1. A revolution in finding books you want to read!
2. Easy recommendations turns ebooks into social objects

I started reading some ebooks in the 90s, but it was not until I bought my first iPad a year ago that I started buying ebooks instead of paper books whenever they are available.

I really enjoy the comfort of having my ebooks available and synchronized  for reading on my iPad, mobile and computer.

But I also discovered that I have started to buy many more ebooks now, and in new ways, as illustrated in this story:

Recently I took a trip to my vacation home in the Stockholm archipelago with this ferry:

During the 25 minute ferry ride I read some blogs on my iPad. My eye caught a story about a new ebook publisher called Atavist, publishing original non-fiction journalism laced with video, audio and layers of information.

That of course appealed to my multimedia production experience, so my finger touched the link to Atavist and this appeared in seconds on my iPad:

I played the video and immediately realized that this is my kind of ebooks; short, non-fiction journalism with multimedia features, love it!

Then I browsed the titles and found the story Lifted,  about the big helicopter robbery in Stockholm 2010, a drama familiar to all Swedes. Seconds later I had spent $2.99 buying it in the App Store.

A new faster way to discover and buy books!

So, most important, only minutes after first discovering Atavist in the blog post, I had bought and started reading the ebook Lifted, while still riding the ferry!

This is a fundamental change in how we discover and buy books. Before, when we read or heard about an interesting book, we hade to make a note of it and then either go buy it at the book store or order it online at Amazon etc. Now this threshold is lowered with two improtant factors, in this order:

1. We can buy a recommended ebook in seconds and download it wirelessly by just tapping links on our e-readers like the iPad.
2. It is very easy to pay for ebooks (mostly, at least with the Apple App Store and Kindle book store) and the prices are now often very affordable.

This changes our consumer behaviours, opening great possibilities for new publishers like Atavist.

Easy recommendations turns ebooks into social objects

A week later I am having lunch at our coworking office space The Hub. I tell a guy sitting next to me about Atavist and how I bought the ebook Lifted on the ferry. Turns out he also enjoys this kind of books, so he flips open his iPad and visits Atavist.net on his web browser.

Seconds later, he also has bought the Lifted ebook for $2.99, thanking me for the tip! All this while we are eating our pastas.

Ebooks are transforming both our reading and buying habits!

                 

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I recently attended the seminar Internetdagarna here in Stockholm, a big event discussing trends in internet usage.

There were all the usual stats, like 85% of all Swedes having access to internet at home. 97% of the internet users have broadband and 81% of them use internet daily. Mobile internet is increasing rapidly.

The keynote speaker Jeff Cole from USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future talked about the ongoing disruption in the whole media industry sector.
Here is the video from his excellent speech: “Falling Apart or Coming Together: Media and Consumers in a Digital Era”
Some tidbits:
“Now everything is falling apart.”
“Newspapers have 5 years left in the US, 8 in the UK.”
“People don’t live by schedules anymore. Schedules don’t work!”
“Consumers are beginning to abandon subscriptions to print media and have little interest in paying for digital content, at least for the next five years.”
“Advertising is still preferred method. People who opt out might have to start paying.”
“All media will survive, but most will be smaller players in the digital era.”

Many of the other sessions discussed the disruption in the media industry, everybody seemed to agree on:

1. The digital transformation will continue, faster for some types of media and slower for some.
2. Most print media business (especially newspaper and news magazines) will be badly hit by the digital transition.
3. Media consumption is increasing due to ubiquitous internet access and all the new mobile devices.

Pontus Schultz, head of business development at Swedish publishing giant Bonnier’s R&D department outlined it wisely:
“Everything goes digital. Digital is free.”
“People want to pay, but so far we have packaged stuff that people don’t like paying for.”
“You don’t pay for news, you pay for identity and for being part of a community.”
“The challenge is to stop being a broadcaster and become a part of the conversation.”
“Reader interaction: don’t ask what they think, ask what they know.”
“Tablets like iPads is a chance for media to do it right this time.”
See his talk (in Swedish, starts at 18:20)

Strategies are necessary, but they are worthless without action!

Pontus ended by saying that media is usually quite good at creating new strategies, but lousy at implementing them. This is a key insight for me!

All this means that today’s media conglomerates are like ocean-going super tankers. When they see icebergs they have big difficulties changing course due to their massive inertia based on their 100+ years of traditions. Some of them have smart crew members like Pontus and will be able to change course a little quicker and perhaps launch some smaller experimental vessels that will take off. Other will hit icebergs or continue slowly into oblivion.

The time is now!

So there are now unique conditions for small speedboats to run around the tankers and cruise on top of the waves, adapting to the ever-changing conditions in the digital ocean and building new types of media content and services. These speedboats can of course be launched from existing media companies (and some already are) but I think the biggest part of the expanded digital media business many will be built by a new breed of media companies.

They need to be small, creative and agile, populated with a multi-cultural mix of  techies and communicators combined with experienced, open-minded media savvies and some hybrid thinkers like me.

These new speedboats can now be built by small groups of open-minded people anywhere in the world. The tools needed to build a new media service are now far less expensive, faster and easier to use. Sweden is an ideal location for this due to our crop of talented developers and internet-savvy early adopters.

This tickles my mind, what about yours?

                 

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I have enjoyed various forms of eBooks since the early 90s (when they were sold on floppies…). But it is not until April this year I have started to really see eBooks and eMagazines replacing some of my boos and magazines in my ever growing piles of things to read.

The reason for this is of course my iPad. It is a delight to use, not only because of its wonderful screen, but because of two features that are not so often mentioned:
1. It start up in half a second. This is changing my behavior a a lot.
2. The form of the iPad makes it usefull in all sorts of “laidback” reading positions, in the arm chair, in the TV sofa, in the bed etc.

Since I have worked since the 80s producing interactive “multimedia” I really like the rapid development of eMagazines and eBooks now. For example embedded videos, animations and various forms of user interactivity.

I have bought and read a number of eMagazines and eBooks and to my surprise I now begin to feel that I enjoy the eBooks more than the eMagazines. I have read both crime novels and business eBooks bought from Amazon’s Kindle app and from Apple’s iBook store.

I find eBook reading on the iPad to be a better experience than reading most physical text books:

1. It is much faster and easier to buy an eBook.
2. I can read my eBooks on my computer, my iPad and my iPhone, and the reader software always directs me to the place in the book where I was the last time, independent of which device I used.
3. I can highlight text, make bookmarks and write notes etc, just like in a physical book, something I always do for my learning.

eMagazines are now appearing in many flavors and I really like this development. But it feels like we are bnow seeing just the frist wave and that there will be a lot of further development needed befor eMags will seriously compete with paper mags.

I wrote about my first impressions of eMagazines in my post “iPad Media apps; CD-ROM revisited, where I complained about the lack of social functions like being able to share articles, make notes, interact with the ads etc.

Now I have spent many hours reading dozens of eMagazine titles, and I still miss all those functions. But also, I still don’t feel as comfortable reading eMags as I do reading eBooks.

I feel that  my vision of the beautiful magazine layout is hindered by looking at it on the iPad screen. The image is sharp and bright, but I have to scroll a lot and I don’t have the overall view that I have with a paper magazine. It is not just that a paper magazine is usually bigger in size than my iPad screen. It is about rapidly turning the paper pages, reading them in any order and get a feeling of how long an article is before reading it.

Am I alone in feeling this? Will I get over it? What do you think?

So I think that we need much more research in user interface design and layout for devices like the iPad before the eMagazine market will really take off. I am convinced that all magazine publishers are now working to address those issues and I really look forward to reading the second generation eMagazines.

Hopefully they will look more like Bonnier’s promising Skiing Interactive concept, which is much more active, lean forward type, scheduled for launch in October 2010. It will be for laptops, hopefully an iPad version will follow.

Enjoy their sneak peak video:

Skiing Interactive Demo Video from Skiing Interactive on Vimeo.

                 

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iPad media apps – the revenue solution for media publishers?

The extremely sucessful iPad launch (3 million iPads sold in 80 days) has created a tremendous buzz and excitement in the media industry. I am certainly one of the very happy iPad owners.
Many publishers see the iPad as a solution to their main headache: How can we charge for our media content when our web site users don’t want to pay for it and there is such an abundance of free content on internet?

With the iPad, the argument goes, we can deliver an improved user experience that looks more like our print media but with some added features like video, then people will want to pay for it.

But are we really seeing improved user experiences with the current iPad media apps? We are now seeing the first generation media apps from big publishers, like Bonnier’s Popular Science, Time magazine, Wired magazine, Washington Street Journal and many others.

Many people react against paying for these apps, some with the rather strange argument “but there are ads in it, so I should’t have to pay for the app”, as if print media were ad-free. Well, that reaction of course stems from that we are so used to free media content on the web.

I don’t mind paying for interesting media content, provided that:

1. I can’t access equivalent content for free as nicely packaged somewhere else (hint: build your brand and work hard on your interface design and user friendliness)
2. I feel that my money goes to an organisation that I want to support (hint: tell me your corporate story and mission)
3. The payment process is simple and quick (this is one of the iTunes Store key success factors)

But I don’t want to pay for media apps that I feel are giving me a worse experience than online media.

Today’s media apps feels like CD-ROMs

I and many others also react against the walled garden of these apps, most of them are not connected to internet at all. We are suddenly back in the 90′s world of interactive CD-ROM media that looked great but were all one-way communication that could not be updated.

In my opinion most of them represent a step backwards compared to web media:

• I can’t copy text in the articles
• I can’t comment the articles
• I can’t share  articles with my friends via email, Facebook, Twitter etc
• I cant’ search for keywords in the articles
• I can’t bookmark or write my own comments in interesting articles
• I can’t interact with the ads
• I have to wait for apps to load
• I find the user interface unintuitive

Interface standards

The current breed of iPad media apps are using a multitude of different interface standards. Even basic functionalities get confusing when you don’t know how they work.

Two examples:
We are used to reading articles in columns from top to bottom. This is the way all our printed media have always worked. Still, Washington Street Journal manages to introduce a horisontal article layout, it even has another column to the right of the story which hides the continued story to the right, making it difficult to find. This also forces them to repeat the headline on each screen, a clumsy and unintuitive solution.

Menus: Publishers want an uncluttered interface design, so they hide the menu buttons, and they all do it differently. Some make you tap anywhere on screen, others use more obscure tricks. Worst so far is Bonnier, introducing a totally incomprehensible two-finger vertical swipe from the bottom to reveal the menu buttons. Sorry guys, I think the only way is to have small, constantly visible, easy to interpret menu buttons.

App download time

I don’t mind downloading utility apps, but when I want media content, I want it immediately. The current crop of iPad media apps weighs in at 150-500 Mb, which takes a loooong time to download. I just bought Wired’s July issue at 375 Mb, it took 25 minutes to download. Bonnier’s Popular Science July issue, 147 Mb, 51 minutes to download! Both of these magazines’ web sites load in about a second… This is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges, sine their websites don’t contain the same content, but the user experiences the app download as a pain that does not exist on the web.

What should be done?

I see two paths of development:

1. Since users are still so reluctant to pay for online content in a web browser, apps will continue to grow for some time. The second generation of apps will soon be connected and solve most of the problems described above.
2. Meanwhile, HTML5 and other emerging web standards and tools will enable publishers to improve media sites with smarter interfaces and functionality. In this process they will experiment with new types of online revenue models, (see my post “Experiment or die“). This will also eliminate the problems of adapting your content to multiple mobile platforms like iOS and Android. Eventually this will to a large degree replace downloaded apps, but it will take a few years.

The key here to media publishers is that they have to be more innovative and develop smarter interfaces and functionality that all the other free online media sites cannot offer.

Things like:

1. Connect the apps to internet, link them with social media and have moderated and well designed comments and discussion forums
2. Reinvent the navigation
3. Develop smarter personalisation tools, letting me create a dynamic media app according to my interests and mood for the moment
4. Work with the advertisers to increase the user value. I want to see ads that are relevant to me and my needs, and I want to be able to access more information and buy products easily via the ad

The best way to find out what will work best is to be innovative, start experimenting with all sorts of solutions. I am convinced that the development pace will be very fast in the next couple of years and look forward to enjoying media like never before.

                 

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Sweden is in recession. Most companies and organisations are cutting down on their R&D and trimming external consultants. The whole media sector is experiencing disruptive changes, many of them are seeing their revenues dwindling.

I find it a bit strange that everybody in the established media sector seem to agree on:

1. There will be big turmoil in their markets due to internet and media digitalisation.
2. Nobody really knows what will happen or what will work in the near future.

And still they cut down on R&D!
It is as if they just hope that somebody else will come up with a working internet business model and they will be able to jump on that wagon when it starts moving and then everything will be fine again.

But hey, there will not be one or two internet business models replacing today’s media models.
There will be hundreds!

And we are now seeing just the beginning of the media industry disruption, it will get much worse soon.

But disruptive times have always created opportunities for those that see them, often people from outside the existing industries, people that are not hindered by “we have never done it like that before”, or “that won’t work”.

The way to create real innovation and progress in disruptive times is to gather a wild mix of creative people of all types and enable them to brainstorm and network. Add the low cost of developing and live test web apps these days and great stuff can evolve quickly!

I am attending three very different social gatherings this summer where I have big hopes that great things will happen:

Moving Images in Malmö, June 4 2009. a conference about new and cross-media.
“This is no ordinary conference! We build it up together.”

reboot11, June 25-26 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I had a great time at reboot last year, and this year’s them appeals a lot to a doer like me: “it’s time to act, time to focus on the act of acting, time to figure out where to begin the reboot.”

Sweden Social Web Camp, Tjärö, Blekinge August 21-23 2009 This will be great!:
“We”™ll meet by a quiet lake, beautiful sea or a red cottage and talk about the social web. Some activities are pre-planned, but the agenda will mostly be set by the participants. Demo your latest project. Start a discussion on a topic you care about. Or present something you learned. And we do all this barefooted, sipping a cold beer, watching the sunset. And then we gather by the fire and chat late into the Swedish summer night.”

So the summer of 2009 will be known as the turning point of this deep recession.
There has never been more opportunities to create great stuff, let’s do it!

                 

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Video has for many years been an important communication tool for corporations. But honestly, how exciting are most corporate videos to watch? Too many use the standard formula:

1. An intro with the company logo, picture of the headquarter and elevator music in the background.
2. Panning shots over all the products of the company.
3. A deep, male voice-over that sprinkles corporate bullshit terms.
4. The CEO in a suit and tie stumbling through an awkward sales pitch.
5. Happy customers holding the products and smiling into the camera.

Unfortunately both video production companies and their corporate clients are used to doing this kind of corporate video. But some clients and video producers realize that video can be much more effective by using storytelling and using the power of internet.

Cre8it, a Stockholm-based video production company interviewed me and some of their corporate clients:

The impact of corporate video

Using the web for corporate videos

                 

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There are many ways for a company or organisation
to use online video for communication, marketing and training!

Here are 26 examples organized according to production costs and how complex they are to produce. There is a twist to the green ones, see the end of this post!

Most people associate corporate video with rather boring 20 minute company presentations where the proud CEO is presented along with all the products and the nice offices, accompanied by a rambling voice-over and some elevator music. Or perhaps “talking heads”, tie-clad managers boasting about the company.

But now video has been revolutionized at both ends:

1. The production is much faster and cheaper due to all the new, smaller digital techology.
2. The distribution is now enormously more flexible and cheaper. Instead of mailing out DVDs or arranging screenings all kinds of video can now be streamed on corporate web sites, in video blogs, emailed etc. All at very low costs.

Nobody has the time or patience anymore to watch those 20-minute corporate all-in-one presentations, and they become outdated quickly anyway. So instead, go for short, niche videos, for example:

1. Press release videos. Show how the new product is used by real customers, thus creating better stories for the journalists.

2. Product launches. Do like everybody else and make campaign sites with slick video commercials etc. But the smarter companies also produces more viral videos that are spread via YouTube and other video communities, blogs and media sites. Before the launch, make a video about your product development challenges where you build hype around the problem that your product solves. When you launch it, post a video that does not look like a commercial but shows the product in a documentary way when it is used by real people

3. FAQ-videos and support screen casts. Use the pedagogicial superiority of video to give answers to frequently asked questions and explain how your software work. Put them on your support web site and email them to customers that call in with problems.

4. Staff presentations. Notice how most consultancy firms proudly states that “our staff is our most valuable asset”? Yet they present them with just a name, title and department. Imagine instead 45-second personal video presentations where the staff describe their background and experience, how they work now and what makes them tick! Far better for boosting relations and the corporate brand.

5. Testimonials from happy customers and employees. A real customer describing how his life was improved by product X is a lot more credible than a slick ad with studio shots of beautiful models holding the product. Here is a good example.

6. Instruction videos. Why have not companies noticed the explosion of “How to” video sites with short video tutorials about everything under the sun? Such as Videojug.  Realise that this is a very good way of both decreasing your support costs and building brands. See also my blog post about this.

7. Video blogs and mobile videos. Let your executives speak in person to the whole world, here is why this is good. And encourage your employees to use their mobiles to document things that customers or other employees could benefit from seeing and post it on video blogs. Reports from business trips, development labs, attended conferences etc.

8. UGC campaigns. User Generated Content, where customers upload videos on how they use the products. Creates marketing ambassadors and an image of acompany that listens to its customers. IKEA does it, why not your company?

9. Recruitment videos. How do you entice people to apply for work at your company? Especially the younger generation don’t read endless texts or brochures. Create short, up to date videos where HR shows what it is like to work here, and interview some of the employees. Here’s how Google did it and a good blog post about it.

10. Internal communication. Replace some of the streams of internal email communications with video. For example, the sales manager’s weekly follow-up of the sales reps is more effective if they can hear and see the sales manager.

11. Company policies. Use video to explain all those rules and policies about security, vacation, sick leave, travel etc. Interview those that are responsible and show how they should be used and the benefits. This motivates the employees better than those Word-documents with bulleted rules on the company intranet!

12. Lectures and seminars. Increase the audience for your speeches, conferences etc by live-casting them on your web site and post edited versions afterwards to prolong the value. Also use short videos to promote the event in advance, interviewing the organizer and make people want to go there or follow it on internet.

13. Talk shows. Think value for your target group. Invite an interesting person for a relaxed chat about a current issue. Do this weekly or bi-weekly for almost no cost and build valuable relations and position yourselves as authorities in your business area.

14. Crisis communication. Prepare before it happens: a disgruntled customer posts a video showing a weakness in your product, such as this Assa Abloy video. But don’t respond like Assa Abloy did, instead fight fire with fire: make your own video response and post it in the same channels, as well as on your web site.

15. Knowledge bank & internal training. Interview your experts on how they solved various problems, post it into an internal knowledge data base on your intranet and make it easy to search. This creates valuable assets out of your organisations skills.

Video = expensive and lots of work?

Many companies have realised that video is an effective form of communication but they still think it is expensive and labour-intensive to produce good videos. Also, they have not realised that you build relations better by producing content regularly, so it is much better to make one short video per week than a long video every 6 months.

Program formats

The way to do this cost-effectively is to create program formats. In the TV business formats are big business. Think “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, “Survivor” etc. It is much easier, cheaper and safer for a local TV station to produce shows according to these formats than trying to come up with their own program ideas. So I help companies do the same thing.

All the green types of video in the matrix are suitable for making program formats. I start with a base template and then analyse the company needs and write an adapted production plan. Then a pilot program is produced with a professional team while I make detailed notes. The result is a template that enables the company to produce multiple programs at a high and even quality level and at a low cost per program. The production can be done inhouse with some employee training,  or the format can be used as excellent documentation for outsourcing to local video producers.

Please send me tips on more types of corporate video and links to good examples!

                 

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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The world as we know it is in turmoil financially. Everybody is lying low and avoiding all expenses, which further increases the crisis. I have given up on trying to understand the underlying mechanism of this, realizing that it is not logical but based on group psychology. I just have to suffer it through, right?

I have been hit with this before:

In 1994 the Swedish Krona was under attack and the Swedish central bank tried in vain to protect it by raising the interest rate to 500%. Back then I had large loans on my flat, so it was quite though.

In 2000 I lived in Los Angeles, building an internet ineractive elearning portal on parenting, how to raise kids using modern psychology. This was at the apex of the internet hype curve so we of course tried to raise venture capital. Unfortunately, being Swedish,  we were a bit too serious and worked hard for a long time to produce excellent scripts, marketing plans, business models etc.
It was all ready to be presented in a state-of-the-art form the week after NASDAQ took a nose dive in April 2000…
Suddenly everything with .com at the end was poison to everybody. But I learned many very useful things and had lots of fun, so I chose to not regret anything and go forward.

I then moved back to Stockholm and was asked to start a research lab at the Interactive Institute, focussing on elearning methods and interfaces. The lab was financed by corporate sponsors like Ericsson. Well, 6 months after our bold start the financial crisis hit Sweden and all sponsors suddenly evaporated so I had to lay off the staff I had just hired and put the projects on idle. Being a very result-oriented person I quickly left to discover that it took 2 years before companies wanted to hire consultants at all. But in that time I developed a number of business ideas, increased my network and learned many new things.

So this time, instead of hiding under a rock like everybody else I prefer to see this crisis as an opportunity!

I am now focussing on all the new exciting possibilities with online video:
Never before has the gap been greater between the available technology and our much lower ability and creativity to make business use of it!

When I started my first interactive media company, Ahead Multimedia in 1988 I first had to educate the customers on what interactive media was, then persuade them to buy both our services and all the Mac computers and other hardware that they needed. Now everybody has powerful computers and wireless broadband, but mostly using it only to write reports in Word…

So it has never been easier and cheaper to develop and try out new digital business models, so lets use this crisis to exploit this!

There are others thinking along the same lines:
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy: well written by Paul Graham, an American investor/entrepreneur.

I am writing this post together with a bunch of blog friends during a “Blog Saturday”:

If you are into our old Viking language, don´t miss to check out their views on the recession: (from the left)

Jesper Åström from Online-PR
Christian Rudolf and Peter Sandberg from Disruptive
Judith Wolst from Internetionalisering
Erik Starck from Opportunity Cloud
Simon Winter from Infontology
Per Gustafsson from Webmoney

+ remote bloggers Carl-Johan Sveningsson from The emigrant Blog
and Martin Sandberg from Martin Spanar

                 

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I don’t want to own my music!

Steve Jobs said last year that he did not see that the successful iTunes business model of selling individual music tracks would be threathened by subscription models where you pay a fixed fee to access all the music you want.

I am convinced that Steve Jobs now realizes that he was wrong (and probably work hard to catch up). The reason people like iTunes is that it is very easy to use and the pricing seems very moderate compared to what people were accustomed to: buying CDs with lots of unwanted tracks.

But that is just because people have not yet tested the upcoming alternatives such as Spotify and other new services. They offer unlimited listening to music without downloading files, and they are faster and just as easy to use as iTunes.

Spotify, an upcoming topnotch Swedish streaming music service. It will be free to use with ads, a premium version without ads will also be available.

Downloading media files will soon be a thing of the past!

I am quite certain that in a few years time we will laugh at this period of time when we downloaded all these media files and struggled with copy-protection and backups and not being able to play them on certain devices etc.

Why? Well, I love my iTunes but…:

1. I don’t want to own files or CDs, I want to listen to my favorite music and find new music easily.
2. I don’t want to fill up my hard drive with Gigabytes of media files that can vanish in a hard drive crash.
3. I want to listen to my music library on multiple computers and on my iPhone mobile.
4. I want to be able to share my music easily with friends and family.

There are two key factors that will drive this revolution:

1. Ubiquitous wireless internet. We are almost there now in many places.
2. The music industry realizing that this is also a way of solving the piracy problem. If you don’t need to download any files to listen to music, why bother with pirated files?

So the only reason for downloading music will be when you want to play it in locations without internet, such as when jogging in the forest etc. But that is also a temporary problem as new wireless fixed-rate broadband services will soon cover entire countries.

                 

(9 votes, average: 4.44 out of 5)

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KIVA

I am engaged in venture capital in Sweden, both as investor and as business coach. But I have also invested in 5 aspiring entrepreneurs in third world countries through KIVA, an internet based micro-lending organization that since the start in 2005 has financed some 30 000 entrepreneurs by small ($25 and up) loans from more than 130 000 people like me from all over the world.

KIVA is an example of something that could not be done without internet and the support from online payment service PayPal, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace and other partners. The web site is a school example of building an engaged community with lots of smart tools for networking between the lender and the entrepreneurs and also between lenders.

See how it works in this New York Times video story, where a reporter goes to Kabul in Afganistan to check up on his investment in a local bakery.
Exercise: first read this blog text and about KIVA on their web site.
Then watch this short video.
Compare the two experiences!
My point: video is a very powerful medium for explaining things and creating feelings for people and causes.

Also, listen to this excellent interview with the KIVA co-founder Jessica Jackley Flannery, from the Phorecast podcast.

And, if you want the entrepreneur’s look at this, check out Guy Kawasaki’s blog post “The six lessons of KIVA” (Guy is the father of the term “evangelism” for marketing and brand building).

KIVA is enabling thousands of people to improve their lives by doing everything right:

1. Creating a great user experience by connecting people globally on their site.
2. Keeping the lenders updated about the progress of each individual that they have lent money to.
3. Having a clear, easy-to-understand business model (a voluntary $2.50 or 10% from the lender for every loan).
4. Using evangelism to recruit lenders, not spending a dollar on marketing.
5. Inviting big corporate sponsors to help out with their services to create win-win.

                 

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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