Push the BUTTON! What a flattering experience….
To be honest: When I first heard about flattr, I really didn’t get it. Was was a flattr-button? Another kind of facebook-like-button? How can I spend money there and how do they allocate the money among my flattred things? As you can see, there were a couple of big question marks on my forehead – and I don’t know about you, but if something of minor relevance appears to be too complicated to understand immediately, I usually lose interest. So I peg flattr as another one of these thousand hopeless attempts to monetize your digital content.
But as everybody knows: you always meet twice in life. And so it was – at the Cebit Global Conferences this year, where Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi spoke about Flattr. (Personal side note: I must admit, I sympathised with Peter at first sight – and for many good reasons. Albeit it has nothing to do with flattr, the whole business model and so on: I just really like people who use their publicity to fight for animal rights, vegetarianism and against Finnish right wing parties! So Peter, keep it up!)
But back to Flattr. What I’ve learned during his keynote at Cebit and re:publica 11: I’m not the only one who didn’t understand the concept of Flattr straightaway. After all, this seems to be one of their main problems when it comes to making flattr more popular, as Peter also pointed out. He admitted that, in the past, they were really good at programming but rather bad at communicating the concept of flattr to the public. A kind of nerdy problem, I guess. Actually, for me, who is working in the communication business, it once again shows that nobody is gonna hear and understand you without a good communication strategy.
By the way, after the release of flattr about a year ago and Peter’s speech at the 10th re:publica, the German blogosphere appeared to have grasped the overall concept of flattr in a flash and used it quite frequently – in contrast to other countries. He obviously met the right people – or possibly just the right multiplicators – there, which is yet another proof of the beneficial results of professional communication. Anyhow, I didn’t attend re:publica 10 and didn’t blog actively at the time. I just ‚heard’ about it and as I said before, it hadn’t fascinated me that much to get any deeper into the matter.
But after Kolmisoppi’s two ‚live appearances’, – which were by the way very entertaining and witty,- I finally understood the concept, it made me really curious and my colleagues of course noticed that. So they made me a very clever birthday present: a 10 Euro credit for my very own Flattr-account. With no excuses left, I started using Flattr a few days ago. Here are my very first impressions:






