Jose is the name of the air cabin steward I met this morning in my flight from Gerona with Ryanair. He was the perfect example of what a cabin steward should never be like. He was the senior one, the one in command. He was working together with two ladies he called my juniors and he was probably supposed to be training them or at least he was supposed to be the senior to follow.
His attitude was completely negative. He welcomed passengers on board with a phony smile and every time someone spent more than a second to show the boarding card, he started a disgusting talk under his nose, with the mouth shut and moving his head up and down, left and right. Once all the passengers were boarded and the plane was ready for take off, he took seat together with one of his "juniors" in the front and started chatting with her. His conversation was based on what the company did to one or the other, giving examples of other cabin crews that had to spend new year's eve in remote locations because of last minute changes and other kinds of punishments.
I was very sleepy because I had to wake up at 4am to drive to Gerona and be there at 6am to board on time, so I tried to sleep all the flight, but still in my dreams I was thinking on how an attitude like this can hurt the image of a company, even to the already bad image of Ryanair.
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Back to Reality
Holidays are over and it is time to put our feet back on the ground. Personally, it has been a nice summer with my family. Enjoying every minute of being a husband and a father, two activities that during the year, are more like a hobby that I do on the weekends because during the week I am far from home.
But, let’s go back to the fight. Well, honestly I haven’t left it during the whole summer. I have only been isolated for 3 days, without opening my laptop or even reading the mail on my iPhone, but even if I had, it would have been in a different mood.
We are growing in registrations and we now have more than 20,000 registered users, our site is getting busier every day and we have lots of active raffles from Louis Vuitton handbags to a weekend in Port Aventura and almost all the latest technological gadgets.
Facebook and Twitter are being animated by Ricardo and Joan and they are doing
a great job. Social Media is not the magical panacea, but it is definitely a must.
Well, it is a short update just to let you know I am still here and that I will continue posting.
Regards.
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
PayPal is not an option anymore
Some weeks ago I posted great news. "We have PayPal", explaining that we asked for authorisation and they finally allowed us to integrate their payment solution in our site.
Last week we received an e-mail putting our account under review and finally stating that our business is gaming and we can not use PayPal. We have tried everything. But they are not interested in listening. You always get the same automated response. "Please remove PayPal as a payment option in your site". No arguments.
We have proposed different options to continue, like placing deposits and guarantees, but there is no other response but the automated response.
Why did they allow us in the beginning and not now? They say our application was not reviewed by the appropriate department. Is it our fault?
Anyway, we are working on integrating other options and maybe in the future...
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Free iPad Raffle. Analysis
Last Monday we held the draw for the free iPad raffle to finalise our first free promotion. We have run this campaign for the last two weeks; basically with a banner based campaign in a news website (20minutos.es).
It's time to analyse how it worked.
Numbers:
| Banner Printouts | 4,306,240 |
| Clicks | 5,319 |
| Landing registrations | 470 |
| Unique Users | 229,700 |
| Print to Click conversion | 0.124% |
| Click to Registration conversion | 8.84% |
| Print to Registration conversion | 0.011% |
| Clicks to Unique Users | 2.316% |
| Reg to Unique Users | 0.205% |
It hasn't been a good campaign. The result is not in the numbers we were expecting. The print to click conversion is too low for a free campaign, but if we analyse the Unique Visitor to Click conversion, it goes up to really good numbers for a web ad. There is a problem here.
But the good thing about it is that we have learned some lessons.
1. We have shown our banner to the same unique user more than 18 times in average. That's crazy. Once a user has seen your banner more than 3 times, you are bothering him. If the web page where you place the ad cannot control how many times you are printing the ad to a user, you have to design lighter campaigns with less printouts and shorter in time. You are throwing away your money if you don't control this.
2. Even when you are giving something away, there is always certain reticence in people believing it. You have to work in your trust even harder.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Press Conference
Thursday 20th May was the date for raff.me to be presented to the media. Over 20 journalists from different areas in the media, from newspapers to radios and online news portals attended the event organised together with Microsoft, our technology partner and pasiona, our development partner.
The event started with a quick presentation of the speakers by the moderator, Ariadna Boada who introduced Enrique Fernandez, Microsoft's Director of Development, Ernest Pagès, Raff Ltd's CEO and David Teixidó, pasiona's CEO.
Enrique focused his speech on the vision Microsoft has for the future, giving special emphasis to cloud computing and pervasive computing with the concept of the three screens (computer, telephone & TV). Enrique mentioned the different innovation centres Microsoft is promoting to help universities, entrepreneurs, software vendors etc. improve the knowledge and use of Microsoft Technologies.
When it was my turn, I started the presentation with the video I had previously posted in this blog, which I think explains the raff.me concept in a quick and easy way. Helped by 4 slides, I tried to explain:
· What raff.me is
· The characteristics of the model
· raff.me today
· Short term plans
David Teixido finished the presentation with a quick overview of the implementation process, focusing on the quality and development methodology they use and the challenges they had faced.
A quick tour on the site to see the different types of raffles we are holding and the services offered to users, ended our presentation.
It was the time for questions. There were questions regarding legal aspects and why Malta, questions about the types and value of raffles, choices of payment gateways... etc, which helped in a better understanding of the site.
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