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.

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!

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?

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.

Anyways, it was about time to hear some negative comments because Tom Peters on his book Project50 says something like this: “Think sometimes if you have pissed off people lately, because if you haven’t, then you are either not working hard enough or not being radical enough.”

And this is what also Jari Parantainen says in his Finnish blog that we need not to be afraid to divide people into two groups because if we get haters then we also got lovers.

Furthermore, practically the same thing from Guy Kawasaki: Do not be afraid to polarize people (point no. 4 in his post about the Art of Innovation).

The third similar minded comment is in this excellent and inspiring TED video by Richard St. John. This is actually what I wanted to share in the beginning. See the video below.

He says that one secret of success is persistence. He says that if we want to succeed we need to persist CRAP – which stands for Critisism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.

And this is what we say when people ask us about the marketing: Be brave, dare to make marketing that may piss off people. But I have to admit, that when the guy calls you and tells you to delete your website and get some more experience, it doesn’t feel good and kind of it puts me down. Anyways, I am happy to know we got loads of supporters out there and this is probably just one guy, who didn’t get what this Monkey Business is all about, maybe?

Keep it yellow everyone! Peace, Ville

As part of our Social Media strategy – “you have to give chance an opportunity” again inspired by Matti Nykänen and made famous by E.Saarinen – we have started a MonkeyTV. It’s an online TV Channel that will have for example monkeying around, short interviews, book reviews, live reporting from events and parties and so on what ever we find fresh and worthy being online. We have been online for a month or so, but until now I wasn’t sure if we had got the real essence of the MonkeyTV recorded. But here we are, ladies and gentlemen, see the video below!

You will know us from the following logo:

It is drawn by Pernan Goni, an illustrator and inspiring entrepreneur from Bilbao. He’s got a blog, too. I met him over in Bilbao last October and I am very happy he promised to co-operate with us for the MonkeyTV and also in future. Moreover, he is an excellent cartoonist – see a MonkeyTV video here where he explains one quick cartoon about creativity in Basque Country. Thanks a lot Pernan for the great work!

Currently we operate MonkeyTV with Qik. It’s linked to our Youtube channel, so if you are there feel free to connect with us.

Have a yellow week everyone! Ville

And below is picture of a very couragious Penquin (in reality 2nd year) Anssi and the program grid of today’s OpenSpace that the participants created.

Tonight is the 17th Anniversary of Team Academy. Should be massive! Maybe I will be doing live reporting through Twitter and Qik Live of ours. Keep it yellow! Ville

1.5 years ago we did a brave experiment with our friends Ralf, Charles, David and Marie. It was called a Penquin Expedition (a pdf) and it included a special thing called Solo Experience. Solo may be familiar to you for example through books like Syncronicity and Presence. Our experience was very good, we have a special place by the lake Saimaa where we can work and the summer in Finland is spectacular.

This coming year we are planning to open solos. The first one is in the first week of June and the second one will be together with a Penquin Expedition and during the last week of August. Here are some slides about the first one!

Loads of yellow! Ville

In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.

The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?

1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though  the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too

After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd.  Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…

Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?

Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.

this morning when I biked to our yellow office I saw a vision of a blog post with then steps or principles about marketing to your tribe. This list is about building your tribe outside the internet and web 2.0. That list will come a little later on. So here we go!

1. Make meaning. (Guy Kawasaki)
2. Come up with a good name. (Guy Kawasaki)
3. Find a good slogan. (Like a core promise a la Thomas Gad)
4. Print the slogan on an ecological and fair trade T-Shirt.
5. Find a cool artist to draw a logo for you.
6. Print the slogan and logo on a notebook and distribute notebooks to your friends and customers.
7. Make cool stickers and hit them on the streets.
8. Make pins.
9. Get busy meeting (new) people.
10. Have fun doing all the above.

This is what we have done. Well, we also bought yellow jeans. Did I forget something?