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.
Friday 14 May 2010
Free iPad Raffle. Campaign Design
Name:
20min Free iPad
Objectives:
1. Generate new registrations on the site.
2. Learn from the experience
Scope:
Spain
Media:
20minutos.com cross-site banners. 20 minutos is the most read free newspaper in Spain and the electronic edition is the second most visited news site.
Goals:
· Good: 5000 registrations
· Fair: 2000 registrations
· Bad: 1000 registrations
Design:
Landing page with a short explanation of the site and the raffle.
The Participate button takes you to a registration page where you only have to enter your e-mail address to get a free ticket for the iPad raffle.
Advertising Methodology
Marketing & Advertising has never been a science where one plus one equals two. In fact it can equal three or minus four. But when you add the word internet into the equation, the results can be bewildering because it can equal five hundred or you can directly bite the dust. The nice thing about it is that you enter into the twilight zone - everything is possible. If somebody tells you they have the knowledge and expertise and know what really works on the net, run away and don't look back, you are in danger.
Advertising Methodology
But, when you do things, you have to follow a method. You can modify it or change it, but you at least need a method. I am writing my method. I am not saying that it works, but it is the one that I am going to follow… for now. It is an exercise of putting on paper (in a post) the initial method and the different modifications in a reasoned way. Let's start.
My Method (today)
Marketing & advertising on the internet is not a science but must be worked with the scientific method of trial and error.
- Start by emptying your mind of prejudices and making and educated guess of how to attract customers to your page.
- Implement it
- Put all the necessary tools in place to analyse your client's behaviour and start your data capturing. Google Analytics can help in this phase. Their tools are easy to understand, simple to implement and give you a wide range of information. And it is for free.
- Never launch a massive campaign. Always make sure you can pause your campaign to adjust parameters and resume it to continue with the data capturing.
- Pause -Analyse -Modify - Resume -Capture-Pause-…
- Never think the results you get from your analysis are a consistent truth.
Wednesday 12 May 2010
Gaming License
Let me explain briefly how gaming licenses work in Malta and what different types of licenses you can apply for.
Remote gaming in Malta is regulated by the Remote Gaming Regulations, 2004 issued under the Lotteries and Other Games Act 2001 ("LOGA"). The regulatory body in Malta supervising remote gaming operation is the Lotteries and Gaming Authority ("LGA").
In order to provide remote betting/gaming services from Malta, one needs to obtain a license of the class appropriate to the operations. I have been dealing with the whole process and it has been tough work. They ask for all the details of your operations and the requirements are really strict. It is a pity that customers don't realize how strict it is because that would make them feel safer and more secure.
Licensees are expected to operate in compliance to LOGA and the Regulations, as well as anti-money laundering legislations, e-commerce legislation and any other relevant law. The following four classes of licenses are available in Malta:
Class 1: For operators managing their own risk on repetitive games. This class covers casino-type games, skill games and online lotteries.
Class 2: For operators managing their own risk on events based on a matchbook. Under this class falls fixed odds betting, pool betting and spread betting.
Class 3: For operators taking a commission from promoting and/or betting games. This class includes P2P, poker networks, betting exchange and game portals.
Class 4: To host and manage remote gaming operators, excluding the licensee himself. This is intended for software vendors who want to provide management and hosting facilities on their platform.
We operate under a Class 3 license because we earn commissions from raffles.
A basic tenet of the Regulations is the requirement that the core part of the online gaming/betting operations must be physically located in Malta.
Tuesday 4 May 2010
Marketing Strategy
Does somebody really know how to launch a new site like raff.me? I am really tired of listening to the "specialists", the ones who theoretically are the gurus of this 2.0 universe. We have been working with different agencies and what is a sacred rule for one, is a fatal error for another. You finally end up with a nice guy who admits that there are neither sacred rules nor fatal errors. There are growing trends in certain directions, but no one can tell that something that has worked well with other sites will work fine for you. It is a game of test and error. Good. I didn't need gurus to get to this point.
If you have a huge budget and you can play the game until you find your own recipe, you are lucky, but that is not our case. We need to guess where our balance between online & offline marketing, viral marketing, brand building, SEM, SEO, SMM…and a long series of other acronyms is. Too many variables in the recipe to get the right flavour in the first try.
Viral Marketing
The first serious proposal from the agency was a viral campaign based on a video. They worked on a good script. The main character was a funny freak that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Augmented reality gags made it spectacular and the result would surely be a good video. Probably a viral one, in fact they guaranteed more than 500K views. Spectacular! But is it really what we need? If 500K internet users enjoy 30 seconds of a good video, will this drive them to my page? And what is even more important, will they register? Or it will just make some branding and they will get familiar with the brand and will recognise it the next time they listen to it? That's not worth 70% of my marketing budget. Nice but not worth it.
Social Marketing
Besocialmyfriend. The next agency was a hyper-social one. The secret lies in being social, creating communities and living in facebook and twitter. They are probably right. Social Media is the present and the future, but to draw a strategy you cannot be obsessive. There is life offline and you can't ignore it. There is an old saying that states "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
Our Strategy
We're back to our initial thoughts. We are launching a raffle platform, how can we promote it? Through raffles! We are creating promotional raffles, some of them free raffles and we are designing a banner and advertising campaign based on some massively visited sites, facebook and AdWords. We are creating focused campaigns to filtered targets, pointing to free raffles of their interest in music, technology, cooking, sports… .
I will go into further detail in future posts.
Thursday 29 April 2010
Ready to Launch
We are officially launching raff.me next Wednesday , May 21st, in a press conference together with Microsoft and pasiona. Microsoft will be present with Enrique Fernández-Laguilhoat, Director of Platform and Development explaining the platform and technologies used in our development and David Teixidó, CEO of pasiona, the Microsoft Gold Partner that has carried out the actual development.
That will be the start of a series of marketing campaigns combining the online and the offline world to start spreading the concept of the platform and the different promotional raffles (some of them free).
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Payment Gateways
When you arrive at the payment page of a web site, you have the feeling of finalising a journey. You have googled through different sites, made your choices, compared similar offers and probably read feedback from other users on the product or the service you are acquiring.
You have made your decision. You are buying. You just have to pay for it. Simple.
Or not. Because there is nothing simple when there is a bank involved.
Payment Methods were never present in the list of risks or complicated duties when we designed the project. It was one in a bunch of agreements with suppliers, but nothing special. It has turned out to be one of the main time consuming and frustrating parts of the process.
PayPal does not accept us because we fall in the category of gaming companies. No problem, there are other options. Neteller, Ukash… but they charge very high fees.
Credit Cards are the main option, but we have to be careful with chargebacks and fraud. 3DSecure is an option to avoid risks, but the majority of card holders are not enrolled for it. Some banks directly reject your transactions if you are an adult content or gaming site and you do not use 3DS. Other banks make it difficult for their customer to enrol and you get more than 50% of their transactions rejected due to lack of enrolment...
… there is a complex world behind a payment page.
Friday 23 April 2010
Customer Care
Alleluia! We finally have a telephone line and Internet connection in our office in Malta. It took more than a month to get the office running. We have been working from home for the past few months and we were waiting to start working in the office and separate our personal and professional life.
Our office in Malta will be initially be attending our customer's questions and requirements in English, German and Spanish.
Customers can contact us through different channels:
e-mail: We will reply as soon as possible. ( support@raff.me )
The community: There is a community section on our website where any user can post questions, opinions, suggestions… and other users will reply. Our Community Managers will post comments and act as moderators.
Telephone: There is a local number in every country that is routed through voice over IP to Malta. (Initially Spain, France and UK)
Twitter: We have created a twitter account and we will tweet relevant information to our followers and users can send messages. @raffme_es in Spanish, @raffme_en in English and @raffme_de in German.
Facebook: We are setting up a facebook page for each language.
Unfortunately we can't offer 24x7 customer care . We will initially be available from 10 to 8 and depending on how things move, we will adjust accordingly.
Our Customer Care strategy is to be direct and transparent. If something is not working, we will be quick to admit it and even quicker to solve it.
Thursday 22 April 2010
Raffles vs Reverse Auctions
Reverse Auction websites are appearing lately like flies on a cake. Some of the sites try to confuse the users by saying it is a raffle and others provide a complete explanation of how they work. The main difference is: A Raffle is considered as gaming because the result depends on random numbers, and Reverse Auctions are not considered as gaming, because there is no randomness involved.
Another big difference is that if your activity is gaming, you need a license to operate and you are audited and have to comply with many anti-fraud regulations. Reverse Auctions are not subject to any regulation or licensing. Those sites are therefore not supervised or monitored by any authority. Their processes and software are not validated, so their prize assignation process doesn't need any approval or compliance with any guidelines. They can literally do what they want and the user is completely helpless if he wants to complain, because there is no authority to appeal to.
www.raff.me is located in Malta. The company’s operations are licensed and regulated by the Lotteries and Gaming Authority of Malta (LGA) http://www.lga.org.mt/ .
Wednesday 21 April 2010
What's www.raff.me ?
www.raff.me is a new Business Model on the Internet. It is a new service platform that allows any user to create a raffle for new or used goods and promote it to obtain higher earnings compared to a normal sales process. On the other side, all other users can participate in the raffle by buying tickets with a high probability of winning.
There are many things we would buy, but they are classified as whims and wishes in our budget. The kind of things that are not really needed, but we fancy having. Raff.me is the place to give luck a chance for just a few Euros.
I think the best way to know how it works is to view the video.
Tuesday 20 April 2010
Be Social my Friend
Open your mind to the net, be social.
If you are not on the net you become an hermit,
If you tell what others do, you become a blabbermouth,
If you tell others what you do, you become social.
Be social my friend.
Times are changing and the internet has changed how we live our lives and how we build our relationships. Those changes invaded our personal relationships and we got used to it, but now the change is affecting our professional lives to. It is changing how we do business, how we interact with our customers, our suppliers and our competitors, by demanding greater transparency and participation.
I just started this blog with the intention of being social, with the idea of sharing with whoever could be interested, the experience of launching a new business model on the net, www.raff.me
I will appreciate suggestions, criticisms and any opinion that could help me and my team do it better. I am facing different challenges here, professional and personal. Personally speaking, I am not the kind of hyper-social guy who needs to be socialising all day, I am more of a family man who prefers a good book rather than a good party, so that's challenge no. 1 "Be Social my Friend". Challenge no. 2 is, how you start up a company telling everybody what you are going to do and sharing your strategy with the world without being afraid of competition or being copied? Well, you all have the answer, because the risk is worth your feedback and opinion.
We are launching in a few days, so the following posts will be a short summary of what has happened till today to help you understand what's happening.
And remember, be social my friend.
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