Talk till you drop

Skype's head of strategy and new business for Asia Christopher Lewis took his headphones off for a bit and trooped off to Singapore to yak with Debbie Cai on marketing "a little piece of software".

What's Skype's marketing strategy?

Our marketing strategy is very much tied to our business strategy, and our business in the coming months is focused on mobility which is bringing Skype away from your PC and using it on your mobile device. Moving our marketing activities from the online segment to mobile is going to be a difficult transition.

We work with 3 (telecoms) on a phone called the X-series on which you only need to pay one flat rate for unlimited broadband access and Skype's mobile client is bundled into it together with other services such as Ebay, Yahoo 7, MSN 9 and others. It's already rolled out in Australia, Hong Kong, UK and a few others and it may possibly come to Singapore.

What's Skype's main marketing technique?

Skype became so successful because of its simplicity. A lot of Skype's success is built through viral communications. It's the network effect. Social networking sites have taken advantage of that as well. It's a part of our brand development.

A lot of our marketing is relatively simple - online, offline, creating viral games for the masses - therefore it says a lot about the technology. It's this viral effect that has helped get us to 220 million users today.

Nothing is stopping Skype from starting its own social networking offering.

Absolutely, if we were to have this conversation in three months time I'm sure you will see developments in that direction. We've made some initial steps with Skype 3.5 launched a month ago. A key feature is adding video content in your mood message, as video's generally more compelling and fun than just text.

Skype must face a lot of competition.

Yes but I am amazed to see there're still very few VOIP players providing free video. It's an expensive technology to build and maintain. We differentiate from other providers through additional services such as instant messaging, SMS, file transfer, Skype Find (search engine within the client), Skype Prime (feature that allows me to sell you a web service/advice/consultancy and you pay me through a click of a button) and Skype Casts (broadcast yourself with anyone on anything - interesting blog-type mechanism).

Enabling people to broadcast themselves keeps the viral momentum going - it's fueled by the user, it's user generated. It helps us save a lot of marketing money.

How much money have you saved on traditional marketing activities?

It must be millions. People talk about how the technology is the driving force but it's actually the brand that is maintaining that momentum. When negative things happen like when we had downtime for a day or two it's the brand that carries you through.

Why don't you sell advertising on Skype?

It was one of the things we didn't want to do from the beginning because it was kind of a sell out. Our users come first. We don't have advertising in the client, we don't sell our email database to third parties, we don't sell advertising on our website, there's no spyware in the client and we don't force our users to see advertising they don't want to see.

But I think it will come in specific areas like Skype Find because people expect in a search engine environment to see some sort of advertising and it allows businesses to place themselves higher up on the rankings and so on.

What are your main challenges in marketing Skype in this region?

It is getting localised messages out and that's mainly because of our small scale here. The positive thing is Ebay is helping us. I work with eBay SE Asia on e-marketing mainly. Also, the danger of viral is it is so uncontrollable. But [even if something negative hits], if you're true to yourself and the product is good you will always have those people who will speak up for you. We use blogging a lot, it's a strong marketing vehicle for us. We've tapped into blogging more in the last year that before.

Do you manage crises through the blog?

We managed our outage crisis [on 16 August 2007] through our blog. Some people liked it, some didn't, but on the whole it was a good way of people getting the latest honest information as quickly as possible.

How are you dealing with the current mini-crisis on Skype's ex-founders saying Ebay paid too much for Skype?

That's not really a Skype crisis. The ex-founder has left the company and that's it. It's an Ebay issue and they'll decide what to do with that. These discussions and comments are not really relevant to our business.