The Importance of Being Earnest about Employee Engagement

Richard's Markkinointi & Mainonta blog post this week was about why and how you should empower your employes to become online brand ambassadors.

And about how the layers of influence are changing as show in the Edelman 2013 Diamond of Influence below:

Mitä yhteistä on sosiaalisella liiketoiminnalla ja pilvenpiirtäjällä? Richard kirjoittaa aiheesta Marmain blogissa

Mitä on sosiaalinen liiketoiminta? Entä miten se liittyy pilvenpiirtäjiin? Lue Richardin uusin blogipostaus Markkinointi&Mainonta-verkkojulkaisun Sosiaalinen sukellusvene -blogistamme.

Mikko ja Richard kirjoittavat säännöllisesti ajankohtaisista sosiaalista mediaa koskevista ilmiöistä. Lue tähän asti julkaistuja kirjoituksia tästä.

Friday Flashback Part 4: Boboing

When we were in the Arabus incubator in 2007 we used to create a little bit of a buzz about what we were doing by decorating the area around our office door with posters, stickers and Post-it notes. The idea of the Post-it notes was to let people know what we were up to in a tongue-in-cheek way. 

You will notice that one of the notes says Boboing! If you want to find out more what boboing is all about you can read this old Zipi Theory post.

Friday Flashback Part 3: Better clear than clever

One thing we learnt when developing our first ever Facebook app, Friends Pad, back in 2007 was that it is better to be clear than clever. 

What I mean by this is that, in stead of using a simple and clearly understood word like "reply", we thought that it would be cute to try and create a unique activity verb that could become part of the usage branding like the way we say to tweet on Twitter. 

The word I chose (and it was something I have to take the blame for) was to "bubble". Bubbles were part of our visual identity and I thought it would be more fun to "bubble" back to your friends status messages - remember this was a long time before Facebook introduced this as standard. 

In retrospect, I came to realize this was hubris and just caused unnecessary confusion. The success of your service, and the engagement of your community is what ultimately decides if a neologism is justified.  

Also, it is better if the new word is related directly to the brand name itself. There are countless examples of brand names that have become verbs or proper nouns, for example: we hoover with a Hoover, we photoshop a picture with Photoshop, we rollerbade in our Rollerblades, etc

The process by which a trademarked name becomes a generic name for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, even has a name: genericide. 

You would think that genericide would be the ultimate sign of brand approval, but many companies fear they will loose control of their trademarks if the usage slips into common language usage.  

To tweet something is a bit different because it is the subversion of the fact that birds twitter and tweet - the connection to birds was according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey totally deliberate.

I still believe that the playful use of words can be very beneficial; for example, Facebook turned a potentially spammy promotional email request into an effective marketing campaign by calling it a "poke". How many of us started using Facebook after being poked? And FourSquare's use of "Check in" makes it much cooler to use than if you just added your location.

But overall, there is always a cost for users to adopt your service and anything that could hinder the adoption process should be avoided. So if there is any doubt, it's better to clear than clever.

Have a great weekend!

Richard (co-founder)

Friday Flashback Part 2: In the beginning…

Within weeks of meeting at Media Lab, Helene and I decided we would start a Web 2.0 type company (social media as a concept hardly existed back in the autumn of 2006).

Initially the idea was to create a service around embeddable opinion polls (similar to what PollDaddy became); however, one of the poll ideas was to collect information for organizing a party, so we decided to develop the ZipiEvent Organizer.

However, we were highly aware of the growing phenomenon developing in the US called Facebook, and in being conscious that Facebook would become a huge influence, we decided in the summer of 2007 to "experiment" with two Facebook apps as a learning activity for later integrating the event organizer - which became a sweet rudimentary prototype.

The first of these was Friends Pad, which introduced the capability to respond to Facebook status messages well over a year before Facebook made it standard; similar with the grouping features it provided.  This app quickly gained about 15,000 Finnish users in a few months, which seemed like a lot back then. This also made us the first Finnish "company" to develop a Facebook app.

From the beginning Facebook apps had open developer pages where the users could give direct feedback, and it was in learning to manage these spaces that we really started to learn about how to manage social media, and the importance it would have in future customer support and relations.

Together with the blogging, the app management and making the odd video, we soon cut our teeth in social media while operating on the front line (or should that be online).

It wasn't long before companies where approaching us to help them out with Facebook and other social media needs, but I'll leave that part of the story to later.

Have a great weekend!