PRODUCT MARKETING OVERVIEW
One of the things I’ve really loved about my jobs at Gowalla and Chaotic Moon has been the opportunity to work with some fun businesses, both large and small, to help them understand how they can use our kind of social technology to engage with their customers and users in unique and fun ways. Any time there is something new on the tech block, businesses and agencies alike clamor for the new “shiny” object, but this often results in just slapping a sticker on an already un-engaging campaign. One of my main jobs in product marketing has been helping people learn how they can do much more than that.
The first business Gowalla partnered with was Incase, maker of some exceptional bags and cases for laptops and all things Apple. We’ve been Incase customers for a long time and loved the idea of using them as our first example of how to use Gowalla for business. I worked with the team at Incase in San Francisco to go through their catalogue and choose 6 of their existing and upcoming products that they wanted to focus on. I then created a campaign for them in which Gowalla distributed digital versions of the Incase items when our users checked-in at Apple Stores. Random Gowalla users who found the virtual items won the exact item from Incase: laptop backpacks, phone cases, and more. The result was fantastic: users of Gowalla were treated to serendipitous moments and rewards, and Incase was exposed to hundreds of thousands of targeted consumers who had previously been unfamiliar with their brand.
The Incase campaign not only did well, but it generated much press, and we were soon inundated with other companies wanting to craft similar experiences for their brands and products. I didn’t want to just cut and paste the Incase campaign for someone else, so it was a fun challenge to create unique campaigns for other brands. We saw some exciting things unfold as businesses were willing to try some things that hadn’t been done before: a partnership with Chevy in which—among other things—attendees at SXSW were rewarded with free transportation in a brand-new Chevy Tahoe, driven by a Chevy representative; a program with Adobe which used Gowalla to help launch Creative Suite 5 by hiding copies of CS5 for users around the world to find in the days leading up to the official public release of the software; work with Universal Studios at Comic-Con to help promote the release of the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
Product marketing continues for me now at Chaotic Moon. We have an amazing roster of clients, ranging from Walt Disney and Starbucks to Whole Foods and Hello Kitty. I work with these partners to understand their business goals, and then devise a mobile strategy which can deliver measurable results. I work with our design team to create product design flows and strategy documents. Then I work in step with our design and development teams—and the client—as we implement the solutions together.
Integral to this work is gathering and analyzing data, so that our clients can best understand their needs and customers, and therefore have more realistic, measurable and achievable goals. I assist our clients with research and data analysis throughout product development.
I also educate and advise our clients as to the best use of existing platforms like Facebook and Twitter, to ensure the campaigns are connecting with their audiences as effectively as possible. One specific area of focus at the moment is Facebook’s rich Open Graph resource, which many businesses are not even beginning to scrape the surface of yet. I help our clients devise ways to effectively use solutions like this.
![I AM THE KILLER ROBOT
I’m Jonathan Carroll, and for the last several years I’ve been working in tech and mobile, helping build and market products that millions of people around the world use to interact, to learn, to buy, to collect, to share, and to discover.
I currently work as Director of Product Marketing at Chaotic Moon Studios, and before that helped build a tiny little idea into Gowalla, a platform which helped millions of people discover the world around them and connect with friends. In both of these jobs, the over-arching theme has been to help companies understand their users and business goals, and then to help craft creative and strategic solutions. I relish the challenge of looking at the needs of a brand or a business and working with them to create a solution using web and mobile technology, leveraging appropriate platforms and accomplishing their goals. Helping someone “get it” and see the fruits of our hard work is quite rewarding.
That’s where the idea of the killer robot comes in: going after something relentlessly, methodically, and getting results. It’s what I’m shooting for in the work I do. I love working with a great team, with fun people, and relish helping build good company culture.
Along the way, I’ve found myself doing some *other* groovy things that you might like:
I built an Airstream
I made a movie
I talked…a lot
Work isn’t all this robot does, though: I have a beautiful wife and two amazing kiddos, the oldest of whom (my 9 year-old) is always asking me to take pictures of him and his sister to “put on Facebook!” I am constantly listening to music, taking photos, and engaging in creative things. Currently I’m doing some painting, designing fabrics for some textile projects, and generally looking for ways to do fun things that put smiles on peoples faces.
Thanks again for stopping by. Wanna talk more? You can reach me at jonathan [a t] thekillerobot.com](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lupwmhLkUO1r6ylzmo1_250.jpg)
