Case Studies on Best Practice in
External Marketing Communication
Cases on
Horus Technology
Il Birrino
Memeoirs
Fluentify
Written in May 2015 by the Italian team of the University of Trento:
Michele Bassetto, Eufemio Ferrante, Carmen Iaderosa,
Enrico Libralato, Luca Manisera, Chiara Tilola.
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Memeoirs
International market focus and on the market since 1 to 2 years
1) Introduction of Memeoirs
The story of Memeoirs began 11 years ago, when three students met in Ghent (Belgium)
during their Erasmus experience. They are Giacomo Miceli (IT student, Italian), Fred Rocha
(IT engineering student, Portuguese) and Paulo Rodrigues Pinto (IT engineering student,
Portuguese). The Erasmus project is not just about studying and partying, but also about
developing entrepreneurial ideas.
During the following years our three future entrepreneurs follow different paths in life,
keeping in touch from time to time until 2010 when the three friends decided to celebrate
New Year’s Eve together. While checking his emails, Giacomo shared his intuition with Fred
and Paulo: Browsing all the emails of a person, it is possible to collect enough material for a
biography. Why not using this material to write a personal story by means of an automatic
software which does it for you?
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The three entrepreneurs decided to create “a platform that turns your email in a book”, but it
took almost 2 years to develop the first prototype. The new-born project was then incubated
for 6 months in Start-up Chile, a seed accelerator created by the Chilean Government based
in Santiago, Chile. Start-up Chile provides equity free investment for qualified start-ups and
our three friends received $ 40,000 funding alongside the possibility to enhance their
business skills. It was at this stage that Giacomo, Fred and Paulo decided to pivot and to
recreate their platform from scratch.
After the incubation program, the team went back to Europe seeking for additional free
equity funds. The three friends entered TechPeaks, an accelerator program in Trento (Italy)
which allowed them to receive € 25,000 for their project.
At the beginning of the year 2014 the Memeoirs team received an important round of
investment of $ 300,000 (around € 225,000 at the time) from Gruppo Pozzoni, an Italian
printing giant (the first Italian printer and the third in Europe with more than 2,000
employees). Since this last round of investment, the startup is currently obtaining-up to €
200,000 equity-free matching funds from the Autonomous Province of Trento – Italy (the
original backers of the TechPeaks program) to match the round of investment received by
the Pozzoni Group. The Break even point will be hopefully reached in 2016.
At present the company’s legal head office is located in Trento (Italy) while the development
team is located in Lisbon (Portugal). The platform has changed and it currently collects not
only emails, but also conversations and pictures, covering all the mainstream social network
and selling books and e-books all over the world (worldwide free shipping via FedEx).
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At the beginning the main targets were young couples willing to make a special gift for their
partners, but nowadays the customers are more diversified. In the future the team wants to
develop a more personalized service, a sort of storify.com (a social network service that lets
the user create stories or timelines using social media, mainly used by journalists) for anyone
who wants to collect and organize all the personal memories.
Product description
Memeoirs is a printed or digital book made by selectively publishing the messages and
pictures from users’ emails that fall into the time frame they choose. Newsletters, account
activation e-mails, and all that non-personal mailing will be discarded for the costumers.
Memeoirs try its best to purge the body of the e-mails of redundant content.
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It is possible to set Memeoirs so that it chooses a style that fits the customers’ needs, creating
a fitting cover and adding some content. The messages are sorted chronologically with each
chapter corresponding to a season of the year. A preview that matches the final content of
the book is available before the order, both for physical books and e-books. Besides Facebook
and WhatsApp, GMail and Hotmail (now called Outlook.com) are currently supported and
free shipping is featured worldwide.
2) What makes Memeoirs an entrepreneurial company? How innovative are they?
Memeoirs is an entrepreneurial company, and more specifically we could define it a start-up,
which means an entrepreneurial project aiming at scaling quickly and globally. The design of
the company is built in order to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It is
newly created (less than 2 years) and it is in a phase of development and research for new
markets.
Their competitors are other platforms providing a similar service like mysocialbook.com,
prinstagr.am, tweetbook.in et similar. The competitive advantage of Memeoirs is the
possibility of creating a book or an e-book based on many different social networks and not
just one as in the case of the aforementioned companies. Other important strong points are
the competitive price compared to other competitors (€ 9.90 for the digital version and €
29.90 for the paperback) and the emphasis on private conversations and chats.
Memeoirs can be defined as an innovative company from different points of view. It is an
innovative service as it somehow challenges some little invisible orthodoxies of the industry:
For instance it goes against the trend of keeping all the files digitized and has as core business
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the printing of all these digital files. At the same time, it uses all the new social networks and
media and some new marketing channels (as shown by the use of affiliate marketing tools).
Memeoirs can be defined innovative also because of its way of raising funds. It received funds
from start-up incubators, start-up accelerators and also from forward-looking business angels
and venture capitalists.
“We are very different from our indirect competitors because we have started making books from
people’s email conversations. Our unique technology, comprised of fetching and parsing
algorithms, allows for fast and automatic creation of books. We are the only ones doing this. Soon
we will be adding Facebook messages, and other unique channels”.
(Fred Rocha, Co-founder of Memeoirs - Techcrunch.com)
3) What makes Memeoirs an example of best practice with regards to external marketing
communication? – How are these practices implemented?
At this early stage the marketing staff of Memeoirs faces important challenges. The website
memeoirs.com receives 500 views per day with 50-60 signups and few sale and these values
haven not been changing since months.
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One of the main problem is that the marketing channels used by Memeoirs are not exploited
properly. The use of the shareasale.com affiliate network could be considered a best practice
of the company, but improvements are needed in the future. Shareasale.com is an affiliate
marketing platform, a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one
or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing
efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant, the network (that contains offers
for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also
known as 'the affiliate’, who could be a journalist or a blogger), and the customer. It is a sort
of two-sided market, or even multi-sided market, which is a type of economic platforms
having two, or more distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits.
The share of sales made by means of shareasale.com platform is around 20% but the aim of
Memeoirs is to increase this share.
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Besides shareasale.com, Memeoirs exploits also social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest), as well as video platforms (Vimeo) and blogs (Wordpress blog at
blog.memeoirs.com).
4) How is Memeoirs utilizing the new communications features?
50% of the total sales are made thanks to the advertisements made by using new
communication features including the new social media and the new online magazines.
30% of the revenues come from the social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In particular
Memeoirs exploits the possibility to advertise on Facebook not only through their page but
also via the sponsored advertisements available for companies.
The remaining 20% derives from the websites and magazines which cited Memeoirs like
Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Gizmodo, Openmag etc.
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It is important to use all these different communication channels in order to differentiate the
risk: if one communication channel goes down or faces relevant issues, it is fundamental to
have the possibility to rely on other means of communication.
A good example, which could explain the importance of the aforementioned differentiation
among means of communication, is the recent so-called “Mobilegeddon”. According to the
international press, Mobilegeddon is a recent happening related to Google and its search
algorithm. Few days ago, on April 21, Google launched the mobile-friendly algorithm
update that they have announced during the last months. The primary motivation behind
this change is Google’s desire to improve user experience for all mobile users. To counteract
the negative experience of those people unable to interact with mobile interfaces while
surfing the web via mobile, Google penalized non mobile-friendly results in favour of
websites that give a better experience to users (this algorithm update only impacts results
shown to users on mobile phones while results for users on tablets and desktops are not
impacted).
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In this specific case, Memeoirs was penalized as it still doesn’t have a mobile website and this
has become one of the key issue for Memeoirs from the marketing perspective. Fortunately
Memeoirs differentiated its marketing possibilities and sales have not dropped dramatically
yet. In any case, a mobile configuration of the website is essential nowadays.
More information here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2015/04/rolling-out-mobile-friendly-update.html
and here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html
5) International issues (if relevant)
Memeoirs started as an international platform. The main language has been English since the
very beginning as the founders have a strong international background. Even if the company
is registered in Italy, Italian is just the second language of the platform and the customer care
is held mainly in English, likewise the marketing communication.
A future challenge will be providing a service which will take into account the cultural
differences of different nations (i.e. German people take privacy into consideration way more
than some other nationalities) as well as the adaptation of the service to the non Latin
languages, which means implementing new fonts and cultural-dependent features (like books
written right-to-left).
In any case, the majority of the sales are made in English speaking countries, as shown below
in the graph.
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Sales per country of Memeoirs in the period 19 November 2014 - 5 May 2015
