Today we are speaking with Baard Overgaard Hansen, country manager Scandinavia with Pixum. Pixum is one of the leading international online photo services and provides free online albums and photo-sharing capabilities to its customers. You can order inexpensive prints and it’s not limited just to paper! Pixum prints calendars, cards, puzzles, mugs, t-shirts, etc.

Baard has been with Pixum for 2 years now, and is responsible for the marketing of Pixum photo-products in Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark). Furthermore, Baard is a community manager working with social media: Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

Sasha Kovaliov (SK): Baard, can you please tell our readers and listeners what Pixum is about?
Baard Overgaard Hansen (BH): Pixum is an online photo service, where people can upload their digital images and order prints, photo books, hats, mugs, etc. We have about 70 different products, which people can order from us.

SK: Right now Pixum is a brilliant company. Looking back 10 years ago when the company was established, what do you think was for important for its growth: technological advantage or founders’ business skills?
BH: I think it was a little bit of both. Pixum had a technology and an idea how to do it. When you start a company in this business domain you should have a mix of very technical and marketing-minded people on your team.

SK: There are a lot of startups right now, a bit less during economic recession, what do you think are the typical mistakes that startups make nowadays?
BH: I think the most important thing for every startup is to put a customer in the center of their business, as happy clients are the most important factor. Without satisfied customers it’s impossible to build a healthy business. You always have to keep that in mind whatever you’re doing.

SK: From your own experience, do you think there were unsuccessful steps in Pixum history? Or everything was perfect?
BH: I can say, on the general, everything was pretty perfect. Proof that we’re doing it correctly is a large customers base, we’re hiring more people and it’s all going in the right direction. As far as I can see, the future is bright for Pixum.

SK: Glad for you! You mentioned that the key factor is to be customer-centric. Do you think it’s the key which differentiate you from other competitors?
Yes, I think so. We’re concentrating on social media more and more and that means, we engage with the customers in another way and are getting new customers. If a company understands social media and how it works (Twitter, Facebook fan pages), then they communicate with the customers in quite a different way in coordination with other marketing tools like e-mail subscriptions and customer service.

SK: Absolutely. Actually, you and I, we met at Friendfeed, as I remember…
BH: That’s right.

SK: In your everyday work, can you tell us what is the utmost social media tool you use and how do they help to drive innovation and bring more customers to Pixum?
Well, I think, at the moment, we are focused on different social media tools and I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years. At the moment twitter is our main social media tool because we get a lot of feedback from customers and we can also talk with our customers publicly, so everybody else can see what’s going on. Feedback might be negative or positive – all for the good, as we can react and react fast! What is more it’s a great competitor spying tool: what are they doing, what our customers are saying about our competitors? Twitter is a huge tool, because we can use it for so many different things. You just have to be creative.
SK: Do you see unique ways of using twitter or any other social media tool to enhance the service that Pixum provides?
BH: I can tell you one thing, which people shouldn’t do, which we tried here, when we started using Twitter. It’s a promotional campaign. We’re still doing that but not as much as before. We offered customers and all our followers a free poster…
SK: Yes, I remember that campaign.
BH: You know, usually people come and get a poster and then leave. We don’t want a customer base like that, we don’t want quantity, what matters is quality. We would like our followers to be with us for a specific reason: good products, great feedback, etc. We are not aiming at a higher number of followers who would like to get a free product and then leave. We won’t do any similar campaigns, I think.
SK: You have quite a large amount of employees at Pixum twittering?
BH: That’s right.
SK: How do you coordinate who tweets what? Do you have a corporate policy on social media?
BH: Yes, we have a corporate social media policy and we also twitter together via Cotweet. Each member of my team concentrates on one or two twitter accounts, as we have about 50 accounts at Pixum.
SK: Fifty? That’s a lot!
BH: Yes, and we started early. For example, @photobook belongs to us and of course we @Pixum is our main account. We have different accounts for each country in various languages and for other products. It would be very foolish to think you can manage all the accounts, so only about 15 of them are active.

SK: Let’s talk about traditional advertisement tools. Do you employ search engine optimization or any advertisements with other partner sites?
BH: No, not really, not as much. We focus on two things: Google adwords and affiliate programs. Besides these, we don’t do anything that you might call “traditional” internet marketing.
SK: Pixum is all into social.
BH: Yes.

SK: Baard, let’s go back to the technological part. Your team is concentrated on the customer service. You outsource the development of your main product, is that right?
BH: Yes, that’s right. Our products are being outsourced, that’s right.
SK: Can you tell us about your experience in web design and development outsourcing? Is it positive? Are there any rough edges about it?
BH: I can’t think of any. Usually it is OK and has its advantages and very little disadvantages. If you bring people from the outside of your team, they have another look at your product. They look at it in another way: you get fresh ideas and manifold views and that’s great. The only disadvantage is a slight culture difference, but that’s a minor problem.
SK: Some companies are afraid to outsource because they think it’s far away and they will not be able to manage the team efficiently. Do you think this is a problem?
BH: No, on the contrary, at Pixum we do not have this problem.
SK: And one more question regarding the development. Who is the innovator, who brings the new ideas? Is it the marketing team or developers? Maybe customers?
BH: Right! Well, the customers are always a great source for new ideas. They tell us why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that. We are always trying to collect the clients’ concepts and tips and forward them to both the development and marketing department. They sit together and consider the ideas. Of course, marketing produces its own ideas as well. For example, we are making a new shop right now, and it’s a much better shop, it’s much more like Amazon. We also learn from our competitors and big companies.
SK: So it is a triangle: customers-developers-marketing, right?
BH: That’s right.

SK: I would like to cite PC advisor: “Easybook is intuitive beyond compare in terms of ease in use and creative options. It’s hard to imagine it being beaten”. What are the next steps in the development of you unbeatable software? How do you see Pixum in a year?
BH: We are constantly making more photoproducts. The challenge is to keep the software simple: with our software you can make a photobook just in three minutes. It’s that easy. We also encourage customers to produce photographs with Adobe InDesign and Quark Express. Then it is be possible to order a photobook just by sending us a PDF file. I think in the future it will be important to have online software, everything will be online and accessible from everywhere. In a few years there will be a shift from all offline photobook software to cloud versions of these products.
SK: Baard, you just mentioned that you are hoping Pixum customers would start using professional design software. Does it mean that you will be shifting to more professional users?
BH: I think there is a market for that, but we are not concentrating on professional users, it’s not our priority. We are mainly a consumer-based company and we work for the mass consumers, we work for a larger market because we are not big enough to open a professional department to cater for professional designers yet. Of course, we are trying to help people, photographers, for example, who want to order their own specific products with their own logo.

SK: Baard, thanks a lot for your time for the interview. We hope that Pixum will be doing as great as it has been doing for 10 years and wish you a great amount of new followers on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and new happy customers.
BH: Thank you very much, Sasha.