What's going on in Bolder World.

Today, we are at the Contact Forum fair, meet us there at our stand! We are continuously looking for new talents to share our enthusiasm and support our growth. We came up with five employee or freelancer profiles, that could add up to Bolder team in near future. Do you have what it takes?

COPY & COMMUNICATION

You speak and write fluent Finnish and English. You are a born idea generator, who loves writing and understands the possibilities of social media. Campaign ideas and texts are created in no time by you.

RICH MEDIA DEVELOPER

Flash is your home court—you think that AS3 was a clear improvement to AS2. You have good skills in essential web programming languages (mysql/PHP). In addi- tion, you are eager to learn more about Flex and you have an eye for design and smooth animation.

VIDEO JACK

You have excellent skills in Final Cut and After Affects—you just simply love shooting and editing video. You have good understanding of web and you publish your work online on a regular basis. As a bonus, you also have experience in animation, 3D and sound design.

DEVELOPER

You master XHTML and PHP and you have an outstanding understanding about content management systems and web projects. Your passion is to create excellent websites and you value the importance of usability and web standards. And of course, you understand the significance of graphic design in web services.

TRAINEE

You master some of the things listed above. Academic background is not a necessity, but hard-working attitude is. You have excellent communicational skills and you know the basics of Adobe CS programs.

Interested? Send your cv or portfolio to you(at)bolder.fi or come talk to us at the stand.

The Bolder team took off to freezing and sunny Suomenniemi for a couple of days of strategic thinking. We aim at being agile in updating our strategy, and try different ways in doing that until we encounter the perfect one. This time Petri introduced us with Business Model Generation, which turned out to be a very functional approach in strategy revision and updating.

The results are still being processed into clear action steps but at least we will:

• Put more focus on our customer relations and post-sales efforts,
• clarify our message to clients and prospects about what we are really good at and what we want to do and
• minimize the internal “clutter”, i.e. make our internal support functions run more smoothly so we can be even more productive.

Also, we will be blogging more frequently (shouldn’t be too hard!) this year -stay tuned!

Stratmark10-seminaari alkoi peruutuksella, kun tulevaisuudentutkija Mika Mannermaa ei ilmestynytkään paikan päälle – tämä aiheutti muutoksia ohjelmaan. Tietynlaista viestintää tämäkin Mannermaalta.

Alkupuoliskon kiinnostavinta antia oli paneelikeskustelu, johon osallistuivat Mika Pantzar, (Kuluttajatutkimuskeskus), Piia-Noora Kauppi (Finanssialan Keskusliitto), Hanna Sievinen (Nokia), Mikael Jungner (YLE) ja Tore Strandvik (Hanken). Aihe oli melkoisen vapaa paneelikeskustelun pohjalle kaavaillun puheenvuoron peruunnuttua.

Mielenkintoista oli, että puhujat olivat valinneet hyvin erilaiset tavat viestiä ajatuksistaan. Tässä ajassa on olennaista tarttua keskustelussa heti aiheeseen ja laskeutua mandaattipaikalta yleisön joukkoon. Sievinen käytti aloituspuheenvuoronsa kertomalla, että Nokiassa tehdään paljon asioita - me Nokiassa teemme, meillä Nokiassa on..

Yksipuolinen viestin tarjoilu sopii nykyisin harvoin tällaiseen foorumiin. On oltava kiinnostava, rohkea ja aloittaa dialogi. Jungner on selvästi aikaisemminkin tämän huomannut, eikä pelkää asettaa itseään ja muita kritiikin alaiseksi. Lisäämällä tähän muutaman esiintymisteknisen kikan ja pienen provosoinnin, hän vei Nokian Sievistä 6-0. Kun kyse on strategisen markkinoinnin seminaarista, ei tätä asiaa voi sivuuttaa olan kohautuksella.

Note : seminar language was Finnish.

Last year we bought a school in Africa and this year we decided to support fellow entrepreneurs in need. We gave out two micro loans, worth a total of 350 USD to potential female entrepreneurs in Asia. We feel this is a great way to contribute to the development of third world countries by encouraging entrepreneurship. Please join our effort at www.kiva.org; you can start off with as low as 25 usd and you can really make the difference -plus, you get your money back as the entrepreneurs are successful!

Our two micro loans were given to Chim Hean in Cambodia and Darlene Gay Conol in Philippines.

Who’s dream are you helping to come true?

Thanks for all who joined our housewarming party, including the policemen! My friend and a true gentleman Eino Joas took some photos of the event – they can found be from our FB Page. And yes, it is a page, not a group, we just had the group first because FB introduced pages later.

After the party it is time to get back to work again. Here’s Lauri, our creative force, working hard as usual!

The key element for success in a creative project is a well thought Brief. When done right, a brief can eliminate the need for countless meetings, where the agency representatives  try to discover and understand what it is the client really wants.

When buying creative work you should focus on two things:

I. The Goal
What do you hope to achieve? Are you looking to send a message, start a conversation, arouse attention, cultivate action, increase brand recognition or simply renew your image?

II. The Target
Who do you want to reach and why? Can you offer any insight about your target audience?

After you’ve come up with What, Who and Why we’ll find out How and tell you How much. The more specific you can be about your goals and target audience, the better. Keep an open mind about how it could or should be done and remember that marketing is an investment, not an expense. Everything you do should be beneficial and relevant for your business.

Our job and goal is to improve your business. We are not a company that just does what the client asks without even considering whether it is what should be done. As funny as it may sound, our goal is not to sell you something, it is to sell something you actually need.

If you’re still unsure of what it is you need, you can schedule a meeting with us and we’ll figure it out together.

There have been rumors circling middle-earth about our future. Yes, it is true - an alliance has been created between two kingdoms. This autumn Bolder Helsinki and Kisko Labs will join forces under the same roof.

The new joint-office is located in the peaceful seaside of Kamppi and it’s over twice the size of our previous residence in Töölö. We also just found out that Bolder’s “role model” Reaktor Innovations used to reside on the same street. Hopefully we will be able to catch some of the same magic and spirit that has made them one of the best places to work in Europe.

The new deeper collaboration naturally expands the service offering for both companies. Our combined expertise and know-how will be available as a single entity for all current and new customers. Through this collaboration we hope to better answer the needs and requirements of our growing client base.

We wish all the best to everyone and welcome you to come and visit our new office in November!

We are more than happy to announce that we have a new member in Bolder. Kasper Stenbäck is joining the company as a sales manager in August. Kasper is a Master of Science in economics, who has gained wide experience working for NGOs in various tasks for nearly a decade.

The members Petri Vilén and Vladimir Abramov are going to fulfill their civil duty in the military service – starting from July 2009. They will be serving the country from 6 to 12 months and will return to Bolder after that.

From now on, the post of CEO will be held by Pekka Hartikainen. This will not affect any ongoing projects and all the preparatory actions for these transitions have been started this spring.

With this information, Bolder wishes everyone a joyful summer!

Someone bought a 20 000 euro advertising space from the most read Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. This someone is looking for a woman he met in a restaurant a few weeks earlier. The ad has raised a huge conversation in the Finnish medium, because nobody seems to believe that this someone is a person rather than an evil advertising company.

To dissolve some rumors around this buzz, we must state, that Bolder hasn’t been involved in posting this advertisement. We only put a Google ad related to some of the keywords related to this topic. However, the most interesting part in the whole story is the appealing demonstration of the power of digital media. We used a 50-euro coupon code Google has sent us, and after spending some 4 euros we got the first calls from Helsingin Sanomat and the tabloids.

Finding strategic partners is a vital part of our story and thus we require much from our customers to bring our relationship to a new level. As a result, people who are interested in this kind of strong impressions and appealing influences are the people we are happy to meet and to work with.

I sure hope that those who have paid for the advertisement will achieve their goals, whether they are personal or businesslike. In any case, if this is a campaign, the attention was clearly missed on some levels and maybe the advertising company should have come to us to get some advice on how to turn such an option into something useful and perhaps, profitable.

Bolder has raised out of the academic community of the Aalto University. Our concern from the very beginning has been the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among our fellow students. We have tried to spread the word about the (mostly) wonderful world of running ones own business and been quite succesful in getting it through.