mistrust when you first meet someone, you should trust that feeling. I also learned that working on something you don’t believe in kills creativity and joy quickly, even if people around you are great both professionally and as personalities. Plus i picked up some new skills, techniques and approaches which I’ll be using until I’m done with marketing (which may not occur until some years after my death).

    As to bit of background, I’ve always been the kind of person who likes variety, and I’ve almost always juggled many balls. The last year and a half were very pretty darn colourful even judging by my own standards. It was binge variety, it was going after different professional challenges with the same force that Charlie Sheen went after bottles and minigrip bags. While it would have been fun for this to continue forever, it would have been … impractical.

    On one level the quality of work would have deteriorated (and perhaps it already did) because championing variety means you become an extreme generalist. And even if you’re a really good generalist, you can only do so much when you need some very specific action in very specific conditions.

    But even more importantly my experimentation had served its purpose. I had found Flattr that provides a button that will change how bloggers, designers, developers and other creators get paid, and that needed a hand with marketing. So for months already I’ve spent most of my time with Flattr’s messaging, PR, events, partnering and such.

    It’s worth pointing out this wasn’t a total Saul to Paul conversion. I had met two people who I liked to work with and who liked the idea of creating a networking site around achievements, and I’m continuing to spend some time on Achoo. Plus I’m keeping my marketing advisor role (read: lamenting in team chat and writing silly email copy) with the World’s best sales pipeline manager. Finally, I simply couldn’t give up organising British stand-up comedy nights in Tallinn every now and then. I did hibernate Storymarks, KnickerMail and said no to a few offers though.

    You may be thinking that working on three and a half things can hardly be called focus. If that is the case that you might also think that having three G&T’s is considered ‘drinking’, to which Mr Sheen would probably object.

    Laps kommihüpermarketis ehk esimest korda Edinburgh Fringe’il

    Minu Edinburgh Fringe’i lavadebüüt läks hästi: võitsin võimaluse olla spermadoonoriks ühe briti koomiku õele. Ja seda lauset peaks vist natuke lahti seletama.

    Edinburgh Fringe on maailma suurim kunstifestival, seda vähemasti esinemiskunstide nagu teatri, muusika ja kõige selle osas, mida hõlmab sõna comedy. Nelja nädala jooksul toimub päevas rohkem kui 1300 esinemist paarisajal erineval laval umbes 20000 esineja poolt; lavadeks muutuvad iga aasta augustis ka restoranide-baaride tagatoad, konverentsiruumid ja kooliklassid, aga vahel ka kodud või taksod.

    Juba paar aastat on festivali suurim kategooria just comedy ehk sketšid, stand-up, improviatsioonikomöödia, muusikaline komöödia ja lihtsalt naljad. Heas kommipoes on erinevaid maiustusi nii mõnesaja ringis, nii kui naljasõbra Fringe’ile jõudmise meeleseisundi kirjeldamiseks jääb väljendist “nagu laps kommipoes” selgelt väheks. See on seesama Fringe, kus laiem publik on esimest korda näinud Rowan Atkinsoni, mitmeid Monty Pythoni liikmeid, Stephen Fry’d, Hugh Lauriet ja teisi suuremaid või väiksemaid staare. Edinburghis on sellised esinejad nagu Ricky Cervais läbisegi tuleviku tähtedega, ning ka nendega, kes peale oma Fringe’i debüüti otsustavad jätkata oma baarmani- või pankurikarjääriga. Avastada ja teha on selgelt liiga palju.

    Kuna kõike niikuinii näha ei jõua, siis valikute tegemiseks on kaks head viisi. Esiteks arvustuste lugemine (nt. Chortle’i oma annab hea ülevaate) ja tuttavatelt soovituste küsimine. Teine viis on kõndida mööda tänavat ning siseneda sellesse saali, kuhu kõnniteel seisev sisseviskaja sind parasjagu kutsub.

    Tulles tagasi selle kõige esimese lause juurde, siis sisseviskaja oli meid sel hetkel meelitanud ühele vähem tuntud esinejate tasuta showle, mille käigus olin saattunud lavale ning võitnud kolmeküsimuselise kiirviktoriini. (Mul oli ka väike konkurentdsieelis, nimelt kõik minu viimase küsimuse vastusevariandid olid ühesugused ja valesti vastata ei olnud võimalik). Nii situatsioon kui auhind oli väga fringe’ilik. Kõik on seal lubatud peale elu, reeglite ja iseenda liiga tõsiselt võtmise.
    Kõige parem on planeerimist ja juhuslikkust kombineerida, ostes ette nö. nurgakivideks häid arvustusi ja soovitusi saanud ning peaaegu kindlasti välja müüdavad piletid, ning jättes oma päevakavasse natuke auke, mida jooksu pealt sisustada.

    Nelja päeva jooksul jõudsime vaadata umbes 20 etendust. Kuna comedy ulatub allapoole vööd naljadest kuni intelligentse ja isikliku huumorini, sai lisaks rohkele naermisele läbi elada laia erinevate tunnete spektri. Ainult romantikat jääb Fringe’i puhul väheks, kuigi iseenesest on Edinburgh armas ja vägagi jalutatav linnake. Ühelt poolt on laginal naermises midagi sellist, mis ei mahu minu meelest samasse aegruumi suurema sensuaalsusega. Teisalt kuna huumorialtarile võib heita kõike ja kõiki, siis kahekesi nädalavahetuse fiiling väheneb iga kord, kui keegi teeb nalja oma intiimelu mõne kentsaka seiga üle; ja mida teravam nali, seda raskem on pärast oma kaaslasele sügavalt silma vaadata.

    Tallinnast lendab Edinburghi otselend ning Fringe kestab 28. augustini. Veel jõuad.

    Kirjutatud Ekspressi Kohvrisse
    PS. Järgmine Komeediklubi on 28. septembril, vaata rohkem siit.

    Pushups, kicks and punches for your mind

    You’ll learn a great deal when you go to martial arts training camps. Most of it is technique, some of it is learning about your limits (they’re much further than you think) and almost always there is good old life wisdom involved, too.

    I attended a 3-day workshop of a hidden-gem-type martial art called sanjuro a couple of weeks ago. Topics over meals wondered far from dynamic kicks and one dinner I was lucky to sit next to Glenn Delikan, the mastermind behind the martial art. I was sharing some interesting (for me, anyway) choices in my life when Glenn voiced a framework to think about those kinds of things. There are three kinds of things in life, he said. There are things you want, things you ask for and things you need.

    Brilliant. And so simple, I guess these things go hand in hand. I’ve developed a habit of looking at my choices in the light of this thought since that conversation, works like wonders.

    Then there was the kimura shukokai karate camp some six years ago when sensei Yrjö Pursianen (7 dan) chatted to a bunch of us participants after a tough drill. He said he was recently asked by someone what he had gotten out of his more than 30 years of practicing karate, gallons of sweat, long training sessions and injuries. What’s the payoff after putting in all that effort, the person had wanted to know. To which sensei had replied: I get back everything I put in to karate. And the more I put in, the more I get back.

    A great way to look at cost and reward, at journey and the destination, wouldn’t you agree?

    A neat viral marketing concept

    Went to a TechHub workshop about viral marketing on Thursday and liked it to the extent I wanted to write a quick post about it. Toby Beresford has developed a simple framework for viral marketing which he calls this the petal model.

    In a nutshell, there are four kinds of viral loops. First there is direct viral loop (inviting friends)  vs. indirect viral loop (eg. leaderboard that everyone sees). A Farmville example of an active loop is sending someone a tomato plant as a gift, a passive loop is coming to Farmville for the first time and seeing your friends there with nice farms.

    The other dimension is positive loop (what do I get if i return every day/week) vs negative loop (what will go wrong if I don’t come back). In farmville positive is getting a crop, and negative is when your plants dry because you haven’t watered them.

    Like petals on a flower there is no limit to how many viral loops your product or service may have. No rocket surgery here, but I thought this is a really good framework for hanging your viral loop ideas onto, and seeing whether you had missed any of the loop type for your app or campaign.

    I’m looking forward to beta testing Pailz, Toby’s new project, which should have all the differents loops covered. Especially as it’s a business app, not some Facebook game with raison d’être just to kill as many hours as humanly (or robotly?) possible.

    The story of Storymarks

    Placebook_FB_v1.pngSome postmodern stories have parallel endings, this one has several beginnings.

    It could be that the story begun last Sunday. Driving back from a canoeing trip on a flooded river we passed a house by the roadside. A house that looked remarkably average. There’s a story with that house, said my friend. It a house someone won with lottery, probably the only house of that kind in Estonia. Not the most exciting story arguably but it did make that house stand out from hundreds of other houses we passed that day.

    It may also be that the story begun a year ago at the first Garage48 event when myself and a hardworking team gave a stab at geo-tagging books and movies. We were underpowered and I guess our vision wasn’t visionary enough, so the project died its painless death after the event. R.I.P. Talepath, you taught the whole team many good lessons.

    Another possible beginning is Garage mentor feedback session earlier this week. I pitched my geo-tagging idea again with some improvements, and heard back that it’s still not visionary enough. But it could be if one could geo-tag more than just books and movies. One of the mentors kindly repeated his thoughts over lunch yesterday.

    Finally, perhaps Storymarks began last night around 9pm when a group of people walked up to the piece of paper that said something about connecting stories to places and said they liked the idea and wanted to spend the next 48 hours fleshing it out.

    So please give a warm welcome to Storymarks, a site where people can connect factoids, news, urban legends, movies and books to real places. We think it’ll make travelling even more interesting than it is today – think learning about an unbelievable story involving fire ladders and a baby rescue just next doors to the hotel you are staying in, or that Pink Floyd once laid 700 iron beds on the beach you’re laying on, just to snap an album cover.

    It may start the movement ‘wannabe-travelling’ where you look at your home street with a fresh pair of eyes; eyes filled with moving personal stories, tragic wartime events and the time when someone famous once got arrested nextdoors.

    Even the most boring buildings have great stories behind them, some real and some (urban) legends. And famous buildings have hundreds of them. We want to create a place for all these stories, add a story layer to the world, if you will. Please check out Storymarks, become a fan, follow it, give us feedback and add a story for a place you know. If you can’t do all of the above, feel free to skip one :)