An interview with Naomi Simson of Red Balloon Days

RedBalloon Days is a great example. It is an online gift retailer that specialises in selling experiences as gifts since October 2001. This year, they were among the 22 finalists of the Telstra Business Awards and they were the most visited website in the gift and flowers category both in 2005 and the quarter of April to June 2006.

Naomi Simson is the founder and CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of RedBalloon Days. She has shared with us her experiences on managing an online business and her views on the Internet. You can find the list of all the websites and blogs mentioned at the end of the interview. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Naomi Simpson
Ladership is also about communicating. We have every sort of communication - we use blog, wiki, podcasts and survey tools. The team know where and how to get formal information as well as their daily team huddles

Cenk - Naomi this is a quote in your own blog, can you go in detail about how you use all these tools, for example wikis? (wiki is a type of website that allows users to edit and change the content)

Naomi - Wiki is our repository for all the information we have. All of our plans, surveys, strategies, even information such as applying for annual leave are in our wiki. As our staff number increased, these tools became a necessity to keep everyone informed of everything that is happening here. Every staff member can edit our wiki’s and people can access it remotely. So now no one can say “I did not know”. We have internal blog, wiki and podcasts so there is no reason for a staff member “not to know”.

Cenk - How about podcasts?

Naomi - We have a big team meeting once a month, where we talk about last month, our plans for the new month and celebrate our achievements. Unfortunately, not everyone can make it, so we record the meetings and we publish the link on our internal blog, so even if someone is on holiday, they can click on the link and keep up to date with what is going on.

Cenk - All these tools (wikis, podcasts) are also commonly known as Web 2.0. Is that part of your strategy to use them?

Naomi - I just have the best developers working here. The development team started using these tools, and when I saw what they use, I asked them to develop for me as well! I did not know these tools, or even what web 2.0 is. It is just that as an online company, we are continually innovating.

Cenk - You have launched your own blog a few months ago, what are the reasons for having your own blog? You recently added the links in RedBalloon Days website to your blog as well, why is that?

Naomi - Our business is online, and it is very important to be available to people that do business with us, so that they trust us and spend their money. They need to know there is somebody there that they can call if something happens.

Blog has been a good reason for me to keep writing. And it is my baby, I manage it myself and I love it. Initially, there was not enough traffic in my blog and so our IT team simply did not link our company website and my blog. I also did not have much content. But now I am working hard in writing new content and more people are reading it so we added the links.

Cenk - You also have profiles in Linked In and Open BC, both social networking websites, what is your take on that?

Naomi - I also do a lot of “old fashioned” networking, attending to events and talking to people and I was really curious to know how networking worked in the online space. I was especially curious to know how Open BC worked, as they can track the degrees of separation, and that is fascinating.

But what does not work for me is that there is no level of intimacy between groups. And I get too many overseas people that want to connect to me and want to do business here but it is hard to build the intimacy and trust solely online, where you do not really meet. That is the biggest challenge in online networking sites. I am not really so sure about the place of the online networking sites, although they are really huge and some of them really want to build communities.

Cenk - Do you sometimes feel that your staff has a hard time with keeping up with having all these technologies closely integrated to your work?

Naomi - We have lots of young people working with us, many Generation Y’s and some Generation X’s, including myself. We are analog, whereas Generation Y is Digital, as they grow up in digital. They naturally multitask, doing three things at once so I do not think it has been a challenge at all.

People also live to the expectation, if you say to them they are big and capable, they are big and capable.

Cenk -What are your favourite blogs and websites?

Naomi – Seth, Godin and Verne Harnish. Seth is a straight talker. He has one idea per book and like Malcolm Gladwell, he is a great story teller and they talk in plain English. Verne’s newsletter is full of useful tips, his website is gazelle.com. Bob Parsons is also great. He has a blog and he is the CEO of GoDaddy.

Cenk - What are some of the lessons you have learnt the hard way in your online business?

Naomi - Know the business you are in. In the first two years, we were trying to be all things to all the people and we considered ourselves to be an “experience company”. But we are not, RedBalloon is in the gifting business. Once we cleared up what business we are in, it all got so easy. The message got single minded.

And it is also important to tell the story of your business. What is the story of your business? People love stories and they are attached to the stories.

In the early days, the information in our website was not documented properly and it could mislead people who wanted to do our experiences. We did not do this deliberately but now we know the details are absolutely important.

Cenk - What do you suggest to people that want to leverage Internet as successfully as you did?

Naomi - Online and offline mechanisms are the same. It is all about empathy and being in customers shoes.

You do not have to have a radical new idea. Even a different angle on existing products, channels, commodities can be successful. Look at blacksocks.com. All they do is to sell black socks, by subscription. They have 600 000 people, subscribing to buy socks, every six weeks. That is really a generic commodity, but they managed to create a different way to do exactly the same thing and they are successful.

You have to be patient with your business and stick with it.

Anything with a recurring income is a great idea and anything that makes people continually engage with your online business works well.

Cenk - Thank you

 

Article related links:

http://naomisimson.com/  Naomi’s blog

http://www.redballoondays.com.au/ Naomi’s online gift retail business

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ Seth Godin’s blog on marketing, one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world

http://www.bobparsons.com/ Blog of GoDaddy Founder Bob Parsons

http://verneharnish.typepad.com/growthguy/ Verne Harnish-Founder of Gazelles inc.

http://www.gazelles.com/ leadership training and development company.

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/ Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the books “Blink” and “Tipping Point”

 

 

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