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UPDATE: THE GUESTLIST IS NOW CLOSED!
Thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic response!!!!
One of my favorite S60 licensees, Nokia, is putting on a party in LA on the night of September 27th. The event will showcase some of the latest devices and experiences from the Nseries group. This is not an "Evening with S60", it is a Nokia Nseries event. Nevertheless, the good people in Nokia Sales and Marketing have agreed to save some invitations for readers of the S60 blogs. I've seen pics of the venue, and it looks appropriately LA-chic.
With the exception of a few of our most active S60 Agents from the NY area, we are limiting invites to fans of S60 who live in the LA area. If you would like to go, please send your name, snail mail address, current S60 device, and 1 reason why you want to attend to danieldotshugrueatnokiadotcom. Pls put "S60 LA" in the subject header.
No word yet on how many invites we get, so I'll work on a first come first serve basis. Oh and we will have an "Evening with S60" in CA coming up this Fall, along with an expansion of our S60 Agent: New York pilot into CA. So if you want to become an Agent but have plans on the 27th, no worries, you'll have an opportunity to sign up soon. More on that to come.
Feargal Quinn is Ireland's "Pope of customer service". He espouses "5 lessons in customer-service humility":
"My customers know more than I do. My employees know more than I do. Neither my employees nor I can be creative all of the time. What I knew yesterday is not enough for today. I'm not responding fast enough for my customer."
That sentiment is one of the philosophies underpinning the decision to out license S60, and open the interface to third party developers. No one company can anticipate all of the ways mobile devices can be used, so we rely on an open market to help spur innovation. It is also an important sentiment when interacting with S60 Agents, many of whom know more about S60, and have discovered uses for their S60 phones that I've never dreamed of.
Joey Bons wrote about talking to a member of his congregation at church (talk about evangelism!). He sent me the link to two different sites offering Bibles for S60: 1, 2.
Adekunle had an excellent idea for tricking out his bicycle with both hardware and software for his N95. He wrote about an encounter he had with fellow bike fans in Central Park, and directed me to this post for pictures of his ride, and ebay to get the hardware.
I'm not a religious person, so that's my excuse as to why I didn't know there were Bible apps out there. I am an avid biker, though, and I still hadn't thought to look on ebay for an N95 case to afix to my bicycle. In both cases it takes a dialog with Agents to get information on the myriad ways S60 can be used. Thanks to both Joey and Adekunle for the great reports!
Listening to what consumers say "live", in the flesh, is a time-consuming but worthwhile task in the world of marketing. I keep an edited video from each of the "Evening with S60s" that I've been to in the US. In the video, each attendee is asked to tell me their name, where they are from, plus three things they like and three things they would improve about S60. Probably the most common answer to the “what do you like” question, among S60 enthusiasts, is the design of the UI. Words like "clean", "efficient", "easy-to-use" are most common. Many attendees also named "extensibility" or "ability to add new applications" or the "number of cool 3rd party apps available" as one of the things they liked. These comments were great to hear, a validation of some of the work we've done establishing S60's value proposition to consumers.
Some comments, however, gave me pause. For instance, a couple of the attendees said they like S60 because it "wasn't Windows Mobile". Now it’s nice to hear that we are preferred over a rival by our fans. However, it is not ideal as a brand/product to be defined by something you are not. When I asked why they liked to *not* be Windows Mobile, one attendee said he was a Mac user, and he liked to be different. Again, not ideal. Ultimately, here in S60 Marketing, we are not looking to be the kid-brother alternative to another brand. We want to achieve critical mass in the US (Just as we've done in Europe, Mainland China, and SE Asia), by delivering the best software platform available.
I remembered this Apple/S60 fan when I was re-reading Dave Balter's "Grapevine: The New Art of Word of Mouth Marketing" last night. Dave is the founder of BzzAgent in Boston as well as one of the founders of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. In “Grapevine”, Dave Balter writes about a Word of Mouth campaign and research study at a restaurant called Rock Bottom. The study revealed two somewhat counter-intuitive aspects of WoM marketing. First, the most active WoMers were the customers who were characterized as "light" as opposed to "heavy" loyals. In other words, the customers who came to Rock Bottom once a month were more likely to talk about the restaurant than those who came in every Tuesday/Friday night. Balter hypothesized two reasons for this: First, "heavy loyals" had in some cases already told all of their friends and family about Rock Bottom, and they didn't have anything more to share. Second, some of the heavy loyals had developed a sense of "ownership" of the brand, and thus didn't want to tell others about it.
I think of this second group of "heavy loyals" as the type of consumer in the US that wants to use S60 because S60 is different, and is seen as a kind of underdog in the world of US smartphone mobility. This is a loyal customer, and thus a good customer. We can target this type of customer with exclusive offers, direct mail, and new products. But we probably shouldn’t target him/her as an S60 Agent.
As Balter writes:
In any exclusive society, in order for there to be “insiders” there must be “outsiders”. The more “inside” you get, the less willing you are to open the door and invite others in. In fact, you’re more likely to shut the door and go entirely quiet. Why risk wrecking a good thing? Why threaten your own status? Why involve yourself with a marketing campaign designed by outsiders and intended to bring more outsider in?”
Thus as we look to expand our pilot S60 Agent campaign into California, we’ll continue to recruit through the S60.com website, but we’ll actively engage other channels as well.
The S60 Agent program is in full swing. Tthe idea behind the S60 Agent program is to amplify the S60 Word of Mouth activity already taking place, and to find out what real people are saying about S60 on the street, over the phone, at the neighborhood BBQ. We are focusing on NY in order to take advantage of the rollout of Nseries devices in that area (check out http://www.nseries.com/nyc for details on Nseries in the NY market.) Anyway I'm getting a kick out of reading the reports from some of the enthusiastic S60 fans out there. Here's a sample from Marion Ong, a great salesperson.
(The Hard/Soft Sell) - Is this a report or what?! =P fast forward to the July 4th holiday. My friend Mon invited me to his apartment in Williamsburg in Brooklyn for a rooftop fireworks-viewing gathering/party. They had an excellent unobstructed view of the East River and it was just absolutely perfect for the party. By 5pm there were about 25 people in the roofdeck and the inevitable party snapshot taking begins. Everybody whips up their digital cameras and starts snapping away. I am always eager to show off the latest and greatest technology every chance I get but waited for my attention-grabbing moment. I let the first round of photos get taken and I suddenly blurt out something to the effect of "My turn kids, I need all the ladies in this corner!" Mind you I had my white Apple headphones on which was plugged in to the 3250.. When the girls congregated to had their group shot taken I proceeded to nonchalantly pull my phone from my pocket, 'twisted' the 3250 to activate photo mode whilst the headphones still plugged in to the HS-20 adapter and went on to take snapshots. The girls were taken aback for a few seconds then went on to pose, after I took a couple of snapshots, I was surrounded by the group and went to check my phone. They were impressed and definitely curious at the twister functionality, the dedicated music buttons but I went on to show them that this is the latest Nokia smartphone. I got the "but its not a Treo, how can that be a smartphone" response but I went on to explain that the phone runs an actual operating system, has excellent PDA software, syncs w/ Outlook, etc., can have software installed (there wasn't much s60 v3 software at the time so to convince them I dragged my friend Mon to the gaggle of girls and had him show off the installed 3rd party software to his 6260 - which I actually convinced him to buy 2 years ago and also proceeded to wow them with the 6260s twister/camcorder mode;). One of my friends Jenny jokingly asked me if she can buy my phone on the spot as she didn't want to go flying to Europe to get a 'high tech phone'; I told her its not too hard to find these phones in the city, I mentioned the importers in Chinatown and Flushing, and a lightbulb flashed in my head. I loaded the new v3 OSS based web browser and went to importgsm.com to show her the prices. The only question I had after that was "thats really awesome, but does it do Friendster or yahoo?" which I gladly proceeded to load on my browser, and that pretty much sealed the deal for her. I got a call from her a few days later and she was calling me to help her install "the internet" on her new 3250 and sync her tasks. I had her sign up for the T-Mobile t-zones plan and directed her to the nokiausa.com/support site and loaded the SMS/MMS/GPRS settings, and even hooked her up with a great deal for a 1GB transflash (microSD) card, and finally linked her ISP POP3 email to her s60 email client! A month ago I had a call from Jenny who moved to and asked for a good music phone for her boyfriend and without hesitation I advised her to visit the Nokia store but definitely recommended the Nokia N91. By this time my techie advice to her was golden and had her BF get the N91 8GB within the week. A few days later got a call from Jenny again asking to install 'the internet' - turns out she loved the N91 and made her BF swap it with her 3250!
Our "S60 Agent" word of mouth marketing program is now in full swing. Here's one of my favorite reports from Agent "Joe":
>A few friends and I rented a house for the weekend in Dewey Beach,
> Delaware.
> The place was a total beach town, populated with college students and
> families on vacation. For our trip down there from NYC my friend had put
> the address into the GPS software he downloaded for his Verizon phone.
> Since we had four hours to kill, I whipped out my laptop and proceeded to
> tether it to my N93. This definitely drew comments from the other
> passengers in the car with me. I explained to them that the USB cable and
> Nokia PC suite made it all easy to do this, all for $2.99 a month on a
> tmobile tzones plan. Unfortunately tmobile had a lot of dead spots on the
> way down, but that's another issue L. The laptop, with n93 still
> attached,
> was quickly passed around as everyone used it to check their emails and
> even
> IM. They balked at the price of the phone however, a common reaction from
> many people I come into contact with J. As we got closer and the streets
> got smaller, the Verizon gps began to fail. Now if I had an N95 or E90
> perhaps, I could've just fired up the built in GPS feature, but this was
> not
> the case. Still tethered to my laptop, I fired up google maps and
> basically
> talked him thru the last 30 minutes of directions. N93 saves the day!
>
> Google maps has been a tremendously useful application for me. I would
> say
> it's the most used 3rd party application that I have. Now this would be
> useless if I had the N95, but I promised myself I would at least keep the
> N93 for a full year before getting a new phone! It next came handy when
> we
> were deciding on a place to eat dinner. No one knew the area, so I
> searched
> the area for our food of choice, which was sushi. In minutes I had a
> location, directions, a phone number and even reviews. This was done all
> while sunning myself out on the beach! Needless to say, everyone was
> impressed. I on the other hand spent that night drying to blow sand out
> of
> my keypad. They said they would all consider an S60 device for their next
> phone, but the main problem is the prices. I've seen enough people's
> faces
> when I tell them the prices to know this is usually the main issue that
> stops many people. I just explained that this is more than just a
> cellphone, and that I've proved that just now. I usually recommend one of
> the S60 v1 devices to try out. They have gotten significantly cheaper but
> still have many more capabilities than a lot of phones out on the market
> today.
>
Great stuff from Joe! If you want to join the New York agent pilot campaign, stop by here. (Remember that for the pilot stage we are only accepting agents in the New York City area).
At some of the "Evenings with S60", and some of the sales trainings I give in the USA, S60 consumers and my Nokia colleagues have wanted to know more about why we don't do more "Above the Line" advertising to support the S60 brand. To explain that I'll back up a bit and give some perspective on where S60 Marketing sits in the overall Nokia organization.
If you take a look at our org chart,, you see 3 main boxes that represent the "Business Groups", in other words the groups that make the handheld devices commonly referred to as phones. Or, in the case of the Multimedia Business Group, Multimedia Computers. The "horizontal" organizations serve the business group either through "backoffice" functions such as printing services or customer interfacing functions like sales. S60 Marketing is part of the "Corporate Functions" horizontal group. As such, we are one step removed from "end customers" and most readers of this blog. As marketers, we exist to serve M, ES, and MP Business Groups.
One extra layer of depth for the S60 Marketeer comes from the fact that we are "outlicensed" to device makers such as Samsung, LG, and Lenovo. Because we license S60 to more than one handset manufacturer, we are separated from other Nokia Business Groups by what is commonly referred to as a legal Firewall (sometimes referred to as a Chinese Wall).
Another extra layer of depth stems from the fact that as middleware (or platform software) providers, we service a variety of customers in the value chain. The only customer from whom we directly collect revenues (and thus some would say the "only" customers period) are the handset manufacturers. But we also actively market S60 to operators/carriers, and to the chipset manufacturers on whose semiconductors Symbian/S60 lives.
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Up until the beginning of this year, with the exception of the S60 website/blogs, S60 was ONLY marketed to these members of the value chain (B2B) and was NOT marketed directly to consumers (B2C). The idea was that the branded handset manufacturers have their own strong brands and S60 as middleware wasn't wasn't necessarily suitable for B2C marketing. The advent of blogging and to a certain extent Web 2.0 in general began to change that. We saw more and more consumers not only knew what S60 was, but saw value in the software platform, whether through the UI, the application suite, or the large number of applications offered on the open market. We also saw some "pull" for the S60 platform and UI by endconsumers.
Today, we are promoting S60 as an integral part of the overall handset manufacturers brands. As such, are becoming a "feature" or "ingredient" brand. In 1st and 2nd edition phones, the Point of Sales materials rarely mentioned the platform. Today, you'll see S60 listed as a feature in spec sheets, as part of the logo on product boxes, and part of the Nseries websites. The process is ongoing. The ultimate goal is that consumers see S60 as they might more famous ingredient brands such as GoreTex -- an important ingredient in a quality product.
Thus, we are only just beginning to build S60 as a consumer platform. In this first stage, we work with the branded handset manufactuers to highlight the platform promise. There is no "above the line" marketing campaign -- by design.
Of course, no one in S60 Marketing would complain if we were suddenly awarded USD100 million with which we could create a series of clever television ads, billboards, and magazine spreads. Until we get there (and believe me there are those of us who fight like hell for it), we can dream. In the meantime, an interesting question is: What would you do with a finite marketing budget? What are some of the more effective ways to reach consumers "on the cheap"?
