Oh boy, the time has come for my last post on this blog as we have no more lectures and the course is nearing it’s end, and I finally have managed to write all my other posts even though they were a bit late.
I must say that, even though it seems like I only whine how I have not learned that much or how we are only taught few things over and over again, I have really enjoyed this course. Seldom come the times when you get to write blogs as a school project and actually express yourself in that way, instead of just writing some boring project reports that have no character in them.
So what did we do on this last week? On Monday we had to present our team’s final presentation to our teachers. It was sort of a dress rehearsal for Thursday’s presentations when all teams had to present their final presentations to everyone else.
Thursday was the very last day of the course and for that reason our teachers had prepared some beverages et cetera for us. Everyone was happy and you could really see that the teachers had been enjoying this whole course. I really have nothing more to report about the last week, except: thanks for the fun autumn and merry Christmas.
On last week’s Monday we had Mika Aittamäki from Rainmaker talking to us. Mika is a sales expert from a company called Rainmaker. He was talking to us about how sales are going to be more and more digitalized as the time goes on, and that we have to be prepared for it and we need to see it’s possible potentials.
He talked about how even though most sales are going to be handled through technology and machines, such as computers, the sales are still human interaction. For humans are still just humans (he used the term analog) and not machines. This made my thought wonder off again and I guess I missed a lot of the lecture because of it. I started wondering how Mika is so sure we are actually humans and not just simulations in the Matrix. Maybe I just have troubles with concentration :^)
Mika also talked about how the digitalization may open up some great opportunities for others. Previously when the sales were done through actual meetings the seller had to rely on his skills as a speaker but when the sales are done through Internet by using computers even the most quiet person can excel as a sales person.
After Mika’s lecture we had our very own teacher Ilkka Kurkela give us a very brief lecture about digital humanism. Basically Ilkka was talking about the similarities between Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric and Kotler’s theory of modern marketing. According to Aristotle a good speaker must have three different attributes in their speech: logos, pathos and ethos. Logos means logic and rationality, pathos means emotionality and ethos means ethics. In his lecture Ilkka was examining the similarities of Aristotle’s logos, pathos and ethos, with Kotler’s marketing theory’s rational, emotional and ethical appeal.
ILLUMINATI
Thursday, the 3rd
On last week’s Thursday we had our second exam of this course. I have not yet received the results but I hope it went well for me, I think it did.
I was not attending the lecture on last week’s Monday because I was on a student cruise, but here is what I read about it from other people’s blogs. There was a guest lecturer Katja Järveläinen speaking to the class about a company called Gapps. She also talked about her own views on what could happen in the future.
Price competition’s value will diminish and instead its about services
Customer satisfaction is even more important, if possible
Leaders must understand their employees motives for doing the work, to gain the employees commitment
Tuesday, the 24th
On Tuesday I came back from the cruise just in time to attend the LaureaES Entrepreneur Tuesday -event in Laurea Leppävaara to make up for me being away from Monday’s lecture. The main speaker there was Aape Pohjavirta who, according to his own words, is a positive guy so he was talking to us about positive things: the end of the world and the collapse of Finnish economy and how everything is going to s#%t. He reminded me of this hit song listed below.
His speech was just as contradictory with itself as that song is with itself. Grim lyrics and yet somehow the melody sounds happy and positive and all. The same with Aape’s speech. He talked to us about how things are getting worse and pensions have all been wasted and they are not coming back et cetera yet somehow he managed to keep a positive and happy atmosphere through out his whole speech.
Aape started his speech by showing us a happy moomin picture and made the reference how modern day Finland is like Moominvalley. Everybody is happy and everything is just wonderful and everyone holds hands together and sings kumbaya. And as soon as he had made the reference he told us that the reference is all wrong and crazytalk. After that Aape continued with the moomin references. He showed to us another moomin image, and this time it was much more grim which made me instantly believe that the other image would be part of a much more realistic reference (pessimist much?).
The second moomin picture was depicting the Groke from moomins and Aape told us that at the moment Finland is living on spare time and on spare money and when those run out the candle light will go out and it will become so cold that even the Groke will freeze. He told us that some years ago when Nokia was still a thing in Finland there was a study made that if Nokia would fail we would need around 53,000 new companies to make up for Nokia’s tax revenues and at that time the idea of Nokia going down seemed like a ridiculous idea. And today, we have only managed to get about one tenth of those companies. The point of all this was to make the audience to understand that we are living in tough times and things are going to change radically and everything is certainly not ok.
After having established that, as the lyrics of the song go, sh#t’s f%&ked, Aape told us what we can do about it. According to him it is immoral to teach today’s children and students by today’s principles since the world is changing drastically and so will the principles and demands. According to him we need more people like Arvo Ylppö and other such people who have made a difference and not so much people who just make useless innovations that look nice in stores but actually benefit nothing.
Aape also talked about how the fossil fuel -based economies are going to enter in a new era. It was not really that surprising thing to hear but it reminded me about one lecture I saw on the Internet about a year ago. The lecture was about the same things Aape was talking about but from a mathematician’s perspective. It was a lecture given by professor Al Bartlett and I have embedded it below because I feel like it is more than worthy of sharing, even though it is quite old and an hour long lecture.
I still remember Aape telling at the end of his speech how he was around 40 years old when he had realized that there is something wrong in this world. I guess that was the main point of his talk. Things are not great, but we can make them great but we just need to be prepared to face the challenges. After his speech I felt like it was refreshing to hear someone speak about this stuff, about how everything is not ok at the moment and how things might get even worse. But at the same time I must admit that the speech felt like it was lacking an insight. It should be obvious that the welfare state is the first victim of globalization for example, or for another example that we should create jobs in Africa to avert a far greater refugee crisis in the future. As I am writing this I was also reminded about a quote from Oppenheimer. In my opinion it fits quite well on Aape’s message of us being able to make the world a better place even though it doesn’t relate to this course.
It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.
Thursday, the 26th
On Thursday we had one of our team coaches, Arman Nuri, giving us a lecture about content marketing. To be fairly honest I do not really remember the lecture, I don’t really care about marketing lectures but I believe the only thing I remember about the lecture was the main point of the whole thing: content marketing is about creating content that has some value to customers. It’s not just about creating any content but something that gives the customers something, something that makes the customers bond with the provider. Arman used the drinkable Coca-Cola ad as an example of a good way to use content marketing.
On Monday we had Jaakko Alasaarela, sales manager of ZEF, and Camilla Tuominen, Emotion Tracker, come over to talk to us. Jaakko was the first one to give a lecture. I must say that his lecture was probably one of the best ones so far. He talked about his company and what they do but from a different aspect, it was not just a lecture about how to be successful in his line of business but instead it was about the significance the particular line of business has. It was not just about self-improvement in daily life of digital business but about the improvement the daily life of digital business may have on the self, or something like that (it was also about the self-improvement though). He used the arab-spring as an example and told how ZEF also had a role to play in the elections that followed the Egypt uprisings. He also had a funny accent.
Camilla Tuominen came to talk to us about her business, the Emotion Tracker, and about emotions in general and how to use them for your benefit in your career.
Thursday
On Thursday we had our two of our team coaches give us lectures about SEO and online service. Talking about SEO was Jabed who gave us multiple good reasons to use SEO. For example it gives you better visibility for a low cost and makes possible consumers able to find your site easier. To be honest though, most of Jabed’s lecture went right past me for I could not concentrate on the subject because the audience was super restless that day for some reason.
Talking about online servicing was Bui. He talked about for example automating customer service in the online services. What stuck most in to my head was the things he told us about FAQ solutions. Thinking about it, it sounds so obvious that FAQ is an important part of automating your customer services but I actually had never thought of it that way. Mind blown.
This was the week I was in London with my parents, so I was not present during the Thursdays lecture.
Crimean War Memorial in London
On Monday we had our very own Marjaana Marmo lecturing to us about the legal aspects of digital marketing. Marjaana Marmo is one of those teachers I really like to listen. I am usually really confused with all the legal things at the end of her lectures, but there’s just something in the way she presents her lectures. It may sound really contradictory but her lectures shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity, even though I am usually very confused at the end of the lectures…
Some random bird from St. James’ Park
Considering how the lecture was about the legal aspects of digital marketing the lecture was really concrete and detailed. She started the lecture by introducing some basic legal concepts like what is a binding contract and who and what kind of people are able to make such contracts. Contracts can be made by legal persons (for example companies) and by natural persons (for example real persons, human beings). There are limitations though to these. If a natural person is under guardianship and unable to take care of themselves their right to make a contract might be diminished for example.
Marjaana also gave us our weekly task which was about some legal cases and about searching for information about some public officials’ statements regarding some legal aspects of digital marketing. On Thursday the teams introduced their task results to other teams.
I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that the British Museum doesn’t have an entry fee
Phew. It has been a while since I updated this blog. I know I should have been posting here every week but there has been so much going on at the moment, but better late than never I guess. Anyways, time to recap a little bit of the things that have happened during this November.
Monday, the 2nd
On Monday the 2nd we had two guest speakers, Sofia Auranen and Hanna Sirama. Sofia talked to us about her life in general and gave us some good advice, based on her own notions of life, how to make it in life and in business especially. Hanna talked to us about her work and experiences in the ICT -field of business and she also talked to us about the startup-company she is about to launch. Hanna gave us also our weekly task and it was about her coming startup. Her wish was though that the information about the startup would remain a secret so I think that’s about it.
Thursday, the 5th
On Thursday we had Arto Kuuluvainen, from a company called M3 Research, come over to talk to us about branding. In his lecture he used sports as illustrative examples. It was quite interesting to hear about how huge the sports industry actually is, one sports team can be a multi-billion dollar business. Almost like someone’s taken Panem et circenses to the extreme…
Monday was the day we have all been waiting for so eagerly. We were finally taught about blogging. Finally! After waiting for so long! It was so amazing, because we like totally like have not like been taught about blogging before, nu-uh, not at all, never before, totally the first time.
I really do not understand why our blogs are so important that we need to be educated about them every single time we attend the lectures. I mean I do understand that blogs are a big part to digital business in modern world where everyone is searching for product reviews from blogs etc. But what I am trying to say is that in my opinion blogging is the kind of thing you cannot really teach others to learn. It is like a public diary, something which requires you to have an inspiration if you are to excel as a blogger. You can’t really teach others to suddenly get an inspiration, they need to have an inner urge to write about things and to let the world know.
But then again this is not just a blog but also a study journal or diary or something where I am also supposed to record the things I have learned. So what did I learn on Monday’s lecture? First of all it was a really good lecture about blogging, it was really nice to hear, from a person who is like a professional blogger (and a DJ), how blogging can make a good income if you ”keep the momentum going” as the guest lecturer said during the lecture.
The guest lecturer told us about the many benefits of blogging like
) source of income and a way to make business (I especially liked the part where he talked about passive income. It sort of reminded me about something Alan Watts spoke of, dunno why though…)
) blogging can be a learning tool
) blogging also connects people
) it can also help you achieve your goals in life
On Thursday we did not have a lecture but instead we had our first exam, no idea how it went on my part, hopefully well 😀
First one will be Ada’s blog. I really like the way Ada writes her posts, they are consistent and you can really tell she really listens and memorizes the lectures we attend to. Her posts also contain nice pictures, yay! I really like the way she analyzes some of the lectures aswell, for example in her blog post Week 6 when she writes about Faysal’s lecture.
#2
Coming next is Hannah’s blog. I must say that I really like the way Hannah’s blog looks like, its easy to navigate in and has a lot of visuality and a lot of other content. Her posts have a funny cheerful energy in them. Keep up with the good work is all I can say.
#3
Third one is Mari’s blog. It is a really nice looking blog that has the events of this course very well detailed with a lot of pictures taken during this course about this course. I also like the teamspirit that is oozing from the pictures in her blog. Having said that it is nice looking I’m going to pretty much contradict myself now. If there’s something I’d suggest to improve this blog it would probably be for Mari to make it so that the newest post would appear at the top of the blog page, not at the bottom.
#4
For the fourth one I chose Aleksi’s blog. I really like how he has carefully documented the lectures we have had during this course, you can really tell he is also one of those who are really paying attention during the lectures. Maybe one thing I would do to improve the blog would be to get rid of the standard blogspot outlook to make the blog look even better.
#5
Last but not least will be Ria’s blog. I really like the way this blog looks like. I don’t know why but just everything in this blog looks so smooth. The colour scheme is fairly simple but it fits the way the text and images and all are placed in the posts.
After a few week hiatus I return to ramble about my experiences during the digital business course. On Monday we had a guest lecturer talking to us about search engine optimizing and I have to say that I remember nothing of the lecture, I wasn’t really listening, shame on me. We were also given a group task on Monday. The task was to analyze our group’s partner company and it’s two main competitors with Hubspot Marketing Grader.
Thursday
On Thursday we had our teacher Ilkka Kurkela giving us a lecture about digital strategy and the thing that most stuck in my head was one slide which said ”customer is king”, pretty much summarizes the starting point for all of potential future business strategies. What was remarkable about this lecture was that this was also streamed online. Congratulations on your first livestream lecture Ilkka :–D
After Ilkka’s lecture we had one of our team coaches, Bishnu, give us a lecture about lead nurturing.
On Thursday we also had a Pitch&Beer -event (not really part of this course but whatever) which was hosted by LaureaES and Baarikärpänen. Basically the whole event was about people with different business ideas being able to pitch their ideas to a live audience in a relaxed athmosphere. Oh, and there were also free beer and pizza (which were pretty much the reason why I went there, along with socializing). In all honesty I still like this kind of events. Even if I not so enthusiastic about listening to others pitching it is nice that there are people who arrange these events so people can practice their pitching skills with a live audience. It’s also a good way for networking, especially to the ones who are pitching but to others aswell.
Coming back to Ilkka’s lecture and the phrase ”customer is king”. It reminded me of a tweet I read. It was posted by Sir Richard Branson so I’ll end this post by sharing it.
On Monday we had all the employers giving us introductions on what each team will do during this course. My team’s employer is Seniori365 eService that is designed to help elderly people find services designed for them more easily. Our task for the employer is to come up with new ways to get new revenue streams for the service. I did not really listen to the other employers since they are not a concern of mine.
On Thursday we had a guest speaker, Jyri Rasinmäki from Vapa Media, speaking about problem solving. His lecture was a bit philosophical from time to time but I’m OK with that kind of stuff. After the lecture we had the student groups presenting to other student groups about the assignments. After the day was over I went to see the Nordic Business Forum with a few of my friends and you can read about it in more detail from my previous post.
Aape started his speech by showing us a happy moomin picture and made the reference how modern day Finland is like Moominvalley. Everybody is happy and everything is just wonderful and everyone holds hands together and sings kumbaya. And as soon as he had made the reference he told us that the reference is all wrong and crazytalk. After that Aape continued with the moomin references. He showed to us another moomin image, and this time it was much more grim which made me instantly believe that the other image would be part of a much more realistic reference (pessimist much?).
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