Marketing
Monkey Business 4 Years!
Oct 5th
Yesterday and four years ago, on 4th of October 2007, was the day when me and Tatu wore the yellow jeans for the first time for a gig. We had just got freshly printed T-shirts from Cameleon Paino, and found the yellow jeans from JC. We took a car and drove to Rovaniemi to do a 1,5 hr workshop in the final seminar of one entrepreneurship project of a local vocational school. It went quite ok, and was fun. I remember we got feedback that we ate chewing gum during the panel discussion. More mistakes. More Learning. So no more chewing gum during public performances. Four years, it’s been quite a journey. A lot of fun, sometimes valleys, and sometimes the way is up. Thresholds and good times. Thanks a lot everyone we’ve met during the four years.
4th of October 2007, Rovaniemi.
I think we’ve learnt quite a lot. But what I know for sure, there’s so much more to learn. About monkeys. About business. And about life. Enjoy the Autumn everybody!
Keynote Cancelled? Call us!
Jun 6th
Not long ago Hugo was doing his morning duties at his bathroom when his cell phone rang. It was somewhere around 8 am. He thought: “Nhh. It’s too early. I’ll call them back later.” And he didn’t pick up the call that came from unknown number. The same person tried to reach Tatu but apparently was so anxious that even if Tatu wanted to answer he wasn’t fast enough. If Hugo had picked up, we would have been offered a chance to jump on a stage as a keynote in biggest Youth Entrepreneurship event in Finland, Aivomyrsky, within 2 hours.
Myself and Tatu were in Lahti 6 weeks ago hosting a Yellow Cafe / Open Space in Innovations for Knowledge Management seminar. They had a similar problem on their second day. Keynote had cancelled. Then as we came to the event on the second day we heard of that but the situation was solved already. However, that got us thinking – if Keynote cancels people that organize events should call us. And we would love to help. We need time to get to the event but nothing more than that. That’s enough to prepare.
Tatu with brand new Mental Models Game graphics.
We are ready to host a Keynote session at any size of an event. Anytime. On any theme. Now you may wonder: “That’s crazy. How can they be experts on any theme?” And you are right, we are not. But the audience attending any seminar is probably smarter together than any Keynote that was supposed to talk there. And we can make the people talk with each other. They will create knowledge together.
If it’s an opening/middle session of the event, our keynote would be the Mental Models game. If it’s by the end, we would host a massive Design Thinking workshop. Both are tools to make people talk and create their own meaning. Mental Models game helps to diverge thinking, and Design Thinking workshop will help to converge the ideas explored in the seminar. And the tools scale up. We can start from groups of 5. And go up to hundreds, thousands or ten thousands of people. It would be cool to do a workshop in a rock festival. Maybe one day?
What do you think? Does this make sense? How could we market this kind of service? And who’s the first client and when? If you are an event organizer, we would love to develop this further with you. Best yellow week to all! Ville
Learning Journey to San Francisco is made of…
Apr 12th
First day behind in this unique 1st Learning Journey to San Francisco we’ve been co-creating together with the Learning Journeys crew Liher, Kaisu and Bego Maite, and the Mondragon Team Academy community.
Who’s on board in here? It’s 2 Uni programs, BBA and Master from Mondragon Team Academy, and 4 pioneer participants of the 1st Learning Journey to SFO with their 2 coaches. All together we are about 40 experimenting the contemporary business context here thiw week.
Yesterday was an inspirational day and it already contained two or more chances to pitch the projects in front of the audience. First we landed in the Hub SoMa, where 10 Hub entrepreneurs were joining us talking their stories of playing in the US market. It was Adam Archer from GamesThatGive, wh said that a young company crew needs to have only 2 roles: “you just need people who are building and selling”. Then there was Javier Ideami, who shared that possibility lurks around every corner, and you need t keep listening to the market carefully and adapt to it a bit, because if you don’t do so you will be forgotten. Also I remember Santiago from softonic.com talking about the importance of having the right people on board in the beginning. “It’s a strategic esicion with whom you
work, and hiring great people needs great investment.” Later on, we had a session with Victoria Hale from medicines360.com, who had created a non-profit drug company and said that in the medical sciences field there are multiple areas where help is needed, but not given, due to the market powers. For example in USA 50 % of the pregnancies are unplanned, and contraceptive pills are not sold without meeting a doctor. There lurks a great change possibility, for example. Her rule of thumb was that business lurks in fields where no one else wants to go. And to go there, she has always been a serius person who came to do serious things. There were also more entrepreneurs from the Hub Ventures program wh were purifying water and building better sanitary solutions to India…quite inspirational in deed! In the evening we headed to the Summit Café, where MTA had invited some local entrepreneurs, and I met for exapmle Espen, an ex Kaospilot Team Leader, who now lives in San Francisco and builds interactive toys for facilitation purposes.
Espen comes to work with a cost of costs, and takes a persentage of sales and a patent of of a new creation, and so he’s affordable for all small and medium size businesses too. Shall we buy him in Monkey Business for a week or two? 
This banana-surfing monkey is his gift for us. Maybe it’s he himself?
Right now I have to go because MINN, my Master’s team, is about to start brainstorming and preparations for today’s meetings with BitTorrent, IDEO and Innvalley. I have to say that this program is an eye-opening, and brain-nurturing experience in many ways!! Yesterday we tried concreticizing what is MINN, and we are still around here:
MINN is a lively, constantly evolving executive learning journey at the service of creative processes, participatory and open environments.
It was set up to research and experience the interaction between the individual, company and community on a contemporary business context.
The value of MINN lies on a unique team for experimentation and promoting new cross-disciplinary formulae.
What do you think?
See you tonight with some new insights….
Yellow regards,
Henna
Cornerstones of Arranging a Learningful Event
Mar 24th
Tatu Monkey once listed the cornerstones of arranging a good event. The list of cornerstones has been in use of plenty of event organizers since then, mostly in Finland. Now it’s time to develope the thought further and make it in English, since Monkey Business acts more and more outside of Finland. Next week Ville & Henna will go to Kramfors, Sweden, to work with NoCry2 –project Kick Off event. We are building that experience now and thus the cornerstones list is a timely thing. It’s here, have a look! Maybe you find inspiration or new points of view into your own work as event organizer!
Cornerstones of Arranging a LearningFULL Event
1.) GOAL What’s the goal of the event? What are the different points of view that the participants have related to the goal? What gathers people together in the event and inspires them to co-create? We need to work on defining the goal as long as we agree on the important thing to achieve with the event. Fun supports learning, so goal needs to be inspiring!
2.) PROCESS How do we reach the goal? Less is more! Process serves the goal, gives space for the participants and leads doing. There are many ways to reach to the goal. Monkeys always offer a variety of proposals for guiding the process, and choosing the ones to use happens in co-creation with the customer.
3.) LEADERSHIP Systems intelligence? What kind of interaction environment is created? Who “owns” the process? There must be a leader, even though people are facilitated to self-organize, and actively co-create & take ownership in the situation. Leader can be one of the Monkey facilitators, or an event organizer.
4.) START How soon the participants are activated to co-create? What kind of interactin environment is created? How do we orientate the participants? How to get people hooked and inspired already before the event – marketing?
5.) TIME Less is more. Master picks one theme and goes deep in it from different points of view. Time serves the process. Long breaks are needed for informal, meaningful conversations. Ending can happen even before the agreed time frame. What’s your mental model of efficiency?
6.) PROFESSIONALISM Team is always smarter than any individual. How can one give up the power and empower others to act? How does the facilitation support that?
7.) LEARNING What learning methods are used? How is the wrap-up of the event done? How is the knowledge crystallized? How do we take into account different learners?
8.) TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT If something special is needed, it has to be organized beforehand, and, if needed, by technical professionals.
9.) MARKETING Even if the event was just a normal development day, it has to be marketed. We must create an inspiring vision about the future that follows after the event day! The meaning of contributing has to be clear.
10.) PLACE What kind of place we have in use? Environment supports learning, and the most important thing in it is that people feel comfortable being in the place.
Plenty of questions in this list! That does not mean that these all should be literally answered before doing anything. Anyway it’s good to check this and take into account all the parallel processes related to the event. This is one way for organizing success!
With Yellow regards,
Henna Monkey
P.S. Are there things that belong to the list but were forgotten to mention until now?
Tape with thousand euros!
Feb 1st
I strongly believe that memories are the only possessions we should collect during our lives. Yesterday Ville talked about blog writing and refered it a bit: “are we happy with sharp drill bits in our rack or happy cos´ borrowed them to a friend”. So in Monkey Business we are sometimes taking it to – Do The Never! Or how could you explain to friend or customer that we are using about same amount Euros monthly to tapes, pins, t-shirts, coffee, ext. than we get salary? Or sometimes even more…
And we try explain it to ourselves that it´s marketing, tribe marketing. And same time happily admitting that we get very exited about these “side track purchaces”. It just feels good! And as you can see – last diktator of Finland, U.K.K – Urkki – Kekkonen, clearly shares the message. Year 2011 theme for Monkeys is U.K.K – stubborness and relentless. Thanks to Sanna for these ultimate kool coasters. And thanks to Asier and Funky Projects for giving us tape back in May 2007. It took allmost four years to implement it in MB…
You get what you measure – they say. So we have started to measure quality and free thinking time spent in hammock. Every 15 minuts gives you a credit. Hammock is electicity free zone, no lab tops etc. According Jussi T. Koski we should spent weekly two times two hours only focusing on thinking, slowing down. If you want to be creative. If you want to follow task list given by your boss – just keep on performing. So how do you explain this Hang Loose – measure to a logical engineer? Luckily I don´t have to. And results after 21st days in Hammock are that first podium place is shared between Johanna, Ville and Tatu. With only four credits/pp, only one hour in 21st days. How mutch is that? What is it? What are doeing? Are we thinking? Are we monkeys?
Human energy is the thing we need to increase. Sun really gives it at this time of year. And hammock. And all the little things I manage to live present. Those are the only things I can remember.
Activboy Tatu learning Zen Riding
ps. Want some tape? Come and get it.
Seriously Yellow.
Jun 26th
Monkey Business keeps getting critics from the people who doubt our possibilities to be a ”real company” as we are. One day it’s about the unpromising name, the other day it’s about the seemingly small amount of work we do. One critical friend shared his opinion about the color, too: no serious company has a yellow brand! Yellow is associated with fun, joy, play, holiday…but not with serious business. ”Name me a serious company having yellow as a brand color?”, he challenged. Not that I’d be obsessed with a question, it just turned out that looking for serious yellow companies became a fun habit 
Now, in the sunny yellow lightness of one of these Finland’s midsummer nights, I want to share some of these yellow findings, for example:
SOL Palvelut, a big grown Finnish service business offering laundry, clean-up and staff leasing services, employing 9000 people in 4 different countries and having made a turnover of 157 million euros in 2009. In SOL yellow means the sunny positivity and the culture of freedom and responsibility. Employees can decide how they want to work and what kind of working environment they like. They were in charge of the decoration in the headquarters, too, and therefore SOL City, the uniquely and wildly designed headquarters of the company, is one of the most desired visiting destinations for the international business groups visiting Helsinki. In the past I worked for SOL Palvelut, and still remember the very positive working culture in there. I felt like part of the team and responsible, but free from the 8am to 4pm routines and having all the power to improve my work and be in direct contact with our partners every day. It was seriously yellow.
DHL Express, a German transportation company offering tailored, customer-focused solutions for managing and transporting letters, goods and information. This company made it to this list for two recent reasons. Firstly because we spotted it’s yellow transporter at our yellow office parking place, delivering goods for one of the companies we are neighboring, and secondly because it offered us a smooth solution for serving our superheroe guest when she left to Paris forgetting her iPhone in Finland. DHL delivered it to her to Paris overnight, taking a service time of 10 hours with a price of 155,55 euros. 7 hours delivery would have also been available. Why DHL is recommendable for anyone in need of express delivery? 1) It transports phone batteries, unlike the express delivery operator recommended by the Finnish main post service Itella, for example. 2) Even being a German company, has it’s web pages nicely in Finnish unlike it’s US competitor FedEx, for example. These primary reasons made us to choose for DHL, and surely we supported the yellow color, too.
Eniro with yellow Pages. Not so long ago I received a phonecall from Eniro, the leading contact search company in the Nordic media market listed in Swedish stock. Eniro was renewing it’s Yellow Pages direct search media, and asked if Monkey Business wanted to be found from there. It could have been a traditional sales call, but the first line, a question of Eniro’s agent, changed the system radically. She asked: What is this Monkey Business doing? I went: We make the world more yellow by improving supportive communication systems. She replied: Hhmmm…ahhaa, sounding like trying to construct a thought in her head before voicing it out: “Then we are in the same business! Eniro Yellow Pages is trying to make the world more yellow by improving the communication systems by creating the connections between people.” It was a good talk with the senior sales agent of Eniro who made me think that in fact it would be cool to do one joint project with Eniro. As a company, Eniro plays in another league, but we share the yellow!
These were just some examples of the yellow and serious brands. What we as Monkey Business mean and want to communicate with the yellow color is that we are all about serious fun, positivity and good vibes in communication. Yellow is the mood of action that produces good feeling and good results by empowering people.
Can you name and describe more examples of the serious yellow companies?
With all my yellow (as Johanna would say!),
Henna Monkey
P.S. Bananas are yellow, too. And very serious business, too.
Purpose of Being in Social Media? Ideas from Likeminds
Jun 17th
Yesterday I attended a pre-event for today’s Likeminds seminar in Helsinki. It was a part of Dicole’s OZ-events, indeed a very nice way to organize people to meet up and socialize on some nice theme, which in this time was social media. Scott Gould gave us a presentation which I enjoyed. I got couple ideas to take home.
1. Think about the purpose of being in the different Social Media.
2. Broadcasting vs. Social Participation
3. For the Likeminds the hashtag is the platform.
This event and ideas came in a right time because I was just about to help our superhero friend Claudia with their Social Media tools and systems. I was about to do that by writing and explaining our tools and methods in this blog and now I got a whole new perspective – not only tools and methods, but also the purpose. Why Twitter? Why Qik/Youtube? Why Facebook? Why Blog? Am I just using the social technologies to broadly cast my own ideas? Do I really want to engage participation? What’s all this noise I am creating? Or maybe just like Henna asked at some point of our summer days: “What are you saying and is it connected to anything?” I will dig into these questions later on in another blog post.
The third point on my list is about the way this movement called Likeminds is being organized. If I have understood correctly anybody can organize anything for so called likeminded people. Who are these likeminded people? I think you are because you are reading this, and I am because I am writing it. I had heard about likeminds breakfasts through hellohelsinki.fi and from our Green Monkey Liher. How to do it? You just add the hashtag #likeminds into your event, youtube video, Flickr images and so on. So then, likeminded people, can go and see what’s going on near you or participate virtually. I think simple is beautiful. Hashtag as a platform for organizing probably truely approaches the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing. I am starting to believe more and more in self-organizing, and starting to doubt more hierarchy and control. Let’s trust people.
Ville Monkey
Ps. Thank you Teemu, Mikko, Petra and everyone at Dicole for hosting this inspiring event. We will follow your example here in Jyväskylä. Thanks also for all of you whom I met and shared interesting conversations. In this event with many start-ups and related people, I am happy I also saw futurist and philosopher Sam Inkinen, who made remember that Monkey Business is a lifestyle company. Thanks a lot Sam!
Renewed Elevator Pitch: Help with Interaction Culture
May 4th
Monday morning was good for us. I think it was because last week we had had a busy week working with some customer projects. We learned a lot.
We visited Design Factory at the Aalto University in Espoo and met Inka (in the picture below on the left) there. Actually, she was already a friend of Henna’s since Paphos seminar last summer but we didn’t know that before Tatu gave her our Banana business card. She is also a designer, also for material but nowadays more and more for intangible. Very interesting place that Design Factory.
I am sure the visit to Design Factory contributed to our learning. What we learned for example that we are at our best when creating the interaction culture. We can create an environment for learning, and an environment where people can talk with one another. And that probably is the core of our business.
Here are first three development versions of our elevator pitch, first one was: We are Monkey Business and we first thought that we ignite collectives. Hä? Now that doesn’t say much, right? Let’s try again… We are MB and we are learning designers. Hmm. Still pretty broad and doesn’t really tell what we do. Ok, we worked a bit more and with the time came the idea of MB building learning environments. That was quite ok, but many times people associate learning environment with something virtual and happening with computers. So not so good for us. So finally we came up with this…
We are Monkey Business and we help our customers to build a better interaction culture.
How does that sound to you?
Word of Mouth goes on in Twitter
Apr 25th
Warning: If you a new to Twitter, this post may contain couple of concepts that you may not know, and thus I recommend checking the Twitter 101 at the bottom of this post first.
The other day I was going through some random twitter updates based on my music, please list. I saw what I think was an update by AnnieMac, DJ and Radio host of BBC Radio 1 Friday night show. She was re-tweeting a post by dj zinc, about his new track being uploaded into youtube, ripped from Annie Mac’s show. I had heard of DJ zinc to be one of the pioneers of Drum’n'bass and a very good DJ, so I thought I should check out the track. I liked the track. It’s not Drum’n'bass but the sound is rather fresh. Track is called Nexx and is from the Crack House EP.
I liked the track, and did what I usually do when I see a new interesting looking person on Twitter: I checked the recent tweets of that person. I thought it would bring me value if I followed this person. Reasons I may not follow someone is excess tweeting without much content. For example, I wasn’t interested to hear a lot about Questlove‘s life so I decided not to follow him. He has over 1 300 000 people following him. I have like 400. Tatu thinks it’s quite a bit, and I started to think that too, until I saw the amount Questlove had and was returned to the ground. Still a long way to go. Oh yes, back to the case.
So I decided to follow dj zinc. And soon comes a new tweet by him. I use Tweetdeck to keep track of different lists. So on the already mentioned Music, Please list I saw a tweet by DJ Zink that I just started to follow: “i bought them pink ortofon needles but they’re not very good. nice clour tho.” See the picture below.
What does this mean? It means that it’s very unlikely I will never buy those pink needles (you use them in turntables to listen those old school records, LPs). Why? Well, just because a long respected member of a DJ community said that they are not so good. If someone says something on twitter about some product, I think it’s like printing it on the packaging of the same product. Probably though I would say Twitter is more reliable than the marketing department of a company.
So why should people care? What would this mean to a service company like Monkey Business? I think this is a good proof that the connections are really getting shorter. Because of Twitter, I hear random comments from people like Annie Mac, Dj Zinc, Tom Peters, Jussi Junikka, Esa Toivonen, Haloefekti and so on that I otherwise wouldn’t hear, at least not daily. (I currently follow about 390 people). My Social Media philosophy “gotta give chance an opportunity” applies very well here. And the consequence of these short connections and fast moving messages is that we as a company have to be transparent and consistent. We need to walk the talk in order to get the positive online-talk going on. And vice versa. If we do not do our work well, it may be so that the world knows sooner than ourselves.
Here’s a little glossary of terms used in the post above. A little Twitter 101 or ABC by @bananadotfi
1. Re-Tweeting: Sending again a tweet that somebody wrote
2. @ mentioning someone: When you @-mention someone, the someone is likely to read that tweet for sure as it’s saved on a specific spot in Twitter. A nice example was by @jeffjarvis I think who said that he had 199 @-messaged waiting for him after one talk in
3. Follow me on Twitter, Contact me through Twitter. -> It’s easy to say out aloud. Twitter allows people to communicate shortly about blog posts, new images, youtube videos etc. that either you put online you or you find online. It’s easy to share interesting stuff through Twitter.
4. Links to other medias, such as Youtube. -> One essential thing in Twitter in my opinion are ourgoing links. It has created, or at least brought into the public a bunch of URL-shortening services such as bit.ly. Normally the webaddresses are long so it’s handy to make them shorter so that you don’t waste your precious marks. One tweet is no more than 140.
5. Subscribing to someone -> Usually tweets are public, and anyone can subscribe to anyone else. It’s also possible to make your tweets private and then you can sort out with whom to share your tweets.
6. Recent Tweets -> A list of recent tweets of someone. Showing on the public page of a person. You can see list of my recent tweets here.
7. Providing Value -> I see the essential question related to Twitter for me to be: “How to provide value to my followers with 140 marks” It’s a joyful challenge sometimes.
8. Followers, amount of -> How many people are following your tweets. How many people see your tweet on their home page when you tweet.
9. Home page. -> Shows all the tweets by people whom you’ve subsrcribed in chronological order.
This post was based on a negative customer experience. It’s usually easier to complain than to thank. Let me sometime write a similar story that has a positive idea of some product or company. Although, actually this one started with the positive idea of Dj zinc’s song being tweeted around.
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