So the digital business course has come to its end. It has been a joyful ride, with valuable learnings. I have to say, it has been the best course so far in the time I have been in Laurea. The course had a very wide angle to marketing and digital business and we covered almost all of necessary to know for this state of our careers. A subject that really took it place in my memory was inbound marketing, a term, that I was not so familiar with earlier. The spark came from ECommerce fair when I listen to a keynote and took 5 pages of notes.
In summary, My course has looked this;
The first week, I was struggling to get back to writing a blog. The course seemed very interesting and I had high hopes for it. My hopes were archived and I in a matter of fact learned lots of new things. The second week, I wrote two blogs. First I raged about the fact that it is not acceptable to make students do jobs for free that should be reserved for professionals. That was and still isn't the purpose of an internship. That week I also wrote a blog about a video making and shared some tips I learned the hard way. The third week of blogging writing was the highlight of this blogging spring since it was selected to be the blog of the week. That blog was about visuality and what makes a good website, visually. A week after that, I wrote about copywrites and why they are important. I recommend reading that if you wonder where you can take pictures from. Rest of the February's blogs were not very special since I was absent one week. In the sixth week, we had an inspirational speech from Ronja Salmi, and I got really good writing tips.
In March we had the law week, which I was a bit disappointed with, The Ecommerce Fair and the super long post I wrote about it. The eight-week was very interesting also, circling around a subject of influencer marketing. The week after that was also interesting, we had a lecture about SEO and google analytics, all things useful for all marketers. I have also written about visuality, and how I gave my first lecture. In April, I started working full time, so I was absent for the rest of the course, unfortunately. But to compensate that I have already learned a lot while working. I wrote punch of compensatory posts, you can find them under here.
I have had a lot of fun on this course, and wish that there was more courses like this in Laurea. Maybe in future school system evolves into something more useful. :)
maanantai 24. huhtikuuta 2017
tiistai 18. huhtikuuta 2017
Study case of Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker. My first touch to his speeches was in the live stream that we organized last fall for Nordic Business Forum 2016. He also writes a blog which you can find from here; http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
He is a writer and he believes that if you want to publish a book you have to write every day, so he writes something into his blog every day. He has been in the industry for over 20 years and he is really a guru when it comes to marketing.
On his speech about how to get ideas to spread he tells on the example of sliced bread, and it's up comings in its early days. Even that all we eat nowadays in sliced bread, no one bought it then. He also showcases some examples in that worked, but why they worked? Because someone figured out how to make customers feel like they need the product. Otherwise, your product is no good. Customers need to feel that they need your product and that is how you succeed. And customers these days just don't care, they have much more choices and less time to make a pick of the product. The obvious thing to do is just to ignore. Here he pulls out his famous purple cow example; if you see a cow while driving, you are just going to ignore it. But if the cow was purple, you would notice it. For a while, before it comes ordinary. This phenomenon can be seen in everything from marketing to news media. Everything remarkable is worth of attention.
There is much what he covers in this short speech but much of it is relevant to your course. Godin really dives deep to a basic idea of marketing and how it is something done wrong. The basic idea of marketing in to get your ideas to spread, and that is what he is saying. Don't do average mass marketing to average people, who are most likely to ignore you when consuming massive amounts of marketing in a daily basis. The key to spreading ideas to market to the target group, to the early adapters, because others will follow. Because those who love it will talk like crazy about it. and when people talk highly about your product, it is free marketing. For those first adapters, your new product is remarkable with a less effort than for average people. If one would market to the average people, it would not create same kinda hype that it would when marketing is targeted to fast adapters, those who seek out the best and newest things in their industry.
Being remarkable and focusing on those you want them to focus on. but you don't have to be super remarkable, you don't have to be the best. But very good is not good enough. Very good is averige. What you really have to do is figure out what people want and give it to them.
His speech really sums up everything we have learned, to buyer personas to creative marketing. I highly recommend watching couple of his speeches.
He is a writer and he believes that if you want to publish a book you have to write every day, so he writes something into his blog every day. He has been in the industry for over 20 years and he is really a guru when it comes to marketing.
On his speech about how to get ideas to spread he tells on the example of sliced bread, and it's up comings in its early days. Even that all we eat nowadays in sliced bread, no one bought it then. He also showcases some examples in that worked, but why they worked? Because someone figured out how to make customers feel like they need the product. Otherwise, your product is no good. Customers need to feel that they need your product and that is how you succeed. And customers these days just don't care, they have much more choices and less time to make a pick of the product. The obvious thing to do is just to ignore. Here he pulls out his famous purple cow example; if you see a cow while driving, you are just going to ignore it. But if the cow was purple, you would notice it. For a while, before it comes ordinary. This phenomenon can be seen in everything from marketing to news media. Everything remarkable is worth of attention.
There is much what he covers in this short speech but much of it is relevant to your course. Godin really dives deep to a basic idea of marketing and how it is something done wrong. The basic idea of marketing in to get your ideas to spread, and that is what he is saying. Don't do average mass marketing to average people, who are most likely to ignore you when consuming massive amounts of marketing in a daily basis. The key to spreading ideas to market to the target group, to the early adapters, because others will follow. Because those who love it will talk like crazy about it. and when people talk highly about your product, it is free marketing. For those first adapters, your new product is remarkable with a less effort than for average people. If one would market to the average people, it would not create same kinda hype that it would when marketing is targeted to fast adapters, those who seek out the best and newest things in their industry.
Being remarkable and focusing on those you want them to focus on. but you don't have to be super remarkable, you don't have to be the best. But very good is not good enough. Very good is averige. What you really have to do is figure out what people want and give it to them.
His speech really sums up everything we have learned, to buyer personas to creative marketing. I highly recommend watching couple of his speeches.
Tips & tricks to blogspot
I have really enjoyed this required blogging this spring. I made my first blog in 2008 when I was in 13. I wrote a blog on & off for three years from 2011 until I stopped from lack of free time. It was a shame since I was really surprised that I enjoy blogging as much as I do as part of this course.
I still invested lots of time on my blogs visual look and learned many tips and tricks during that time. Here is some that I have implemented or previously used on my blog.
How to get the picture as wide as a text?
First of all, you have to find out how wide your text part of your blog is. This is found under the Theme- section. Click Edit, and select the Adjust with. There you can see what is the width of your whole blog and the column section. With little math, you are left with the width of your text area. My blogs texts area is 1000 px wide but I edit my pictures to be 900px so it sits nicely together.
There are multiple free softwares on the internet to size down your pictures, so you don't need Photoshop for that. Why I recommend this; well take a look and say which one of these previews look better;
There are as many banners that there are blogs.
What comes to your banner, that is for you to decide; I recommend your banner to be as wide as you blog is. In my case, my banner is bit smaller since the default size is 60 px smaller than the width of my blog. Again, you don't need photoshop to create your banner, use Canva instead. If you already have a picture you want to use, you can smaller it to the desired size using free online tools. Note that good banner should not be too high. Take into consideration what your blog looks like when you first land on it.
While uploading your banner from "ulkoasu" part of the settings, select "Otsikon ja kuvauksen tilalla" ( instead of headline & insert") to hide the headline of your blog.
If you want your banner to be smaller, but centered; here is a trick;
#header-inner img {margin: 0 auto;}
The above is CSS- code that can be used to change your blog's appearance when normal tools can't. That particular code is for centering the banner.
You can add CSS- codes while editing your theme. Click more settings and scroll down to CSS and paste your code to there. Click apply (käytä blogissa) after this to save the settings.
Removing the picture boxes
Blogspot has one little thing that annoys me when it comes to pictures. While back when I was updating a photography blog, it really struck out. The borders around the pictures. Code for that;
.post-body img, .post-body .tr-caption-container, .ss, .Profile img, .Image img,
.BlogList .item-thumbnail img {
padding: none !important;
border: none !important;
background: none !important;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important;
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important;
box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important;
}
Don't leave anything out.
Side banner links
You can add more gadgets from the "ulkoasu" - menu. Click "add a gadget" and select "picture". You can find free social media icons for example here.
Then fill in the information you want, don't forget the link you want the picture to take you. Make sure the click "Make picture thisandthis wide" to avoid the following situation;
Other code magic
With little code magic, you can also choose any color ever for your highlight color, from not only those you can choose in a text editor, for example, the pink I use is #e1bcac. When writing your text, highlight the text you want to change color, and then change it any color. Then go to HTML side of the editor and find the text chapter you just highlighted. Find the part that says; color: #ea9999, or any other number in this case. If you changed it to red it would be #FF0000 and so on. Change this color number to whatever number you want, in my case, it is the #e1bcac so it matches to my other visual elements on the site.
If you want to find your own color to use, here is a useful link.
If you want your sidebars pictures to appear without a headline, for example, if you want them to be just pictures add <!> in the "headline" part when editing the gadget box. Also If you want to line your text to multiple lines in the sidebars use a <b /> in between the lines. <b/ > is equal to pressing enter in your HTML code.
I have also hidden my navigation bar, which is also a CSS code you can add while editing your theme;
#navbar-iframe{opacity:0.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=0)}
#navbar-iframe:hover{opacity:1.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=100, FinishedOpacity=100)}
Also a good tip, you want to be able to edit your text in HTML - mode in text editor and are writing your text somewhere else than blogspots text editor. If you paste your texts from there straight to the normal text editor, your text on the HTML side will look very confusing, since you will paste also all the preset design your text have with the text. Meaning fonts, sizes etc. So If you have selected a font you want to use in your blog, it will not show. Cure to this is to paste text straight to the HTML side.
Centering your post headline and date happens also in CSS editor with this little piece of code;
.post-title {
text-align:center;
}
For the headline and this for the date;
.date-header {
text-align:center;
}
There are multiple ways to edit the appearance of your blog. There is no right way, there is only your way. Go and be creative with your blog.
maanantai 10. huhtikuuta 2017
I value sleep.
Around the time last nigth when I was getting ready to go to sleep, there was not very many blogposts posted. And as I was absent during last week, I was supposed to find out from other peoples blogs what was discussed. And since I value sleep, I was not gonna stay up late just to wait around others to publish their blogposts and then start writing.
Others than blogs there was one blurry video posted about website UX, if I understood correctly since both image and audio quality was not good enough to me to actually find out what was the lecture about. Sadly no slides were posted, and I was unable to do notes from the lecture, because I could see the slides properly.
Based on those blogs that were very early to me to start writing this at bearable time, the topics discussed were digitalisation and wedsite UX and workshop about improving ones perform skills.
So Digitalization, "Integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitized." I have no idea what was discussed furthermore in the class, and I don't want to copy paste from some else's blog.
the future of technology is already here but are you and your business using it to its fullest potential? People take a time to adapt to the news things, like the traditional taxi drives shaming Uber from taking their markets, when they could have made the same, used a similar app to distribute their services but they didn't. Because change is scary and why to change something that is already working?
This week we were also shared the feedback from of the lecture. I indeed have some feedback to give about this course. I think there are subjects that could be more useful and then topic that should have been discussed in early on the course like website UX, SEO, social media and social media marketing and all the inspirational/personal branding lectures could have been on the end part of the lecture; when the projects are already planned and almost ready. And lectures I would have wanted to see, or I could be useful for future students of this course like if we have 5 lectures about personal branding, why not one about the importance of LinkedIn and how to make a killer profile and get founded as a talent. If you read my old post, you can see some topic I wish we would have had. I will write about LinkedIn as my compensation post since I was founded that way and now I work for Microsoft.
One thing that I have thought would have been useful is how to give feedback, and then make students to comment each others blogs.
Apparently, this week there was also a lecture about web design and user experience. I tried to listen to the video of that lecture but the quality of the image was too poor for me to actually read the slides, and the audio wasn't the greatest either. You can read my previous blog post about web design here.
How has my week been? Well on Monday, I started a new job at Microsoft Finland as a Creative Marketing Intern. Everyone in there is wonderful, and the food. I had a tiny white-thrash-moment since I literally cannot even. The food is ten times better than in our school cafeteria, and there is always at least eight options to salad, wok to freashly grilled things. I might not know how to cook, but I do love to eat.
As I already said that I value sleep, I didnt post this yesterday, since I was so tired and went to sleep early.
Others than blogs there was one blurry video posted about website UX, if I understood correctly since both image and audio quality was not good enough to me to actually find out what was the lecture about. Sadly no slides were posted, and I was unable to do notes from the lecture, because I could see the slides properly.
Based on those blogs that were very early to me to start writing this at bearable time, the topics discussed were digitalisation and wedsite UX and workshop about improving ones perform skills.
So Digitalization, "Integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitized." I have no idea what was discussed furthermore in the class, and I don't want to copy paste from some else's blog.
the future of technology is already here but are you and your business using it to its fullest potential? People take a time to adapt to the news things, like the traditional taxi drives shaming Uber from taking their markets, when they could have made the same, used a similar app to distribute their services but they didn't. Because change is scary and why to change something that is already working?
This week we were also shared the feedback from of the lecture. I indeed have some feedback to give about this course. I think there are subjects that could be more useful and then topic that should have been discussed in early on the course like website UX, SEO, social media and social media marketing and all the inspirational/personal branding lectures could have been on the end part of the lecture; when the projects are already planned and almost ready. And lectures I would have wanted to see, or I could be useful for future students of this course like if we have 5 lectures about personal branding, why not one about the importance of LinkedIn and how to make a killer profile and get founded as a talent. If you read my old post, you can see some topic I wish we would have had. I will write about LinkedIn as my compensation post since I was founded that way and now I work for Microsoft.
One thing that I have thought would have been useful is how to give feedback, and then make students to comment each others blogs.
Apparently, this week there was also a lecture about web design and user experience. I tried to listen to the video of that lecture but the quality of the image was too poor for me to actually read the slides, and the audio wasn't the greatest either. You can read my previous blog post about web design here.
How has my week been? Well on Monday, I started a new job at Microsoft Finland as a Creative Marketing Intern. Everyone in there is wonderful, and the food. I had a tiny white-thrash-moment since I literally cannot even. The food is ten times better than in our school cafeteria, and there is always at least eight options to salad, wok to freashly grilled things. I might not know how to cook, but I do love to eat.
As I already said that I value sleep, I didnt post this yesterday, since I was so tired and went to sleep early.
maanantai 3. huhtikuuta 2017
My first lecture ever
This week in school we had a bit different task. On Monday we were given a task by Heinon Tukku Oy, a food wholesale company, to track the customer path and create a marketing plan for their new app launching in autumn.
Our group worked on the marketing plan, and we divided the task for three days, we did the basic work on Monday after the lecture and had a skype meeting on Tuesday. We completed our presentation on Thursday before the lecture.
So not much to tell about that. But the one thing I was super excited about this week was my lecture on Friday. I give out a lecture about "visuality and how to make your presentation better" in a LaureaES's Cambridge Venture Camp. This was kinda my first lecture ever. I have once given a lecture about photography but it was not so official and more like a friend to friends situation.
Have to say that I was freeking out, that nervous I was even that the audience was small, it felt huge! But all my preperations paid out, and spending hours to the presentation and thinking that what I want to say was not wasted.
I thought about sharing some of those points I made in that presentation for you guys.
So what is visuality?
Visuality is simply how things look. Things can look bad, they can look good, or they can look average. With bit of a visual touch, you can transform anything into something better. Usually, people don't care what they things look like or care to use that extra 10 seconds to find a better-looking option to something.
A visual eye is something that you practice, and my background in photography has come handy in my job. By having a photography as a hobby for 10 years I had already eye to visual things and what looks good before I even knew what typography meant. But the thing is that you don't have to have that visual eye to make your presentation look good, since there are some guidelines and do’s and don’ts to avoid the biggest mistakes and awful looking things. There are couple main things that you can impliment into any visual thing not only presentations.
The use of colors is the most important thing when thinking about visuality. Use colors that suit your business or your style. Don't use screaming red if you have a relaxing spa and so on. Also take into a consideration how suitable the color is for the eye, or how common the color is. I have talked about this earlier in my blog. Take little bit extra time when you choose your colors, tone them up or down a bit instead taking the easy way. There are lots of different sliders ( RGB, CMYK, WEB) in powerpoint to tune your colors or you can choose whichever color you want, so why use those ones that everyone else uses too? Also mind the contrast also when using colors.
There can be too much or too little of contrast and always make sure that your text is visible enough to been actually written when using colors on the background or negative texts. (negative text= white text on any other color) I don’t recommend to use more than 5 colors and that includes black and white. You should pick one main color and then up to three complimentary colors. There are many color palette tools on the internet, personally really like https://coolors.co it is particularly very great tool, if you have already one color picked out and are looking for the complimentary colors.
I have also written a post about this earlier. Other thing to know about pictures is to not make them bigger than they are, avoid using crappy quality and avoid pic collages. Those things are just nasty looking.
Typefaces, fonts in the common language. There are three fonts in the standard computer that you should never use and those are Comic Sans, Papyrus, and Zapfino. basically, these fonts are the trash and there is always a better option. Only excuse to use a comic sans is in the cartoons speak bubble. Any font like this makes you look unprofessional. You really have to think what is the message you what to give out.
Arial, all of you know how it looks right? It is one of the most common fonts that there is out there. But only because it is common, doesn’t mean that it is the best option for your slides. To give out more interesting and not to so average slideshow, use some other similar looking font like the Sintony here. Same goes for the Times New Roman - use Garamond Instead.
I don’t recommend using Serif fonts like TNR in presentations, but I will go over that in a sec. And if you think just for an extra second your font choice, it really makes a different. Don't go with the easiest choice. There are many free font options on the internet. Just search free fonts in Fontsquirrel, 1001fonts etc. Couple practical tips too; there is two kinds main font types, or font families. Serif, and Sans Serif, Sans Serif fonts are modern looking fonts without decorative finishes and easier to read. I recommend using Sans Serif fonts in presentation and in body text.
Mixing fonts and using space.
Serif and Sans Serif together usually create a nice contrast but in presentations limit the use sans in only headlines if necessary Never use more than three on the same page. Different cuts ( bold, italic, light) of the same font also counts. In the whole presentation, it can be more, don’t use more than three different fonts.
Space and its usage are what differentiates designers from other people. We work with space, and see it as part of the design As you can see from the picture, that by using white space over the headline I created a much more visually pleasing slide. there one overall rule for this; LESS IS MORE. and by that, I don't mean less space is better, but the other way around. Don’t over pack the slide with different elements, just keep it simple. Then it is more pleasing for the audience to adopt. Use space wisely, use it creatively. The empty space can be a very effective tool when used right.
Another thing about space is visual hierarchy. It is as simply it is where the eye is guided to go. So guide the eye where it needs to go. This case the headline even that is on the bottom of the paragraph. So make sure that the main point stands out.
One last thing about powerpoint presentations; Skip the stock template. This means also the standard headline - bullet points set up. You can also create your own template if you want to use one but you don’t necessary need a template at all. I didn’t use template to create a slideshow. Be creative, think outside of the box. Powerpoint is not a design program, but there is still lots of things you can do with it. Go and discover. But if you feel that it is easier for you to use a template, There are multiple websites that sell professional looking powerpoint templates like Graphic River.net
So here you go, guys. I hope this helps you to create better-looking presentations in future. All of the pictures were made by PowerPoint btw. I am off to bed now and won't be participating on next week's lectures or tasks since tomorrow the time you are reading this it is my first day in my dream job in Microsoft. Wish me luck!
Our group worked on the marketing plan, and we divided the task for three days, we did the basic work on Monday after the lecture and had a skype meeting on Tuesday. We completed our presentation on Thursday before the lecture.
So not much to tell about that. But the one thing I was super excited about this week was my lecture on Friday. I give out a lecture about "visuality and how to make your presentation better" in a LaureaES's Cambridge Venture Camp. This was kinda my first lecture ever. I have once given a lecture about photography but it was not so official and more like a friend to friends situation.
Have to say that I was freeking out, that nervous I was even that the audience was small, it felt huge! But all my preperations paid out, and spending hours to the presentation and thinking that what I want to say was not wasted.
I thought about sharing some of those points I made in that presentation for you guys.
So what is visuality?
Visuality is simply how things look. Things can look bad, they can look good, or they can look average. With bit of a visual touch, you can transform anything into something better. Usually, people don't care what they things look like or care to use that extra 10 seconds to find a better-looking option to something.
A visual eye is something that you practice, and my background in photography has come handy in my job. By having a photography as a hobby for 10 years I had already eye to visual things and what looks good before I even knew what typography meant. But the thing is that you don't have to have that visual eye to make your presentation look good, since there are some guidelines and do’s and don’ts to avoid the biggest mistakes and awful looking things. There are couple main things that you can impliment into any visual thing not only presentations.
The use of colors is the most important thing when thinking about visuality. Use colors that suit your business or your style. Don't use screaming red if you have a relaxing spa and so on. Also take into a consideration how suitable the color is for the eye, or how common the color is. I have talked about this earlier in my blog. Take little bit extra time when you choose your colors, tone them up or down a bit instead taking the easy way. There are lots of different sliders ( RGB, CMYK, WEB) in powerpoint to tune your colors or you can choose whichever color you want, so why use those ones that everyone else uses too? Also mind the contrast also when using colors.
There can be too much or too little of contrast and always make sure that your text is visible enough to been actually written when using colors on the background or negative texts. (negative text= white text on any other color) I don’t recommend to use more than 5 colors and that includes black and white. You should pick one main color and then up to three complimentary colors. There are many color palette tools on the internet, personally really like https://coolors.co it is particularly very great tool, if you have already one color picked out and are looking for the complimentary colors.
Typefaces, fonts in the common language. There are three fonts in the standard computer that you should never use and those are Comic Sans, Papyrus, and Zapfino. basically, these fonts are the trash and there is always a better option. Only excuse to use a comic sans is in the cartoons speak bubble. Any font like this makes you look unprofessional. You really have to think what is the message you what to give out.
Arial, all of you know how it looks right? It is one of the most common fonts that there is out there. But only because it is common, doesn’t mean that it is the best option for your slides. To give out more interesting and not to so average slideshow, use some other similar looking font like the Sintony here. Same goes for the Times New Roman - use Garamond Instead.
I don’t recommend using Serif fonts like TNR in presentations, but I will go over that in a sec. And if you think just for an extra second your font choice, it really makes a different. Don't go with the easiest choice. There are many free font options on the internet. Just search free fonts in Fontsquirrel, 1001fonts etc. Couple practical tips too; there is two kinds main font types, or font families. Serif, and Sans Serif, Sans Serif fonts are modern looking fonts without decorative finishes and easier to read. I recommend using Sans Serif fonts in presentation and in body text.
Mixing fonts and using space.
Serif and Sans Serif together usually create a nice contrast but in presentations limit the use sans in only headlines if necessary Never use more than three on the same page. Different cuts ( bold, italic, light) of the same font also counts. In the whole presentation, it can be more, don’t use more than three different fonts.
Space and its usage are what differentiates designers from other people. We work with space, and see it as part of the design As you can see from the picture, that by using white space over the headline I created a much more visually pleasing slide. there one overall rule for this; LESS IS MORE. and by that, I don't mean less space is better, but the other way around. Don’t over pack the slide with different elements, just keep it simple. Then it is more pleasing for the audience to adopt. Use space wisely, use it creatively. The empty space can be a very effective tool when used right.
Another thing about space is visual hierarchy. It is as simply it is where the eye is guided to go. So guide the eye where it needs to go. This case the headline even that is on the bottom of the paragraph. So make sure that the main point stands out.
One last thing about powerpoint presentations; Skip the stock template. This means also the standard headline - bullet points set up. You can also create your own template if you want to use one but you don’t necessary need a template at all. I didn’t use template to create a slideshow. Be creative, think outside of the box. Powerpoint is not a design program, but there is still lots of things you can do with it. Go and discover. But if you feel that it is easier for you to use a template, There are multiple websites that sell professional looking powerpoint templates like Graphic River.net
So here you go, guys. I hope this helps you to create better-looking presentations in future. All of the pictures were made by PowerPoint btw. I am off to bed now and won't be participating on next week's lectures or tasks since tomorrow the time you are reading this it is my first day in my dream job in Microsoft. Wish me luck!
maanantai 27. maaliskuuta 2017
Things we should have had ages ago
Last week was short for me since I took part in only two lectures on Monday.
The first lecture that we had was from Laurea alumni who works currently in digital marketing. She went over the first parts of inbound marketing; how to attract the customer to your website. The lecture was very informative and included lots of different things. It was also bit long and hard to follow due to the amount of the information. Anyways, I enjoyed the lecture a lot, but think that this should have been more in the starting end of the course to be most efficient and useful in our projects.
The first part of inbound marketing act is setting up an SEO for your site. She explained to us how SEO works; google searches throughout the websites and which one response fastest is displayed highest. By response, It means how much there are keywords, how many other places has to link to that page. That difference is called offsite and onsite SEO. Onsite counts all the meta descriptions and headings etc. and offsite tracks how many other sites refer to that site.
She also showed us the difference between paid and organic traffic, where the SEO falls into the organic traffic and all the adds are the paid ones. (duh) All the links, shares, and SEO etc. anything that you do to make it easier to people to find your page is organic traffic. The easiest way to do is to share your blog in your social medias like facebook, Instagram, and twitter, have the link in your bio, so when people visit your profile they find the link to your blog. Also sharing your posts makes people come over to your page. There are over 100 million people who have a chance to visit your page, so start sharing it.
And when you get a visitor, make sure that they enjoy your page, that it looks nice and that you post quality content. Because If you have been successful to attract your customers to this point, you don’t want to lose it by a crappy website when you just got them to go there. This is the first part of the inbound marketing, the customer attraction and that should be the main focus on inbound marketing. Then how do you get strangest into visitors? By collecting data, she told, and making buyer personas out of that data, and then marketing to that target group.
Next, she spoke about two types of advertising on the internet. There is different kind of adds depending do you want to make a sale or branding. SEO and the SERP advertising is used when you want to make a sale, but google advertising is most likely used when you want to grow your brand, and do branding. The link grades are not that good, but the customer can still google you later after seen the add if it is good enough to gain attention and hits its target group. She showed us how to use google AdWords to create campaigns. Google AdWords works simply way; when the user makes a search in the same field, google shows your add and you only pay for the clicks you get. I won’t go into details how AdWords works since it is complex to use and actually available only for business so you can’t try it just for funsies and there is a ton of different tutorial on the internet to show you how to use it step by step when you actually need to do it.
We also had a lecture from Vesa Robertson, who I actually know before hand. He told us how to gain followers on twitter and how to use Crowdfire to do that.
He had many good points in his speech like to tweet regularly and to retweet actively relevant and interesting content, using hashtags and just being active. He also made a point out to make lists of hashtags and people whose content is most relevant and focus on those. He also made points that I don’t agree on.
First of all; I want to implement, that if you cannot say that you have 15000 followers when that is in a matter of fact scattered in five different accounts. Then the individual accounts have their own follower numbers.
Second, following 1000 people a day and unfollowing those who don’t follow you back is horrible twitter strategy for business. This might work on small scales, but it is giving out everything else but the professional look of your twitter account and if you follow near 10 000 people or any number that is higher that the follower number you currently have, people assume that you are a scam.
And overall, if someone follows you just because you follow them, they don’t care what you post. The engagement, the most important thing in social media IMO over the follower count is not there. You can clearly see this on his company’s Twitter when they have almost 9000 (no pun intended) followers but in every tweet has minimum engagement. Less that 10 likes and retweets. People don’t engage because they don’t care! Vesa also said to tweet often and they time their tweets in night times when the USA is awake, which I think is pretty smart. But if your content is not quality, it creates no value to the follower and then you get ghost followers that do nothing.
The only way I see that tactic is efficient is when you are following similar pages’ followers and actually have a content that interests them. There are other ways to that you can gain twitter following, like commenting and engaging with other users, you know, like using twitter to its original purpose, and by retweeting, liking and using hashtags. Here is a link that I have once linked in this post.
Other good tips
On Wednesday we had a team day like usual in Microsoft Flux, which is a co-working space in Helsinki City center. WE finished our presentation and the report is also almost ready! I and my teammate Silver were supposed to give the presentation, but unfortunately, I had a migraine that morning. I have a migraine with aura, so I am lucky that I know before hand when I am getting an attack. It usually starts with a small fussy ball in my eye area and then evolves into a half circle. I was just done my makeup when I noticed it so I was a bit pissed about it. This weekend has been just stretching and relaxing and trying to get out of this migraine cycle. Which would probably be easier if I when to bed early…
The first part of inbound marketing act is setting up an SEO for your site. She explained to us how SEO works; google searches throughout the websites and which one response fastest is displayed highest. By response, It means how much there are keywords, how many other places has to link to that page. That difference is called offsite and onsite SEO. Onsite counts all the meta descriptions and headings etc. and offsite tracks how many other sites refer to that site.
She also showed us the difference between paid and organic traffic, where the SEO falls into the organic traffic and all the adds are the paid ones. (duh) All the links, shares, and SEO etc. anything that you do to make it easier to people to find your page is organic traffic. The easiest way to do is to share your blog in your social medias like facebook, Instagram, and twitter, have the link in your bio, so when people visit your profile they find the link to your blog. Also sharing your posts makes people come over to your page. There are over 100 million people who have a chance to visit your page, so start sharing it.
And when you get a visitor, make sure that they enjoy your page, that it looks nice and that you post quality content. Because If you have been successful to attract your customers to this point, you don’t want to lose it by a crappy website when you just got them to go there. This is the first part of the inbound marketing, the customer attraction and that should be the main focus on inbound marketing. Then how do you get strangest into visitors? By collecting data, she told, and making buyer personas out of that data, and then marketing to that target group.
Next, she spoke about two types of advertising on the internet. There is different kind of adds depending do you want to make a sale or branding. SEO and the SERP advertising is used when you want to make a sale, but google advertising is most likely used when you want to grow your brand, and do branding. The link grades are not that good, but the customer can still google you later after seen the add if it is good enough to gain attention and hits its target group. She showed us how to use google AdWords to create campaigns. Google AdWords works simply way; when the user makes a search in the same field, google shows your add and you only pay for the clicks you get. I won’t go into details how AdWords works since it is complex to use and actually available only for business so you can’t try it just for funsies and there is a ton of different tutorial on the internet to show you how to use it step by step when you actually need to do it.
We also had a lecture from Vesa Robertson, who I actually know before hand. He told us how to gain followers on twitter and how to use Crowdfire to do that.
He had many good points in his speech like to tweet regularly and to retweet actively relevant and interesting content, using hashtags and just being active. He also made a point out to make lists of hashtags and people whose content is most relevant and focus on those. He also made points that I don’t agree on.
First of all; I want to implement, that if you cannot say that you have 15000 followers when that is in a matter of fact scattered in five different accounts. Then the individual accounts have their own follower numbers.
Second, following 1000 people a day and unfollowing those who don’t follow you back is horrible twitter strategy for business. This might work on small scales, but it is giving out everything else but the professional look of your twitter account and if you follow near 10 000 people or any number that is higher that the follower number you currently have, people assume that you are a scam.
And overall, if someone follows you just because you follow them, they don’t care what you post. The engagement, the most important thing in social media IMO over the follower count is not there. You can clearly see this on his company’s Twitter when they have almost 9000 (no pun intended) followers but in every tweet has minimum engagement. Less that 10 likes and retweets. People don’t engage because they don’t care! Vesa also said to tweet often and they time their tweets in night times when the USA is awake, which I think is pretty smart. But if your content is not quality, it creates no value to the follower and then you get ghost followers that do nothing.
The only way I see that tactic is efficient is when you are following similar pages’ followers and actually have a content that interests them. There are other ways to that you can gain twitter following, like commenting and engaging with other users, you know, like using twitter to its original purpose, and by retweeting, liking and using hashtags. Here is a link that I have once linked in this post.
Other good tips
On Wednesday we had a team day like usual in Microsoft Flux, which is a co-working space in Helsinki City center. WE finished our presentation and the report is also almost ready! I and my teammate Silver were supposed to give the presentation, but unfortunately, I had a migraine that morning. I have a migraine with aura, so I am lucky that I know before hand when I am getting an attack. It usually starts with a small fussy ball in my eye area and then evolves into a half circle. I was just done my makeup when I noticed it so I was a bit pissed about it. This weekend has been just stretching and relaxing and trying to get out of this migraine cycle. Which would probably be easier if I when to bed early…
maanantai 20. maaliskuuta 2017
Influencing is the future
This week has been about influencers, how to become one and how to work with one. We had a visit to marketing agency TBWA, and two lectures from Ilkka Kurkela and Riikka from communication agency Drum. All of them told us something about influencer marketing.
The “normal” marketing, the outbound marketing is still popular but in the growing amounts, it is getting ignored more and more. This week it made very clear to us that the old ways are not the way to go in 2017. People don’t trust advertising that is done the old way as much as use to do. Quality over quantity is how you market and target people these days.
I was looking forward to the TBWA visit since it only 10 min walk away from my place instead of the normal 45 mins that I use to travel in school days. I really love Helsinki city center and even more the south Helsinki where I live so it very refreshing and definitely more inspiring to have a school day in Helsinki instead of dark and stale class room.
So What does marketing agency do these days? Definitely, no tv adds, they said. Two of the TBWA’s company employees gave us an hour presentation about the work they do and what is currently the state of the marketing industry. TBWA is the most internationally awarded marketing agency in Finland and they have over 100 employees. They do marketing in an example for Nissan, VR, Tieto, Fortum and Neste, which the last they had prepared a show case for us.
They showed us a couple videos which they made with Prince Ea, an youtuber, activist, and an influencer. Neste, when they came to TBWA, suggested using a famous actor like Penelope Cruz for the add, but the TBWA had a different idea. Prince Ea, is really a good choice for this campaign since he has a really efficient way to speak. His speak has a sense of drama but is still very addictive and inspiring to listen to. After researching him further, I realized that I have seen his videos before, like one below. This particular video when viral and has reached millions of people. (I could rant about the subject of the video for ages, but I choose not to now. But I do agree on every bit of what he is saying)
With this campaign Neste hit the global markets and they did it by content creating and trying to go viral. They set standards for greener and better future of any kind from fuels to education and produce lots of interesting content about it. They write a blog and produce videos about different subjects. By doing this marketing, which is recognizably inbound marketing, they make their way into the people’s knowledge. Filled with beautiful video and photography about nature with the effective voice from Prince Ea, they have created successful and impressive pieces.
In my opinion, this is inbound marketing in its fullest potential. What TBWA taught us was that marketing in TV and other sorts of places like that is old fashioned, and will not carry you very far anymore. It is not about advertising, everything is about services these days. The worlds biggest market place owns no product, biggest taxi company owns no car and biggest accommodation company owns no apartments.
Also, marketing has changed. People don’t view the adds the same way they use to, or even as long that they use to. This is partially the information overloads fault. 20 years ago, the internet was not a big thing yet and people only saw advertising in magazines, TV or printed out in the street view. All of those still exists, but people shut their eyes from them. Or how many tv adds can you remember that you have seen this past week? Versus how many blogposts or pictures posted by influencers do you remember? And the most important, not to only remember but which did bring more value to you? In inbound marketing, it is important to create quality content that is still relevant and current. I spoke about inbound marketing last week.
Another interesting project they had done was for Helsinki’s police force, and for completely free. The purpose of the campaign was to lower the threshold to report and intervene with domestic violence. They did this just before Christmas hoping it would have a decreasing effect on increasing domestic violence around that time.
On Thursday we continued on the same subject and had Riikka from communication company called Drum to come to speak to us about influencer marketing. I found this lecture very interesting but was a tiny bit disappointed in her examples of influencers these days. She used examples like lifestyle or interior design bloggers, aged about 35+. Which for me, was funny, since most of your glass room is between ages 20-25. She did realize this herself when she asked us to raise your hand if we were a certain age, but made still no examples of more influencer people like Youtube celebrities or Instagram famous people in Finland, that tend to get the attention of the young and young-minded. Your young might be now the 20% of the population, but they are 100% of your future and if influencers are the way to market to them, you can presume a huge growth in this business. Right now is the best time to do influencer marketing, since is is popular among the audience, but not too many marketers proceed to do it yet. Influencer marketing is a good option, for example, new brands and products.
Riikka mentioned four great reasons why influencer marketing should be used;
1. It goes straight from influencer to audience
When an influencer posts a sponsored photo for example in Instagram, it goes straight to the X amount of followers they have. If you pay for add in Instagram, yes, it might as well reach same amount of people, but not most of those people are nearly as interested in the add than they would be in the sponsored post.
2. It gets noticed
Same as above, the target group is easier to select when using influencer marketing. As Riikka stated, not every who reads interior magazine is going to even thing buying your product, but the amount is significantly higher when influencer makes an add or sponsored post in their interior blog.
3. It feels trustworthy
People trust celebrities and they trust other people over brands. People tend to buy what is recommended to them by someone they know, or don’t know. A good example of this is something that I caught myself from doing yesterday. I was in the store to buy something easy to eat. I am a very bad cook and even lazier when it comes to doing the dishes. The meaning of that I was intending to buy a pizza from the freezer, instead of making food by myself, because that would require me to actually clean my cooking pan… Anyway, I was standing there wondering which of the freezer pizzas where the best one, I don’t usually eat those so I had no clue what was good and what is not, when a woman, about my age, goes by me, grabs a pizza from the freezer, and walks away. I ended up buying the same pizza because I thought that if she likes it, I might as well. (it was awful)
4. Presence without setting up an own account
Having and updating a social media account can be very time consuming for a brand, so by influencer marketing you are using the platform for marketing without actually doing the work by yourself. And for starting brands and their social media accounts influencer marketing in the same platform is very effective way to gain followers in the first place.
Forbes article about influencer marketing that I found very interesting.
On the same day, we had also a lecture from former teacher and creator of the current course, Ilkka Kurkela. His lecture didn’t really bring anything new to my knowledge but it was pleasant to listen to. He spoke about growth hacking, and I do know what that means, just don’t expect me to answer to that after 4 hours sleep the night before (which ended up me to have a migraine later that day), and had to say that I was not the sharpest on that hour. I fight to urge to fall asleep in the lectures because I tend to speak when I sleep.
I was really disappointed when I heard that Ilkka is no longer teaching this course, because I had heard so good thing about him. He did briefly go over some social media tools, which I would have hoped we would have had more lectures about. So far we have had personal branding -, video- or inspirational lectures. I can think so many other things that would be beneficial for this course like how to build a good LinkedIn page, social media for companies, marketing in social media, and how about a lecture about what makes a good website (not just grates) and a wild idea that I had, why we are not required to comment on each others posts? A short introduction to feedback giving could be also useful before that but I do read other peoples blogs, and I am sure than others do mine. So let’s say, that If you leave a comment on my blog, I will leave comment on yours. We do get feedback from the coaches, but that is only one opinion. I think leaving and reading comments could actually improve this blogging experience greatly. And it would make us better at giving feedback and that is skill to have in the workplace that they don't teach in schools, right?
The “normal” marketing, the outbound marketing is still popular but in the growing amounts, it is getting ignored more and more. This week it made very clear to us that the old ways are not the way to go in 2017. People don’t trust advertising that is done the old way as much as use to do. Quality over quantity is how you market and target people these days.
I was looking forward to the TBWA visit since it only 10 min walk away from my place instead of the normal 45 mins that I use to travel in school days. I really love Helsinki city center and even more the south Helsinki where I live so it very refreshing and definitely more inspiring to have a school day in Helsinki instead of dark and stale class room.
So What does marketing agency do these days? Definitely, no tv adds, they said. Two of the TBWA’s company employees gave us an hour presentation about the work they do and what is currently the state of the marketing industry. TBWA is the most internationally awarded marketing agency in Finland and they have over 100 employees. They do marketing in an example for Nissan, VR, Tieto, Fortum and Neste, which the last they had prepared a show case for us.
They showed us a couple videos which they made with Prince Ea, an youtuber, activist, and an influencer. Neste, when they came to TBWA, suggested using a famous actor like Penelope Cruz for the add, but the TBWA had a different idea. Prince Ea, is really a good choice for this campaign since he has a really efficient way to speak. His speak has a sense of drama but is still very addictive and inspiring to listen to. After researching him further, I realized that I have seen his videos before, like one below. This particular video when viral and has reached millions of people. (I could rant about the subject of the video for ages, but I choose not to now. But I do agree on every bit of what he is saying)
With this campaign Neste hit the global markets and they did it by content creating and trying to go viral. They set standards for greener and better future of any kind from fuels to education and produce lots of interesting content about it. They write a blog and produce videos about different subjects. By doing this marketing, which is recognizably inbound marketing, they make their way into the people’s knowledge. Filled with beautiful video and photography about nature with the effective voice from Prince Ea, they have created successful and impressive pieces.
In my opinion, this is inbound marketing in its fullest potential. What TBWA taught us was that marketing in TV and other sorts of places like that is old fashioned, and will not carry you very far anymore. It is not about advertising, everything is about services these days. The worlds biggest market place owns no product, biggest taxi company owns no car and biggest accommodation company owns no apartments.
Also, marketing has changed. People don’t view the adds the same way they use to, or even as long that they use to. This is partially the information overloads fault. 20 years ago, the internet was not a big thing yet and people only saw advertising in magazines, TV or printed out in the street view. All of those still exists, but people shut their eyes from them. Or how many tv adds can you remember that you have seen this past week? Versus how many blogposts or pictures posted by influencers do you remember? And the most important, not to only remember but which did bring more value to you? In inbound marketing, it is important to create quality content that is still relevant and current. I spoke about inbound marketing last week.
Another interesting project they had done was for Helsinki’s police force, and for completely free. The purpose of the campaign was to lower the threshold to report and intervene with domestic violence. They did this just before Christmas hoping it would have a decreasing effect on increasing domestic violence around that time.
On Thursday we continued on the same subject and had Riikka from communication company called Drum to come to speak to us about influencer marketing. I found this lecture very interesting but was a tiny bit disappointed in her examples of influencers these days. She used examples like lifestyle or interior design bloggers, aged about 35+. Which for me, was funny, since most of your glass room is between ages 20-25. She did realize this herself when she asked us to raise your hand if we were a certain age, but made still no examples of more influencer people like Youtube celebrities or Instagram famous people in Finland, that tend to get the attention of the young and young-minded. Your young might be now the 20% of the population, but they are 100% of your future and if influencers are the way to market to them, you can presume a huge growth in this business. Right now is the best time to do influencer marketing, since is is popular among the audience, but not too many marketers proceed to do it yet. Influencer marketing is a good option, for example, new brands and products.
Riikka mentioned four great reasons why influencer marketing should be used;
1. It goes straight from influencer to audience
When an influencer posts a sponsored photo for example in Instagram, it goes straight to the X amount of followers they have. If you pay for add in Instagram, yes, it might as well reach same amount of people, but not most of those people are nearly as interested in the add than they would be in the sponsored post.
2. It gets noticed
Same as above, the target group is easier to select when using influencer marketing. As Riikka stated, not every who reads interior magazine is going to even thing buying your product, but the amount is significantly higher when influencer makes an add or sponsored post in their interior blog.
3. It feels trustworthy
People trust celebrities and they trust other people over brands. People tend to buy what is recommended to them by someone they know, or don’t know. A good example of this is something that I caught myself from doing yesterday. I was in the store to buy something easy to eat. I am a very bad cook and even lazier when it comes to doing the dishes. The meaning of that I was intending to buy a pizza from the freezer, instead of making food by myself, because that would require me to actually clean my cooking pan… Anyway, I was standing there wondering which of the freezer pizzas where the best one, I don’t usually eat those so I had no clue what was good and what is not, when a woman, about my age, goes by me, grabs a pizza from the freezer, and walks away. I ended up buying the same pizza because I thought that if she likes it, I might as well. (it was awful)
4. Presence without setting up an own account
Having and updating a social media account can be very time consuming for a brand, so by influencer marketing you are using the platform for marketing without actually doing the work by yourself. And for starting brands and their social media accounts influencer marketing in the same platform is very effective way to gain followers in the first place.
Forbes article about influencer marketing that I found very interesting.
On the same day, we had also a lecture from former teacher and creator of the current course, Ilkka Kurkela. His lecture didn’t really bring anything new to my knowledge but it was pleasant to listen to. He spoke about growth hacking, and I do know what that means, just don’t expect me to answer to that after 4 hours sleep the night before (which ended up me to have a migraine later that day), and had to say that I was not the sharpest on that hour. I fight to urge to fall asleep in the lectures because I tend to speak when I sleep.
I was really disappointed when I heard that Ilkka is no longer teaching this course, because I had heard so good thing about him. He did briefly go over some social media tools, which I would have hoped we would have had more lectures about. So far we have had personal branding -, video- or inspirational lectures. I can think so many other things that would be beneficial for this course like how to build a good LinkedIn page, social media for companies, marketing in social media, and how about a lecture about what makes a good website (not just grates) and a wild idea that I had, why we are not required to comment on each others posts? A short introduction to feedback giving could be also useful before that but I do read other peoples blogs, and I am sure than others do mine. So let’s say, that If you leave a comment on my blog, I will leave comment on yours. We do get feedback from the coaches, but that is only one opinion. I think leaving and reading comments could actually improve this blogging experience greatly. And it would make us better at giving feedback and that is skill to have in the workplace that they don't teach in schools, right?
maanantai 13. maaliskuuta 2017
I am too tired to title this.
Hello there, its blog time again. And this might be my longest blog yet, so stick with me, buddies.
We started our Monday morning in the usual way, a lecture in Otaniemi. This time the guest lecturer was Aida Hubanic, a mentor, and a motivator.
The siege of Sarajevo lasted all the way to early 1996. During that time 11 500 citizens were killed and 50 000 injured. One of them being Aida’s brother. To know more about her story I read the Apu article she mentioned from couple years back.
She and her family came to Finland to get the medical healthcare the siblings needed. They originally planned to stay only couple years but never moved back to Sarajevo.
There are currently wars going on in our world, and I think someone us forget about that, what is really like. I went for a walk yesterday because it was so sunny and warm, and when I came back to central Helsinki, I saw the “Rajat kiinni”- protest. It almost ruined my day and makes me so sick that some people can be so close-minded and straight on racist.
Aida told us how she came up with her story and her identity in a kitchen table. She had experienced more than rest of us by that age but turned those experiences to her resources. While thinking out her own story, she developed her method of mentoring, a tool, the 3E puzzle. Explore, expand, execute.
Explore different parts of your life, expand those parts and dreams to goals, and then execute those plans. This leads her to stabilize her own company and start giving inspirational speaks and motive people.
The week rolled on, we gathered to work on the SSM project in Microsoft Flux. we had quite productive day and good pizza too! On Thursday I participated in the E-commerce fair in Messukeskus. I registered as an AD from LaureaES as I usually do, so I got the ticket really easily. I optimized my time and listened to three speeches in a row since I was also helping out on LaureaES’s Pitch& Beer - event that evening. Luckily for me, those three were also the most interesting ones.
I got much out of the talks, not only for me and my personal interest, but also I learned a lot of information which will be valuable in our SSM project.
Keinot maksimoida verkkokauppasi asiakasmäärä By Maiju Fernelius, director of mail & direct marketing services in Posti Oy.
I founded this speak to be very useful for our SSM project. But out of the 30 minutes she spoke, she spoke only 5 minutes about web shops and how to maximize the customer flow. The focus on her speech was on how effective direct marketing really is. And that was the main way to “maximize the customer flow” which I think was very one-sided view of the subject. And since she even works for a Posti, the mail company, I don’t think that she should talk about web shops, since she can only bring one opinion to the table.
They make a study about how people actually remember advertising spontaneously. They studied which companies advertising do Finns remember to hear or seen in a past week. They didn’t tell name any companies or products, so the study would reliable as possible. In the results they got, the shops were more remembered and 25 out of 30 were either shops like Prisma, H&M or web shops like Zalando and Verkkokauppa.com.
Their research also showed that the direct unaddressed marketing via mail was the most remembered ( 55% ) following the email newsletter second (50%) and printed newspaper third 44%. Internet was the seventh and only 31% of people remembered advertising from the internet, 24% from social media.
The direct marketing is seen as the most pleasant way of marketing, whereas online advertising can be annoying and most of the ad blocker users are Diginatives like myself.
The UKs Royal Mail made a similar study lasting 18 months called The private life of mail. Key results by her opinion where that direct marketing is really the most effective one. It has many places in your home and if not thrown away immediately, it can travel inside of the house for months. Also Canadas post made a similar study were they stated that customer process and remember best the message and the marketer of direct add and that those adds are both, processed quicker and actually make the customer act on it.
She told about case example of website Dick Johnson, who sells mans cosmetics and hygiene products. The results were great; right after they advertised in Postinen (that orange annoying leaflet you get every week) their websites visitors doubled. They also included a promo code in the add and said that they got orders with that code even a month after the release of the add. She also stated couple main points of good add; a Good deal, interesting for the customer aka found the right target group, and visually pleasing.
But the website stuff?
She pointed three main things
1. Plan well the content of your add and your target group
2. Choose channels which support your goals
3. Track the results and repeat. The campaign usually works best In many channels.
The next speech I listened was about creating a great customer experience by using high-quality content by Daniel Lambert-Kryss from InRiver. I was super interested in this speech since I have talked about the importance of quality content before. But I was disappointed, because he spoke very fast, so it was actually pretty hard for me to keep track of all what he said while making notes. This speech was not as interesting than the two other since he didn’t really talk about the topic. His point of bit off and mostly he talked about micro-moments how it is not about products or services anymore it is about moments. People don’t buy the stuff, they buy the moment. In this time of internet, 90% of people purchase across screens and for 82% mobile is a shopping assistant.
His lecture was a bit confusing in my point of view, - and my notes too, but what I got out of his lecture that to archive a quality content and user-friendly content you need to build up a story. Every product tells a story, everything is a product and it is about how you tell it if it is quality or not if it is interesting or not. And nowadays it's more about user experience than product experience. I am not sure what he meant by product experience, his lecture was clearly targeted for someone deeper in a marketing scene than I am...
He also talked about The customer challenge, when a company has 5 – 10 different channels where they meet the customer and where they have to represent themselves.
10 rules of inbound marketing
This was the by far most inspiring lecture I have listened in this spring. I actually made 5(!) pages of notes. It was by Jarkko Kurvinen, author or B2B markkinoinnin & myynnin pelikirja (Guidebook to B2B marketing & Sales)
1. Understand your customer
Anymore there isn’t only news, where you get the information around the world. Social media is the place where you read about what is going on in the world and this leaves the original medias, newspapers, and tv-channels in crisis. Original medias to battle for their existence. Every one of us carries a media tool in their pocket and everyone can become a media. We as starting to live a new dark age when there is so much information available but not a way telling if it is true or not. And the battle of clicks and that way income is getting more and more ridiculous, with even the big newspapers to write click bait headlines to gain attention. Existence is measured by likes and clicks these days. And when everything is happening now, and all the time 24/7/365 the old medias cannot compete.
The everything right now – attitude has lead the companies and selling as a concept in a crisis. There is a problem when a company serves the customer in the company’s terms, not in customers terms. Customers want to be served when it is optimal for them and the way they what. Meaning that the buying has become a self-service. As millennials and generation after us grow older the amount of population who wants to be served online changes. So the big movement that companies have to make is from company centric to customer centric. This does not only apply to online companies and services but it's also happening in the traditional stores. People go to those stores which serve them when the customer wants to be served. For example, I am from a small city called Varkaus, in northern Savonia. In there, most of the “actual” coffee shops close at 5 pm. Still, I see the only coffee place that is open until 8 or 9 pm full of people after 5 pm. The most tragicomic are that most of these coffee shop owners then complain that they don’t make enough money on the daytime… Well, I wonder why. The most of the potential customers are in working age, meaning that they are working in the hours that the coffee shops are open.
What inbound marketing have to do with being the customer centric and available? Inbound marketing was first introduced by Seth Godin in his book in the 90s. Inbound marketing basically means that the content that company produces changes from annoying marketing (Finnish: tyrkytyksestä) to a provider of value. And inbound marketing is basically providing certain aspects to the customer to find, building up a brand and reputation. This means social media, SEO, PR, earned media etc. It’s the content, a hook, something that attracts the customer in the playfield. But the downloaded PDF doesn’t still mean that they are ready to buy anything.There is a difference between marketing-ready and buying-ready customer. What you need to do is to deepen the relationship by offering relevant content.
In companies, there is usually a deep hole between marketing and sales, and it should not be that way, Jarkko states. Their biggest problem is the communication, and the word “lead” which is a key part of both of they process, might mean totally different for other. Marketing catches the potential customer, turns them to customers by providing interesting content and then forwards them to sales when they are ready to buy.
He also talked about buyer personas and how they affect customer’s choices. The biggest difference between B2B and B2C buyer personas is the difference in decision making. In B2B there might be multiple processes and people. In B2B, inbound marketing should involve customer’s problems, hotspots that gain attention; the trends and other viral things but still make it personal and differentiate the content for the customer. IN B2C it is important to find out the motives and the hidden motives. Meaning that customers have different needs, they can be compelling, planned or woken, which the last is the most important for the marketer. The most decisions are made by emotions as we all know by now, but it is about how to get to customer chance their needs. By making the buyer personas, companies can actually talk to customers as they were unique by grouping them. And when a company knows the buyer process it is easier to personally affect the customers and help them.
2. Help, don’t push
Kurvinen used a great example of the Finnish marketing guru Jari Parantainen, who decided that he is not going to make any phone calls to customers, the customers are going to call him. He has a blog, called, Pölli tästä where he writes about producing, and has made himself a source of value. He speaks about customer’s problems, not his. Customers don’t give a crap about someone else’s problems. What they are interested are their own problems. So provide a content that is intriguing for the customer and as said above Inbound marketing means that the content that company provides.
3. Lead with customer centricity aka bring value with every meeting
Cold calling is dead. The goal is to leave the customer with an image that the company is easy to find in different contexts with a interesting and useful content. This in done by providing useful, customer centric content. Company blogs are the most used way of doing this. But there is different parts of the customer journey and the company should be available to offer something for every part of the journey to prevent the customer fallout. And this works like a funnel, where the most content provided on the beginning of the customer journey. That materials purpose is to wake the needs of the potential customers.
4. Leave the jargon.
If you don’t the topic very good, you may hide it in the jargon talk, which to the customer, signals that this company has to be avoided when they don’t understand the jargon. According to Kurvinen; jargon talk is what is same for the unsure people and people who are full of themselves. So talk in customer’s language and about topics that interest them. The customers follow the one who says it the most interesting and easy to understand way. The content can make all the sorts of way. He used a company called http://www.houston-inc.com/ Houston Inc. as an example since they even make their own series of videos about life inside the company. The content doesn’t have to be blog, it can be also infographics, videos, podcast, anyway something audio-visual since this that is the most common and easiest way to actually consume information.
5. Build a brand
You are as good as your latest action. And your competitor in only in next browser tab. The customers don’t differentiate you from your competitors. You have to know the basics; communication trough to how to make yourself to stand out, but there is more than that. Your brand is equal to your user experience and if you have succeeded, you know it because then your customers are your best marketing force. They recommend you and you should use those. Show, don’t tell. Nobody is interested in what you say you can do, but in what you have shown that you can do. The better you can plan and execute the value bringing customer interactions, the stronger is your brand going to be.
6. Become a media
For a example he used their own project Toinen Mielipide. were they created a fuss and big thing in three weeks just by promoting it on social media. By this they wanted to become a priory source of information for their customers. To become a filter for the information that is out there and just refine the best pieces for your customers. You can take a new aspect fro customer stories, bring out your persona, fill it with the emotion and share the best tips and ticks for customer; don’t just do it for the image. If you want to stand out from the crowd, make thing that interests your followers, build interesting stories and the most important; help your customers to succeed.
Unfortunately, he had to rush through the end of his presentation because the time limit they had on the fair so he didn’t have time to explain the rest four rules.
7. Play with emotion
8. Challenge the customer
9. Lead the money process aka smash up the marketing and sales
10. Use personal brands
The webinar about these rules can be listened here. I unfortunately, didn’t have the time to actually listen to that this week. If the blog seemed a bit chaotic, I recommend watching that webinar, since there is lots of information on this blog that will be easier to understand if you have some knowledge what I am talking about.
Here, I salute you if you made it to the end because of even I and now too tired to read it all over again. These blogs are quite time-consuming, I started around 6 pm. Oopsie. Luckily, we have a company visit tomorrow, located in the same street than my apartment so I can sleep the usual 45 min that I would be traveling to school. zzz
We started our Monday morning in the usual way, a lecture in Otaniemi. This time the guest lecturer was Aida Hubanic, a mentor, and a motivator.
The breakup of Yugoslavia occurred as a result of a series of political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s. After a period of political crisis in the 1980s, constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart, but the unsolved issues caused bitter inter-ethnic Yugoslav wars. The wars primarily affected Bosnia and Croatia… Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992 and received international recognition the following month on April 6, 1992. On the same date, the Serbs responded by declaring the independence of the Republika Srpska and laying siege to Sarajevo which marked the start of the Bosnian War
The siege of Sarajevo lasted all the way to early 1996. During that time 11 500 citizens were killed and 50 000 injured. One of them being Aida’s brother. To know more about her story I read the Apu article she mentioned from couple years back.
She and her family came to Finland to get the medical healthcare the siblings needed. They originally planned to stay only couple years but never moved back to Sarajevo.
There are currently wars going on in our world, and I think someone us forget about that, what is really like. I went for a walk yesterday because it was so sunny and warm, and when I came back to central Helsinki, I saw the “Rajat kiinni”- protest. It almost ruined my day and makes me so sick that some people can be so close-minded and straight on racist.
Aida told us how she came up with her story and her identity in a kitchen table. She had experienced more than rest of us by that age but turned those experiences to her resources. While thinking out her own story, she developed her method of mentoring, a tool, the 3E puzzle. Explore, expand, execute.
Explore different parts of your life, expand those parts and dreams to goals, and then execute those plans. This leads her to stabilize her own company and start giving inspirational speaks and motive people.
The week rolled on, we gathered to work on the SSM project in Microsoft Flux. we had quite productive day and good pizza too! On Thursday I participated in the E-commerce fair in Messukeskus. I registered as an AD from LaureaES as I usually do, so I got the ticket really easily. I optimized my time and listened to three speeches in a row since I was also helping out on LaureaES’s Pitch& Beer - event that evening. Luckily for me, those three were also the most interesting ones.
I got much out of the talks, not only for me and my personal interest, but also I learned a lot of information which will be valuable in our SSM project.
Keinot maksimoida verkkokauppasi asiakasmäärä By Maiju Fernelius, director of mail & direct marketing services in Posti Oy.
I founded this speak to be very useful for our SSM project. But out of the 30 minutes she spoke, she spoke only 5 minutes about web shops and how to maximize the customer flow. The focus on her speech was on how effective direct marketing really is. And that was the main way to “maximize the customer flow” which I think was very one-sided view of the subject. And since she even works for a Posti, the mail company, I don’t think that she should talk about web shops, since she can only bring one opinion to the table.
They make a study about how people actually remember advertising spontaneously. They studied which companies advertising do Finns remember to hear or seen in a past week. They didn’t tell name any companies or products, so the study would reliable as possible. In the results they got, the shops were more remembered and 25 out of 30 were either shops like Prisma, H&M or web shops like Zalando and Verkkokauppa.com.
Their research also showed that the direct unaddressed marketing via mail was the most remembered ( 55% ) following the email newsletter second (50%) and printed newspaper third 44%. Internet was the seventh and only 31% of people remembered advertising from the internet, 24% from social media.
The direct marketing is seen as the most pleasant way of marketing, whereas online advertising can be annoying and most of the ad blocker users are Diginatives like myself.
The UKs Royal Mail made a similar study lasting 18 months called The private life of mail. Key results by her opinion where that direct marketing is really the most effective one. It has many places in your home and if not thrown away immediately, it can travel inside of the house for months. Also Canadas post made a similar study were they stated that customer process and remember best the message and the marketer of direct add and that those adds are both, processed quicker and actually make the customer act on it.
She told about case example of website Dick Johnson, who sells mans cosmetics and hygiene products. The results were great; right after they advertised in Postinen (that orange annoying leaflet you get every week) their websites visitors doubled. They also included a promo code in the add and said that they got orders with that code even a month after the release of the add. She also stated couple main points of good add; a Good deal, interesting for the customer aka found the right target group, and visually pleasing.
But the website stuff?
She pointed three main things
1. Plan well the content of your add and your target group
2. Choose channels which support your goals
3. Track the results and repeat. The campaign usually works best In many channels.
The next speech I listened was about creating a great customer experience by using high-quality content by Daniel Lambert-Kryss from InRiver. I was super interested in this speech since I have talked about the importance of quality content before. But I was disappointed, because he spoke very fast, so it was actually pretty hard for me to keep track of all what he said while making notes. This speech was not as interesting than the two other since he didn’t really talk about the topic. His point of bit off and mostly he talked about micro-moments how it is not about products or services anymore it is about moments. People don’t buy the stuff, they buy the moment. In this time of internet, 90% of people purchase across screens and for 82% mobile is a shopping assistant.
"Micro-moments have fragmented the customer journey" - Google
His lecture was a bit confusing in my point of view, - and my notes too, but what I got out of his lecture that to archive a quality content and user-friendly content you need to build up a story. Every product tells a story, everything is a product and it is about how you tell it if it is quality or not if it is interesting or not. And nowadays it's more about user experience than product experience. I am not sure what he meant by product experience, his lecture was clearly targeted for someone deeper in a marketing scene than I am...
He also talked about The customer challenge, when a company has 5 – 10 different channels where they meet the customer and where they have to represent themselves.
10 rules of inbound marketing
This was the by far most inspiring lecture I have listened in this spring. I actually made 5(!) pages of notes. It was by Jarkko Kurvinen, author or B2B markkinoinnin & myynnin pelikirja (Guidebook to B2B marketing & Sales)
1. Understand your customer
Anymore there isn’t only news, where you get the information around the world. Social media is the place where you read about what is going on in the world and this leaves the original medias, newspapers, and tv-channels in crisis. Original medias to battle for their existence. Every one of us carries a media tool in their pocket and everyone can become a media. We as starting to live a new dark age when there is so much information available but not a way telling if it is true or not. And the battle of clicks and that way income is getting more and more ridiculous, with even the big newspapers to write click bait headlines to gain attention. Existence is measured by likes and clicks these days. And when everything is happening now, and all the time 24/7/365 the old medias cannot compete.
The everything right now – attitude has lead the companies and selling as a concept in a crisis. There is a problem when a company serves the customer in the company’s terms, not in customers terms. Customers want to be served when it is optimal for them and the way they what. Meaning that the buying has become a self-service. As millennials and generation after us grow older the amount of population who wants to be served online changes. So the big movement that companies have to make is from company centric to customer centric. This does not only apply to online companies and services but it's also happening in the traditional stores. People go to those stores which serve them when the customer wants to be served. For example, I am from a small city called Varkaus, in northern Savonia. In there, most of the “actual” coffee shops close at 5 pm. Still, I see the only coffee place that is open until 8 or 9 pm full of people after 5 pm. The most tragicomic are that most of these coffee shop owners then complain that they don’t make enough money on the daytime… Well, I wonder why. The most of the potential customers are in working age, meaning that they are working in the hours that the coffee shops are open.
What inbound marketing have to do with being the customer centric and available? Inbound marketing was first introduced by Seth Godin in his book in the 90s. Inbound marketing basically means that the content that company produces changes from annoying marketing (Finnish: tyrkytyksestä) to a provider of value. And inbound marketing is basically providing certain aspects to the customer to find, building up a brand and reputation. This means social media, SEO, PR, earned media etc. It’s the content, a hook, something that attracts the customer in the playfield. But the downloaded PDF doesn’t still mean that they are ready to buy anything.
In companies, there is usually a deep hole between marketing and sales, and it should not be that way, Jarkko states. Their biggest problem is the communication, and the word “lead” which is a key part of both of they process, might mean totally different for other. Marketing catches the potential customer, turns them to customers by providing interesting content and then forwards them to sales when they are ready to buy.
He also talked about buyer personas and how they affect customer’s choices. The biggest difference between B2B and B2C buyer personas is the difference in decision making. In B2B there might be multiple processes and people. In B2B, inbound marketing should involve customer’s problems, hotspots that gain attention; the trends and other viral things but still make it personal and differentiate the content for the customer. IN B2C it is important to find out the motives and the hidden motives. Meaning that customers have different needs, they can be compelling, planned or woken, which the last is the most important for the marketer. The most decisions are made by emotions as we all know by now, but it is about how to get to customer chance their needs. By making the buyer personas, companies can actually talk to customers as they were unique by grouping them. And when a company knows the buyer process it is easier to personally affect the customers and help them.
2. Help, don’t push
Kurvinen used a great example of the Finnish marketing guru Jari Parantainen, who decided that he is not going to make any phone calls to customers, the customers are going to call him. He has a blog, called, Pölli tästä where he writes about producing, and has made himself a source of value. He speaks about customer’s problems, not his. Customers don’t give a crap about someone else’s problems. What they are interested are their own problems. So provide a content that is intriguing for the customer and as said above Inbound marketing means that the content that company provides.
3. Lead with customer centricity aka bring value with every meeting
Cold calling is dead. The goal is to leave the customer with an image that the company is easy to find in different contexts with a interesting and useful content. This in done by providing useful, customer centric content. Company blogs are the most used way of doing this. But there is different parts of the customer journey and the company should be available to offer something for every part of the journey to prevent the customer fallout. And this works like a funnel, where the most content provided on the beginning of the customer journey. That materials purpose is to wake the needs of the potential customers.
4. Leave the jargon.
If you don’t the topic very good, you may hide it in the jargon talk, which to the customer, signals that this company has to be avoided when they don’t understand the jargon. According to Kurvinen; jargon talk is what is same for the unsure people and people who are full of themselves. So talk in customer’s language and about topics that interest them. The customers follow the one who says it the most interesting and easy to understand way. The content can make all the sorts of way. He used a company called http://www.houston-inc.com/ Houston Inc. as an example since they even make their own series of videos about life inside the company. The content doesn’t have to be blog, it can be also infographics, videos, podcast, anyway something audio-visual since this that is the most common and easiest way to actually consume information.
5. Build a brand
“sä olet yhtä hyvä kun sun viimesin teko” - Jarkko Kurvinen
You are as good as your latest action. And your competitor in only in next browser tab. The customers don’t differentiate you from your competitors. You have to know the basics; communication trough to how to make yourself to stand out, but there is more than that. Your brand is equal to your user experience and if you have succeeded, you know it because then your customers are your best marketing force. They recommend you and you should use those. Show, don’t tell. Nobody is interested in what you say you can do, but in what you have shown that you can do. The better you can plan and execute the value bringing customer interactions, the stronger is your brand going to be.
6. Become a media
For a example he used their own project Toinen Mielipide. were they created a fuss and big thing in three weeks just by promoting it on social media. By this they wanted to become a priory source of information for their customers. To become a filter for the information that is out there and just refine the best pieces for your customers. You can take a new aspect fro customer stories, bring out your persona, fill it with the emotion and share the best tips and ticks for customer; don’t just do it for the image. If you want to stand out from the crowd, make thing that interests your followers, build interesting stories and the most important; help your customers to succeed.
Unfortunately, he had to rush through the end of his presentation because the time limit they had on the fair so he didn’t have time to explain the rest four rules.
7. Play with emotion
8. Challenge the customer
9. Lead the money process aka smash up the marketing and sales
10. Use personal brands
The webinar about these rules can be listened here. I unfortunately, didn’t have the time to actually listen to that this week. If the blog seemed a bit chaotic, I recommend watching that webinar, since there is lots of information on this blog that will be easier to understand if you have some knowledge what I am talking about.
Here, I salute you if you made it to the end because of even I and now too tired to read it all over again. These blogs are quite time-consuming, I started around 6 pm. Oopsie. Luckily, we have a company visit tomorrow, located in the same street than my apartment so I can sleep the usual 45 min that I would be traveling to school. zzz
maanantai 6. maaliskuuta 2017
The law week
Last week has gone by very fast.
On Monday we had the first law lecture of this spring, the different legal systems all around the world. I don’t see any point to write about those since it has nothing to with the actual digital business course. Honestly I thought that we would learn more about legal things considering digital business and marketing in social media. As far as I see it there was only one task related to social media, for one group to do the presentation about advertising in blogs and finding about legal stuff you have to have in your web shop jurisdictions, cancelation forms and such. Useful, yes, but I think there could have been so much more, like about social media, which is one of the main points of this course.
There are no laws considering social media and our law system don’t know the word Social Media because as a subject it is still so new. In all actions discarding social media law wise we apply the overall rules about marketing and rules by Finnish law and each social media sites terms and conditions. Usually the terms and conditions are actually stricter than the Finnish law. But in Finnish law there is lots of different thing to consider online like consumer Protection Act, the law Unfair Business Practices, the personal data law, the electronic communications privacy law, copyright law, trademark law, the Employment Contracts law and criminal law. Most cases the the law about marketing against good taste is applied, for example something that if content online is racist, discriminatory or if it does approve content or act that is danger to the health.
Other big thing to consider is the adds, and they also need to be recognisable and and that is the biggest challenge in social media. Sponsoring content has been around more and more when platforms like Youtube rise. In Finnish law if you create content were you directly recommend the audience to buy the product or service you are talking about its an add. Also sponsored content must be visible and you can see this for example in Facebook or Instagram, when they put adds on your newsfeed, and Its might otherwise to mixed up with the content made by the people you follow.
Did you know by the way that like and share competitions are actually forbidden by Facebooks rules? Using personal timelines is not allowed and also you cannot make them like your page to participate. I haven’t seen like & share – competitions recently when more and more people actually know that is not actually allowed. But still I see it sometimes, for example from small companies and other places where there is not anyone professional to actually do the marketing.
About copyrights I have already written about, so link to that post here. But Just a short re-cap: everything that is in internet in made by somebody and if that someone has not given up their rights to the picture or other content, it is under their copyright. So the wrong way to credit pictures is anything that is not direct link. Source; internet, pinterest.com or google, is not legit and means that you did actually steal the picture. This is important because if we will grow up to be professionals in marketing, this is something we need to know, or we can get to trouble because of it. When you work for a company, you don’t represent only yourself online but also the company you work for. If you get caught for stealing pictures from online, how do you thing that will affect your working life?
But also considering personal branding, the person is protected against possible employers as by the about law about privacy in working life. Anything that your possible employer finds about you online that you have not provided to them, cannot affect their decision to hire you or not.
Also Its good to thing what you put online, because it can always be put in other contexts and made to way it makes you look bad. Take for a example what happened to Youtuber by alias Pewdiepie. He posts videos everyday, and I wonder how many hours had to the journalist from Wall Street Journal had to watch his videos to find enough jokes and them smash them together to make it look bad. This is not even the worst part of the journalist actions; they when to straight to Disney and other partners that he had, before they event publish the story of asked him for a comment. Very not cool. But the moral story of this is that anything that you put on internet can be put in the different contexts, can be altered to look bad, and it happens even to the most influential ones. In my option WSJ made the story to get clicks and then money, because Pewdiepies name brings in lots of clicks.
But anyway I thing we have pretty good law system here in Finland, as we have the Civil law system, we can trust law back as up. And the what I learned on Monday that you have to be careful when you make contracts with companies from other countries, because then everything that you don’t include in the contract is not binding and they can screw you up. But the civil law system is still not perfect, I think there is many things that need to fixed like longer sentences for rapist and murderers.
Other things considering, I had wonderful end for my week, when I went to judge Nuori Yrittäjyys – semifinals in shopping centre Kaari.
Nuori Yrittäjyys is a program for student were they can found a “practice” company and build up a business for a year. Totally byrocracy and tax free (up to 10 000€). I was part of this program in 2014 where me and my team mates actually won the semi-finals in Northen Savonia and gained a spot in the finals In Kajaani with 60 other NY-companies, so it was really interesting to see the fair as a alumni of the same program. It was also huge learning experience for me back then, and I was very excided when the opportunity opened up for me to actually judge the same competition that I was once part of.
Of course I was there behalf of LaureaES as a board member and bring in my knowledge about the startup culture to the judge table. http://uskallayrittaa.fi/ it was wonderful to see so many inspired and talented young minds. There were so many good ideas and working business that got their place in the finals is in Kamppi 19th to 20th of April, I recommend you to visit. This year is also the Suomi 100 – year so this year there is even more companies than there has previously been.
The sources I used to write this blospost;
http://www.kuulu.fi/blogi/sosiaalinen-media-ja-lainsaadanto/ http://kauppakamaritieto.fi.nelli.laurea.fi/fi/s/t/markkinointijuridiikka/
On Monday we had the first law lecture of this spring, the different legal systems all around the world. I don’t see any point to write about those since it has nothing to with the actual digital business course. Honestly I thought that we would learn more about legal things considering digital business and marketing in social media. As far as I see it there was only one task related to social media, for one group to do the presentation about advertising in blogs and finding about legal stuff you have to have in your web shop jurisdictions, cancelation forms and such. Useful, yes, but I think there could have been so much more, like about social media, which is one of the main points of this course.
There are no laws considering social media and our law system don’t know the word Social Media because as a subject it is still so new. In all actions discarding social media law wise we apply the overall rules about marketing and rules by Finnish law and each social media sites terms and conditions. Usually the terms and conditions are actually stricter than the Finnish law. But in Finnish law there is lots of different thing to consider online like consumer Protection Act, the law Unfair Business Practices, the personal data law, the electronic communications privacy law, copyright law, trademark law, the Employment Contracts law and criminal law. Most cases the the law about marketing against good taste is applied, for example something that if content online is racist, discriminatory or if it does approve content or act that is danger to the health.
Other big thing to consider is the adds, and they also need to be recognisable and and that is the biggest challenge in social media. Sponsoring content has been around more and more when platforms like Youtube rise. In Finnish law if you create content were you directly recommend the audience to buy the product or service you are talking about its an add. Also sponsored content must be visible and you can see this for example in Facebook or Instagram, when they put adds on your newsfeed, and Its might otherwise to mixed up with the content made by the people you follow.
Did you know by the way that like and share competitions are actually forbidden by Facebooks rules? Using personal timelines is not allowed and also you cannot make them like your page to participate. I haven’t seen like & share – competitions recently when more and more people actually know that is not actually allowed. But still I see it sometimes, for example from small companies and other places where there is not anyone professional to actually do the marketing.
About copyrights I have already written about, so link to that post here. But Just a short re-cap: everything that is in internet in made by somebody and if that someone has not given up their rights to the picture or other content, it is under their copyright. So the wrong way to credit pictures is anything that is not direct link. Source; internet, pinterest.com or google, is not legit and means that you did actually steal the picture. This is important because if we will grow up to be professionals in marketing, this is something we need to know, or we can get to trouble because of it. When you work for a company, you don’t represent only yourself online but also the company you work for. If you get caught for stealing pictures from online, how do you thing that will affect your working life?
But also considering personal branding, the person is protected against possible employers as by the about law about privacy in working life. Anything that your possible employer finds about you online that you have not provided to them, cannot affect their decision to hire you or not.
Also Its good to thing what you put online, because it can always be put in other contexts and made to way it makes you look bad. Take for a example what happened to Youtuber by alias Pewdiepie. He posts videos everyday, and I wonder how many hours had to the journalist from Wall Street Journal had to watch his videos to find enough jokes and them smash them together to make it look bad. This is not even the worst part of the journalist actions; they when to straight to Disney and other partners that he had, before they event publish the story of asked him for a comment. Very not cool. But the moral story of this is that anything that you put on internet can be put in the different contexts, can be altered to look bad, and it happens even to the most influential ones. In my option WSJ made the story to get clicks and then money, because Pewdiepies name brings in lots of clicks.
But anyway I thing we have pretty good law system here in Finland, as we have the Civil law system, we can trust law back as up. And the what I learned on Monday that you have to be careful when you make contracts with companies from other countries, because then everything that you don’t include in the contract is not binding and they can screw you up. But the civil law system is still not perfect, I think there is many things that need to fixed like longer sentences for rapist and murderers.
Other things considering, I had wonderful end for my week, when I went to judge Nuori Yrittäjyys – semifinals in shopping centre Kaari.
Had amazing time judging the #uskallayrittää semifinals these two days! So inspiring young minds! #suomi100 #nuoriyrittäjyys #laureaes— Suvi Lehtonen (@sswwiiful) 3. maaliskuuta 2017
Nuori Yrittäjyys is a program for student were they can found a “practice” company and build up a business for a year. Totally byrocracy and tax free (up to 10 000€). I was part of this program in 2014 where me and my team mates actually won the semi-finals in Northen Savonia and gained a spot in the finals In Kajaani with 60 other NY-companies, so it was really interesting to see the fair as a alumni of the same program. It was also huge learning experience for me back then, and I was very excided when the opportunity opened up for me to actually judge the same competition that I was once part of.
Of course I was there behalf of LaureaES as a board member and bring in my knowledge about the startup culture to the judge table. http://uskallayrittaa.fi/ it was wonderful to see so many inspired and talented young minds. There were so many good ideas and working business that got their place in the finals is in Kamppi 19th to 20th of April, I recommend you to visit. This year is also the Suomi 100 – year so this year there is even more companies than there has previously been.
The sources I used to write this blospost;
http://www.kuulu.fi/blogi/sosiaalinen-media-ja-lainsaadanto/ http://kauppakamaritieto.fi.nelli.laurea.fi/fi/s/t/markkinointijuridiikka/
maanantai 27. helmikuuta 2017
Plan, write, edit, repeat.
Okey, lets start again.
The program crashed and I lost all what I had written.
So, on Monday we had a guest lecture from Digipeople. Digipeople is add agency and they make mostly videos and infographics. Pekka Tuominen, was there to tell more about video making, marketing and infographics. He showed us a Ted Talk by Simon Sinek. Basically talk was about how people make decisions and how some ways to market are better than others. Subject that we had already covered couple weeks back when Anna told us how people make decisions. According to Simon Sinek it is coded deep in our DNA that we make decisions on the emotion side of your brain and then justify them on the logic side of our brain. So first why, then how and only then what.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
Pekka talked us through how video production works and how the planning is the key. So nothing new for me here, I wrote post about video making couple weeks back, you can check it here. Assignment we got after the lecture was to make a synopsis and then mood board for commercial. We didn’t have any guidelines or subjects which slowed down our teams’ process quite a bit. It is easier to make ideas when you have subject nor than when you can do anything. Anyways our team came up with a brilliant idea in my opinion. It was about the rumoured launch of “new” Nokia 3310 model which is assumed to happen soon. And which actually launched today.
I have actually heard about Digipeople before, because I have their E-book about how to create better infographics. I like making Infographics, even thought there is not many I have done “officially”. It is working with the data and making it easier to see. Downside to making them is that it takes lots of time, like Pekka said, usually two working days depending the amount of data and how much you have already made elements you can use. Of cource you can use pre made templates and that sort of stuff but anyway here are a 10 tools to make infographics with.
On Thursday we had the lovely Ronja Salmi as a lecturer. Her lecture didn’t have anything to do with digital marketing but she was very inspiring. She is an entrepreneur and a professional hostess. Her story was inspiring to me for many reasons; first to be that she didn’t have any education after high school, but still se has succeeded in life and had published three books. Three books! I have been always thought that by working hard you will accomplish great things. The secret of her which she shared was to work hard and not to wait around for inspiration. And by just writing and writing and pushing herself towards the goal and the deadline of her next book.
I am not sure if I agree or disagree with not waiting around for inspiration part. I mostly agree because things have deadlines and needs to be done and you can find an inspiration once you working. And of course, more you write easier it becomes to you.
But I also Disagree because, most of the creative work is artistic. It cannot be forced out because he quality is not the same without the inspiration. The you just do the work, driven by other goals than the joy of the work itself. Simon Sinek also talks about this in the video above. As a graphic designer I can do this work easily without inspiration, I just do. But I know before hand what I need to do and then I do it. I know what I need to include to the poster and I include all of them. But that’s it. There is no passion in that art work then. There is no inspiration. Same comes to writing. When I talk about the things that I am passionate about, I can write very quickly and lots, but if I just have to write, the quality of the writing doesn’t stay the same.
And still I agree with Ronja, with her other point about writing. Planning. Plan, then write and when you are done writing, edit. If you follow this guideline, I am sure the writing can be done without inspiration, but the planning is the part I would not do with out it.
The plan, write, edit strategy is the one I realised I use too. When I was required to write lots of essays, I developed this one pattern about how I write and nowadays I apply that into these blogposts. With essays, I started by writing down everything I know about the subject and then organising them and then writing them out. With the blogposts I also first write random things down about what I want to write about, then maybe search more information and then just write for a 25 mins and stop, take a break.
Like right after my current 25 mins is over, I am going to open the ice cream I just bought other day. I have found that when I am sick and in fever there is really only two thing I can eat. Rye bread (without any toppings) and ice cream. Don’t know if I am the only one and just weird. Probably, tho.
After the break there comes the editing. I go over the text, correct the typos, which I don’t usually do right away because that disturbs my thought flow. There was a long time since I have written a blog or anything that involves long texts so this blog writing has been very freshening for me.
Why 25 mins? I once heard that it it the optimised focus time for one subject and keeps the brain from distracting itself. Okey, ice cream time now.
Ronja Salmi also talked us about braveness as her main point. She told us how she used to struggle with socialising and other stuff but then developed a method how to be a brave and get the job done.
Power hour, she called it. One hour is only 4% of your day. If you focus your energy in that one our and be brave.
Being brave doesn’t mean that you are not afraid. Being brave means that you were afraid but did it anyways. Basically you decide before hand which hour you are going to be brave or productive and that lets you stress less when you already know that hour is actually a short time and you can focus all the energy to that one hour. And you don’t feel the pressure of handling the whole thing when you are satisfied when you completed your goal.
I personally find this theory interesting, since I am more introverted person and I am only extroverted when I feel safe and self-confident and with people I trust. I am not shy or antisocial, I just have a super low tolerance for bullshit and fake people. Networking and other that kind of stuff in especially hard for me, because if I am not feeling it, - if I am not feeling social, I seriously don’t give a damn about other people or what they think.
The power hour method also applies to working life, I am definitely going to use it to be more productive, since as a freelancer I work from home and some times find that pretty un-motivating and cannot get into the the workflow.
After Ronja’s lecture our coaches had a workshop for us. We had task to explore ourselves and write down your dreams, mentors, values and what you give to other and how you develop your mind, body and spirit and your skills. I do have multiple dreams in life, and very many goals to this year. Mostly work related, like learning more and more about marketing, finding out things about graphic design that I didn’t already know and that sort of stuff. Basically what I did, was to write down as many as possible of these dreams and goals, then choose 5-6 most important ones and track every week what I have done to archive my goals. Has worked so far, as the goals are there every week and nowadays they already affect my decisions. Take a stars instead of a elevator, read a article about marketing rather than spend 30 min on Instagram.
For everybody out there, I just want to leave this here.
When you write a dream down, it becomes a goal. When you write down the steps to it, it becomes a plan.
maanantai 20. helmikuuta 2017
All what I have learnt
As I was absent from last week, I have no idea what was
discussed during the week. Due to that this blog might come out as bit short. Since Facebook live videos were very bad in
terms of audio and video quality, I decided that I will find out about the
subjects by myself. As I was not present in school, here is all that I learnt this week.
I founded out that my bathroom is the greatest place in my apartment to eardrop to my neighbour’s fights.
Personal Branding. This seems to be very popular topic in this course, so I expect us to be professionals for end of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning about it.
So what is personal branding? It is marketing yourself, and promoting what you can do. Everything you do in your social media accounts is you branding yourself. Everything you do is representing your brand. Everything you post in social media shapes your brand. It is what you give out, what other think about you. Making a personal brand is easier than ever and everyone has a tool to make it in their pocket.
What kind of a brand do I have? I was not there Monday, when others had a practise where they told each other what they think they represent, so I have no clue, what my classmates think of me. Not like I care what other people think of me, I have sorted that problem years ago, but I am still curious to know. What of my aspects would people I see every week point out? What do they think I could develop myself at?
What is my online brand look like? I am very subtle what comes to the social media accounts, I don’t post every day. I use to be very active on Instagram, but now days I just don’t have enough time to post as often and still keep up the image quality. As I am very visual person, I tend to favor quality over quantity. I am also very minimalistic person, which you can see from example this blogs visual outcome. The website version, not mobile. That looks like crap always in blogspot.
Right now, I don’t have any need for branding myself very high, yet. I have already more work than day has hours. But I am developing my brand for future in social media and it will grow with me. When ever I switch jobs, or start a business, or write a blogpost I want to share, I already have the platform to share it. But currently I use social media for fun and connecting, not to promote myself in anyway or to grow my “audience”. But I have read about that and I am interested in the subject, and maybe my next summer project will be developing my social media and growing number of my followers. Just for fun, and to learn how its done. To execute my hypotesis about how it works.
There was couple tips that how to make your social media branding better that I want to include here; Be clear about the image you intend to project.What is that you want to give out? What do you have to offer to others? When you figure that out, stick with it. It might evolve but the basic subject stays the same, other wise it is confusing to the audience. I do not yet know what I have to offer. I am still learning, not a expert of a some subject.
To maximise the engaging, post regularly and in all platforms. There is social media account mashups and calendars which keep you organised if needed. Show your personal side, be approachable. Why would anybody want to follow someone who doesn’t seem real? It is different of course the strategies might vary if you have 30 followers or 300k followers, but the punchline is the same; listen to your audience, engage with them. Gary Vee’s yesterdays vlog just happens to fall in the same subject.
Here is the articles I read about personal branding in top of the slideshows presented last week.
http://sproutsocial.com/insights/personal-branding/
https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-strategy-personal-branding-tips
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239308
http://feldmancreative.com/2014/03/personal-branding-power-tips-michael-hyatt/
I learnt that my current pan is too heavy to actually flip the pancakes by throwing. Use to be very good at that. And no matter how hard I try they wont come out as round ones. And that I am out of strawberry jam. Bollocks.
I also learnt that NYX's HD finishing powder is not good for baking your, -or someone else's face in this case. That shit reflects like crazy! 0/5, would not recommend.
Breathe and relax. They are people just like you.
And try not to speak too fast. If I have a bad day, I will get very anxious if I have to speak publicly. But I also know that I can do it if I know what I am talking about. So two things to point out; Practise, know what you speak about, so even that if you freeze, it is easy to continue as you know to subject. And try to relax. If you are nervous, it transmits to your audience and make them feel that your presentation is not worth of their attention.
http://www.briantracy.com/blog/public-speaking/27-useful-tips-to-overcome-your-fear-of-public-speaking/
http://www.inc.com/ss/jeff-haden/20-public-speaking-tips-best-ted-talks
I think the next videos are pretty self-explanatory.
And last but not least, my pitch, one liner about me
I bring beauty to this world one design at the time.
I founded out that my bathroom is the greatest place in my apartment to eardrop to my neighbour’s fights.
Personal Branding. This seems to be very popular topic in this course, so I expect us to be professionals for end of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning about it.
So what is personal branding? It is marketing yourself, and promoting what you can do. Everything you do in your social media accounts is you branding yourself. Everything you do is representing your brand. Everything you post in social media shapes your brand. It is what you give out, what other think about you. Making a personal brand is easier than ever and everyone has a tool to make it in their pocket.
What kind of a brand do I have? I was not there Monday, when others had a practise where they told each other what they think they represent, so I have no clue, what my classmates think of me. Not like I care what other people think of me, I have sorted that problem years ago, but I am still curious to know. What of my aspects would people I see every week point out? What do they think I could develop myself at?
What is my online brand look like? I am very subtle what comes to the social media accounts, I don’t post every day. I use to be very active on Instagram, but now days I just don’t have enough time to post as often and still keep up the image quality. As I am very visual person, I tend to favor quality over quantity. I am also very minimalistic person, which you can see from example this blogs visual outcome. The website version, not mobile. That looks like crap always in blogspot.
Right now, I don’t have any need for branding myself very high, yet. I have already more work than day has hours. But I am developing my brand for future in social media and it will grow with me. When ever I switch jobs, or start a business, or write a blogpost I want to share, I already have the platform to share it. But currently I use social media for fun and connecting, not to promote myself in anyway or to grow my “audience”. But I have read about that and I am interested in the subject, and maybe my next summer project will be developing my social media and growing number of my followers. Just for fun, and to learn how its done. To execute my hypotesis about how it works.
There was couple tips that how to make your social media branding better that I want to include here; Be clear about the image you intend to project.What is that you want to give out? What do you have to offer to others? When you figure that out, stick with it. It might evolve but the basic subject stays the same, other wise it is confusing to the audience. I do not yet know what I have to offer. I am still learning, not a expert of a some subject.
To maximise the engaging, post regularly and in all platforms. There is social media account mashups and calendars which keep you organised if needed. Show your personal side, be approachable. Why would anybody want to follow someone who doesn’t seem real? It is different of course the strategies might vary if you have 30 followers or 300k followers, but the punchline is the same; listen to your audience, engage with them. Gary Vee’s yesterdays vlog just happens to fall in the same subject.
Here is the articles I read about personal branding in top of the slideshows presented last week.
http://sproutsocial.com/insights/personal-branding/
https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-strategy-personal-branding-tips
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239308
http://feldmancreative.com/2014/03/personal-branding-power-tips-michael-hyatt/
I learnt that my current pan is too heavy to actually flip the pancakes by throwing. Use to be very good at that. And no matter how hard I try they wont come out as round ones. And that I am out of strawberry jam. Bollocks.
I also learnt that NYX's HD finishing powder is not good for baking your, -or someone else's face in this case. That shit reflects like crazy! 0/5, would not recommend.
No one has ever died form giving a presentation.So why so many people are afraid of it?
Breathe and relax. They are people just like you.
And try not to speak too fast. If I have a bad day, I will get very anxious if I have to speak publicly. But I also know that I can do it if I know what I am talking about. So two things to point out; Practise, know what you speak about, so even that if you freeze, it is easy to continue as you know to subject. And try to relax. If you are nervous, it transmits to your audience and make them feel that your presentation is not worth of their attention.
http://www.briantracy.com/blog/public-speaking/27-useful-tips-to-overcome-your-fear-of-public-speaking/
http://www.inc.com/ss/jeff-haden/20-public-speaking-tips-best-ted-talks
I think the next videos are pretty self-explanatory.
And last but not least, my pitch, one liner about me
I bring beauty to this world one design at the time.
maanantai 13. helmikuuta 2017
TedTalks and Copyrights
I spent this evening by watching TED talks. With a rising fever, I have really not done anything productive today. Still my blog writing constantly disrupted by a random dance party.
Here is a track that has been stuck in my head since HelsinkiEC Meeting's after party on Wednesday.
We, LaureaES and Helsinki Think Company, organized with other Helsinki area Entrepreneurship Societies a meeting for all stakeholders in startup scene in Maria 0-1. It was a huge success and we were sold out and had over hundred participants and 250 + interests in our Facebook event in three weeks. What we did for marketing was pretty simple. We created a fuss. We made our event a big thing. That is all. I think that a hype about something is the best form of inbound marketing, which was this week's topic.
School wise, last week was quick and not as productive as the last. This was because our group had done our mandatory work before hand. In our lectures we learnt that Inbound marketing consists all that you can find on internet about the subject. The customer comes to you; you just need to be there for them. Social media, websites, blogs and SEO. I already covered social media visibility in my last blogpost, which was selected to be a blog of the week, a huge thanks for that!
I am really fond of the concept of inbound marketing, and will be watching for example the Hotspot’s employee’s lecture again sometime. Have to say that the Thursdays lecture was bit hard to follow, even that I am pretty fluent in English.
All rights reserved By Heidi Lehtonen
On Monday we had a guest lecturer Anu Nousiainen, who gave as an interesting lecture about service design. It was very detailed and informative. She spoke about how we are driven by our emotions and how to harness that power to make services to feel more valuable for the customer and to wake up their emotional responses. There was a one thing in her lecture that I would like to talk about.
I am all about details, I know. If you follow me on snapchat (@sswwiiful) , you might already know what I am about to say.
I did not know was I supposed to laugh or cry. I think this subject will be discussed in the law week of this course but it is very important problem.
First of all,
Image Source: internet
Oh Really?!
I would not have figured that!
More specific label could have only been; Image source: Camera.
Nobody knows the amount of photographs that there are on the internet. Put still every picture has an owner, a maker, a photographed. In most cases, that maker did put their picture on the internet to other to enjoy, but probably did not intended it to end up in a slideshow in a Finnish auditorium.
You are not allowed to share the picture without a permission. Not ever. Even that the image is already on the internet, is the asking permission from the artist always mandatory when you publish the picture in other context.
The only case you don’t have to credit, is when the photographer has given a permission to use to photo in so called Creative Commons- licenses.
Why the big fuss?
I am a photographer, and as I have made my living out of it in the past, why would I want to people to use my photos as free? And without giving me a credit from my job? If you were a baker, would it be nice to people take a bread from you without paying, just because it was on the table?
I once had to email an organization for miss use of my photograph, that they had put on their website. I had posted the picture in a Facebook page, that I then managed, but since my time of volunteering was over, I deleted admin rights from myself. Since they took over the Facebook page, they had found a picture there. They did not use my name and used the website in their marketing, so I was pretty pissed about that case. I emailed them, and they removed the picture with an apology. If I wanted, I could have also send them a bill from use of my photo, but I am not that evil since they did not know any better.
You don’t need to credit the maker if you share it to your friend for example on WhatsApp, but if they use it on their blog, if they publish it anywhere, they should have asked the maker if they can use the photo and also give credit. Taking pictures from internet is not the prober way to do things.
As you see I am pretty strict when it comes to this, and the photos I use on my blog now, are eather my own, I have asked a permission to use the photo or they are labelled as Creative commons CC0 Which means I can copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist. To the extent possible under law, the unloaders have waived their copyright and related or neighbouring rights to these Images and Videos. For example Pixabay has pictures under this license. There is also other kind of CC- licenses which I mentioned above. Pictures under this license you can find from example in Flickr.
If you wonder how to credit a picture the "right" way, check the first picture of the post. Note that it is under All Rights Recerved, put I do have a permission to use her picture in my blog.
Here is a track that has been stuck in my head since HelsinkiEC Meeting's after party on Wednesday.
We, LaureaES and Helsinki Think Company, organized with other Helsinki area Entrepreneurship Societies a meeting for all stakeholders in startup scene in Maria 0-1. It was a huge success and we were sold out and had over hundred participants and 250 + interests in our Facebook event in three weeks. What we did for marketing was pretty simple. We created a fuss. We made our event a big thing. That is all. I think that a hype about something is the best form of inbound marketing, which was this week's topic.
School wise, last week was quick and not as productive as the last. This was because our group had done our mandatory work before hand. In our lectures we learnt that Inbound marketing consists all that you can find on internet about the subject. The customer comes to you; you just need to be there for them. Social media, websites, blogs and SEO. I already covered social media visibility in my last blogpost, which was selected to be a blog of the week, a huge thanks for that!
I am really fond of the concept of inbound marketing, and will be watching for example the Hotspot’s employee’s lecture again sometime. Have to say that the Thursdays lecture was bit hard to follow, even that I am pretty fluent in English.
 |
| All rights reserved By Heidi Lehtonen |
On Monday we had a guest lecturer Anu Nousiainen, who gave as an interesting lecture about service design. It was very detailed and informative. She spoke about how we are driven by our emotions and how to harness that power to make services to feel more valuable for the customer and to wake up their emotional responses. There was a one thing in her lecture that I would like to talk about.
I am all about details, I know. If you follow me on snapchat (@sswwiiful) , you might already know what I am about to say.
I did not know was I supposed to laugh or cry. I think this subject will be discussed in the law week of this course but it is very important problem.
First of all,
Image Source: internet
Oh Really?!
I would not have figured that!
More specific label could have only been; Image source: Camera.
Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution….. Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to certain forms of creative work.
Nobody knows the amount of photographs that there are on the internet. Put still every picture has an owner, a maker, a photographed. In most cases, that maker did put their picture on the internet to other to enjoy, but probably did not intended it to end up in a slideshow in a Finnish auditorium.
You are not allowed to share the picture without a permission. Not ever. Even that the image is already on the internet, is the asking permission from the artist always mandatory when you publish the picture in other context.
The only case you don’t have to credit, is when the photographer has given a permission to use to photo in so called Creative Commons- licenses.
Why the big fuss?
I am a photographer, and as I have made my living out of it in the past, why would I want to people to use my photos as free? And without giving me a credit from my job? If you were a baker, would it be nice to people take a bread from you without paying, just because it was on the table?
I once had to email an organization for miss use of my photograph, that they had put on their website. I had posted the picture in a Facebook page, that I then managed, but since my time of volunteering was over, I deleted admin rights from myself. Since they took over the Facebook page, they had found a picture there. They did not use my name and used the website in their marketing, so I was pretty pissed about that case. I emailed them, and they removed the picture with an apology. If I wanted, I could have also send them a bill from use of my photo, but I am not that evil since they did not know any better.
You don’t need to credit the maker if you share it to your friend for example on WhatsApp, but if they use it on their blog, if they publish it anywhere, they should have asked the maker if they can use the photo and also give credit. Taking pictures from internet is not the prober way to do things.
As you see I am pretty strict when it comes to this, and the photos I use on my blog now, are eather my own, I have asked a permission to use the photo or they are labelled as Creative commons CC0 Which means I can copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist. To the extent possible under law, the unloaders have waived their copyright and related or neighbouring rights to these Images and Videos. For example Pixabay has pictures under this license. There is also other kind of CC- licenses which I mentioned above. Pictures under this license you can find from example in Flickr.
If you wonder how to credit a picture the "right" way, check the first picture of the post. Note that it is under All Rights Recerved, put I do have a permission to use her picture in my blog.
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