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

Do you remember our Beanie campaign from last year? Even though it was only two that were sold, and the other customer was myself, the beanie got into an English street fashion blog and the brand was also exhibited in NYC later on. Outo wear is doing well and kicking, I think.

We are proud to bring you new beanies to warm your precious heads this year. Sometime ago Janne came to our office smiling and clearly excited about something. He told us that he had found something explosively fantastic from shop yesterday. Well, he didn’t share us directly what is was but the next morning he walked into our office wearing a hat that had big letter writing on it: “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow!”

We were really excited about the new beanie not least because we found out that it was made by VillaWool, a 35-year old family company from Finland. We had been using their other hats for years already. And as the freezing weather doesn’t seem to get much warmer we thought it is time to contact the company for little co-operation. Also the trigger for the contact was that our friend Soren who bought the hat last year told me that his beanie got lost… So Soren et al. here is what Matti from VillaWool says about the hat:

deys (Don’t Eat Yellow Snow) slogan was originally used by the first and only original Helsinki based Ski-Store called SkiSystems somewhere in the early 70s. SkiSystems were our first customers in this beanie business. real tough guys back in the days.

We are proud to say that you can order your own DEYS beanie now. Price is 30€ including Finnish VAT and mailing all over the world. Let us know which color your prefer: white, gray (my favorite) or black (Janne’s beanie is black). You should make the order by tomorrow 12pm in order to catch the first round of orders. If you somehow missed this message do not worry but just make an inquiry for the beanie as we will order couple extra to be sold from our office directly.

Peace, Love and Bananas,

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

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?

Monkey Business

Promote your Page too

This is our latest Design by the Tiimiakatemia bookshop host Esa. He gave it to us in the first page of a small notebook at the Team Mastery Arena (which was quite a success, by the way!) I think it’s rather cool and maybe this will be the design for our next T-shirt. And yes, the point of this post was to say that if there are some eager designers and or people with some eye for the visual candy please let us know. We are building a roster of artists, and we need loads of graphics in the future. My inspiration has come for this kind of organization and style initially from Mambo from Australia and and more recently also from Control Clothing from Finland. Cool stuff indeed by both of them, I think. Story by Ville Monkey

Also I got a picture of Janne and Tatu. Here we go! Tonight we’ll have some crepes at Janne’s place and I am looking forward to that. Janne and Tatu had a good talk about if we should define our products or not. Janne made a connection to restaurant that also has a menu, so we started to talk about menu of Monkey Business.

Janne and Tatu.

And last, there’s a nice video I found through Makenubs videoblog which I originally found through Demos Helsinki Blog. I like it a lot, both the dance and the song. It’s something by Brodinski and Noob. I think we’ll use this video somewhere someday. Good stuff, enjoy!

After reading this idea from Seth’s book Small is the new Big I realized that I had become all of a sudden into a salesman for a friend. Here in Jyväskylä there’s a man who organizes parties. Or not just ordinary parties but clubs with music that is not normally played in the nightclubs we’ve got here. Such as Funk, Soul and Drum’n'bass. And I happen to like such a music a lot. I didn’t know him until half a year ago when my former flatmate Bram met him first. Then Bram introduced me to him. Now he’s my friend. And I promote his events to my friends. By the way, the clubs are named sharply: Wake-Up (not organized anymore) and Remedy.

Let’s analyze this phenomenon a little bit. Why do I promote his events? First of all because I would go to them myself. I trust his skills on making good events. Also, it’s rare to hear real good more marginal kinds of music in here. I want other people also to enjoy Drum’n'bass. Also, I know that the event is better for me as well if I know people who are there. I like to dance with my friends. I think we can generalize this into making meaning. When you feel that something is meaningful in a way or another you will promote.

Another aspect I wanted to elaborate about Seth’s theory is the idea of turning friends into customers. This may sound harsh to many. It used to me as well. Because I used to have a mental model that business exists in order to make money for it’s owners and only for that. But how about social business? Or team company where you actually make business with your friends? The idea is to redefine what making business means. I like to know people I do business with. I like them to be my friends. And then there’s a change that these friends become also my salespeople. Is it ok? I think it’s ok as long as business is based on something else than money. If it is transparent and aims on creating benefit for all. Our business is not a zero sum game. Story by Ville.

Ps. The next Remedy is on the Friday 3rd of April in Ilokivi, Jyväskylä
Ps2. Photos courtesy of Joonas Nissinen