Spoiled Milk is positioned as an international company with offices in Copenhagen and Zurich, and several closely associated freelancers spread around the world.

We communicate in English with a well executed setup spanning a number of valuable tools. For international clients, this is a significant advantage. They expect us to work through the cloud and that English is the primary language during projects.

Many of our clients are however located in Denmark or Switzerland and for them it is a much greater challenge switching to English. Still in 2010, not being able to use your mother tongue is considered terribly challenging by many well-educated professionals.

We are a flexible service agency and of course offer to communicate in the local language to make things more convenient for our clients. The problem is however that the project manager has to translate a lot for the internal team or put together a work force that can handle Danish or Swiss German.

We’re definitely getting by, but I think language is one of the biggest challenges we face. We can optimise processes, but what to do when we open our next office in Latin America or China? Translating mails, tasks, questions and issues is possible, but sitting in a meeting room just using your hands is more problematic.

Especially if you happen to be striving for perfection.

Photo by edwardjohnphotography

I once visited a friend of mine in his studio – he’s a writer. I was a bit astonished looking at his very barebone furniture setup he was working with: Only a very basic, hard wooden chair and a pretty small wooden table. He explained to me that he couldn’t work properly sitting on a soft, homely office chair – “They make you feel too cosy and distract you from focusing”.

I somehow compare this wooden chair setup with working “in the cloud”. Working over the Internet doesn’t feel very comfortable at times. It demands quite an effort. But that’s exactly what keeps you focused and efficient for many reasons.

For example, having a Skype meeting is a lot less homey than sitting around a table with coffee and croissants. When having a Skype meeting, you have to follow stricter rules: Only one person is talking, that person has to speak clearly and loudly, everyone has to be focused, and you don’t want that meeting to take up too much time, so you’re precise and focus only on the relevant topics. In comparison, face-to-face meetings tend to go overboard with chit-chat, take up a lot of time and often end without actionable decisions nor clear results.

Other communication performed in writing includes e-mail, Basecamp or chat. Same here: Writing is more challenging than talking. But having to go through the process of writing things down makes you re-think what you are trying to communicate. You have to be very precise and get to the point.

Doing a production briefing in writing is demanding. But then when you’re writing down the details of your briefing, you normally become aware that you are missing information from the client or that there are points one hasn’t fully thought through. You then return to the client, work out missing situations and go over your homework again. Once you’re done, you have a clear briefing with the complete information that leaves no questions open to the production team and thus prevents a time-consuming ping-pong process later.

Don’t get me wrong: I love face-to-face discussion with a good whiskey and real-life contact with people. But I see that in daily work, working in the cloud can make a lot of processes much more precise and optimized – despite being more demanding.

The seed has now grown into a strong tree.

Spoiled Milk wants to be the ground, the fertilizer, the safe surrounding, the location, the sturdiness and base for the roots of the tree. Spoiled Milk wants to take care of your tree.

You know and decide how much water you want to give to the website. We help you with the cycles and the growth. Give you the right information and make sure you learn, so the next tree you plant will grow even bigger, stronger and lead to more fruit.

This is how you make your website grow to become a beautiful tree or whatever you want to create. The ideas and possibilities are countless.

The gardeners are here to bring them to life.

(This post is the fourth out of a series of four. The first was ‘The seed‘, the second was ‘The growth‘ and the third was ‘The life‘.)

The beauty when planting a tree is that you gave life to it. As the creator, you have all the knowledge and power that comes along with that website.

The visitors look at your tree. You know when and how long they stay. You know where they come from and how many they are. You know what fruit they eat and if your tree is fulfilling their needs. You know what they are using and looking at.

All this information is there. Only, you need to know what to look at and with what it should be compared. How it can help to take further actions and make your fruit even better and bigger.

You can learn a lot from this and it is right there in your garden.

(This post is the third out of a series of four. The first was ‘The Seed‘, the second was ‘The Growth‘ and the fourth was ‘The roots‘.)

The growth of the plant is the important upbringing. It should grow in content and quality. Growth can be optimizing and tuning it, so the website gets better day by day, year by year. In taking care of this process, you help the plant grow and get strong, so the fruits get sweet and juicy.

A decision has to be made now: How important is this plant and how much attention and water do you have to give? Or can you leave the tree alone and will it then take care of itself? This is when you have to decide how much water, basically resources, you want to devote to this plant. This can be in the form of your own time or someone else’s.

You do not take big steps. You check the ground, rake the leaves, cut some branches. Step by step. You have that budget and you spread it throughout the year and take small actions from time to time and optimize to see it grow and grow.

Before you know it, the tree stands strong. The website that you planted.

(This post is the second out of a series of four. The first was ‘The seed‘, the third was ‘The life‘ and the fourth was ‘The roots‘.)

The first step when planting a tree is to take a seed and put it in the ground. That is when you make the decision to build a website. You have an idea or a goal, for your company, a product or whatever reason. You take action and you do it.

You might be able to create it yourself or you need others for input, maybe an agency like Spoiled Milk. By doing so, you put the seed in the ground and choose the proper surrounding. The soil, the location and enough water is very important. Should the tree be in the sun or in the shade? You want all the circumstances to be just right.

The moment you go online, the young plant sees the light for the first time. A big step has been taken. New life is born. Some plants should grow so they become big, some should stay small. Some flourish with fruits and others should give shade.

What you see with a lot of trees is that it stops there. The project ends, since the goal has been achieved. The tree is planted, the website is online.

This is however when the journey of a tree begins!

(This post is the first out of a series of four. The second post is ‘The growth‘, the third was ‘The life‘ and the fourth was ‘The roots‘.)

The other day, an urgent job landed on the table. When the client came around the office to deliver the project briefing, I asked him – as I occasionally do – why he had chosen our agency.

He explained that one of our former clients had recommended us to him, saying: “These guys are no-nonsense and know what they’re doing“.

To me, that’s the highest ranking recommendation Spoiled Milk can receive.

As a service company, we’re only around for as long as our clients are around. If we sit in endless meetings and sell solutions that look marvellous on the paper, but disappoint once executed, we would probably no longer be in business.

We thrive, because we avoid the fluffy talks and focus on the action that brings measurable value to our clients. As simple as that.

We have virtual meetings every day. Two offices and quite a few freelancers and co-workers spread around the world. We work together via mail, videoconferencing and still use the old beloved phone. The reason why we have offices is because we like to be around each other when we work. We prefer the company of a great team compared to just sitting some isolated place transferring data.

Nothing can replace “real” human contact. Sitting in the same room, sensing the same temperature and following each other’s faces. Many small details can be enhanced if one can meet and communicate in person. Details that can make the difference in any project.

Then, a lot of time gets lost in travelling to meetings and after leaving many of them and reflecting back, one is not sure if all that time and energy was really necessary. There are definitely times when it is more effective to work alone and not have to travel and lose time to meet someone in person. Especially if it is a one-to-one conversation.

A good connection and the right equipment is necessary to have a good “virtual” meeting. If the connection is bad it can be a terrible and frustrating experience. Spoiled Milk has clients spread out mostly across Europe and we have successfully set up projects without seeing our clients in person even once. We have experienced that it can work.

One must carefully balance when it is vital and important to meet in person. Nothing can replace the human contact. But very often a mail will do the job and a videoconference can spice it up.

Now that’s an easy one.

The good website is found right away. One click and you are there.

The simplicity and clarity is striking. In only a flash of a second you have a clear overview of the structure, functionality and purpose.

The browser loves the code and displays it accurately and so fast that there is no waiting time involved.

The copywriting short and to the point. The content placed with thought. The design clear and beautiful. Before you know it, you have acquired the desired information.

There are many types of websites – all with different goals and purposes. Sometimes you visit only once, sometimes you visit on several occasions. You stay for seconds or spend hours. Your agenda can be reasons of fun, work, information, entertainment, shopping – you name it.

Either way, you are never in doubt when you find yourself visiting a good website.

100 new Facebook fans every day. Stress is a popular Swiss rapper. Surely. But he also received premium Spoiled Milk support.

A while ago, Spoiled Milk released the Stress website (showcase) for the Swiss rapper originally named Andres Andrekson.

During the first months of the website, the general readership was low, the number of Facebook fans only grew by a small margin and stayed in the early thousands. To change the course and enhance the interaction, Spoiled Milk sat down with Stress and agreed to focus intensively on 1) Content and 2) Integration.

The first part, content, was up to Stress himself. He was going to invest himself more into the medium, open his voice more intimately to the thousands of potential fans and thereby secure their experience of authenticity.

The second part, integration, was our responsibility. We set up a Facebook module next to his blog, which pulls in his latest Facebook updates and shows an excerpt of his fans. We also enabled automatic feeds, so Stress can focus on producing content for the blog, which then automatically feeds both Facebook and Twitter. Smaller notifications can still be fed directly to the social media services.

And the result of the renewed direction? Today, Stress has more than 34,000 Facebook fans, growing by 100 new fans every day and usually overseeing 300 interactions on the page every week. The website viewings have risen considerably. The YouTube channel we set up has streamed 2,25 million views.

We’re pleased, Stress is thriving and his fans are happy.