Turku

My name is Jari Liitola and I’m 38 years young man. I live by the river Aurajoki, right in the center of Turku, Finland. You can see couple shots of my hometown in the pictures below. I also have a super duper wonderful wife for 16 years, Pia.

I work in our own web marketing company called Viidakkorumpu (translated it means jungle drum i.e. expression for Word of Mouth). We will celebrate our three year birthday in the summer. So in other words my life is good.

I think it was in the summer of 2008 when I first stumbled into hilarious (and smart) video in YouTube. The sympathetic, bearded fellow rumbled something about the power of people as consumers…hmmm…interesting. He mentioned the word Carrotmob, so I had to do some digging around the web. And soon enough I was sold and decided to open our own Turku Carrotmob group in Facebook. As I was doing that, there were various group openings around the Finland… Helsinki, Oulu, Jyvaskyla, Tampere, etc. Seems that we all woke up in Finland at the same time

Then I sent invitations through Facebook and used word of mouth… and kaboom, there were 300 of us at Carrotmob Turku! Now the number is over 700 and around 10 of us meet regurarly.

We had our first Carrotmob happening on 14th of March. We sent offer requests into 20 restaurants. The winner promised us a full 100% of the day’s revenues.

So we started to invite people into three restaurants (1,2,3), all in the opposite sides of town and owned by the same people. That way it was easy for everyone to access at least one of them.

The day went well. There was around 2000 visits altogether and we raised 6000 Euros for the restaurant owners. A week after the event we held a meeting with the owner. With me was our energy expert, Anne Ahtiainen from the company Valonia. Restaurant owner told us that they had already made various energy improvings, but there were two large freezers which will have to replace within six months or a year. Those will cost around 6000 Euros each, so they will put another 6000 and they can replace both of them with Carrotmobs help.

Now we are wondering where to organize the next event. Maybe into food store or market? We will see, but I’m sure to keep you all up to date with our life here in the southern Finland. I’m just really happy to be a part of this great idea, which I’m sure will turn into a huge thing in a couple of years as Brent & co. in Frisco will get all their plans started.

All the best, and as the english say – cheers,

Jari Liitola, editor of Carrotmob Turku

See my hometown: