Twitter - Fail Whale Brand Strategy

I like twitter a lot. Its so uncomplicated. If you haven't heard of twitter yet, duuuuuude better catch up! Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging service where people input text to keep their friends or "followers" updated on what's been happening in their lives. Twitter has a character limit of 14o, so its sorta like a MSN/Gtalk status message only with more character limit and which people online can follow

Twitter is cool but more often than not the site seems to be down, particularly when there is heavy usage during an event like Mac world expo etc. Although the site suffers from technical glitches, it still has extremely loyal followers and its popularity is growing day by day. So question, how come web surfers like us who have no patience with technical glitches, still continue to patronise twitter? Answer: Twitter has come across as a community product. Twitter communicates the site unavailibity through a Fail whale graphic and is extremely open about site outages and failures. This honesty is endearing and comes across as genuine. The Fail whale graphic greatly helps in this cause. The image now has a huge fan following online and there's even a mechandize line based on the fail whale image.

The fail whale image above, was created by Yiying Lu and apparently symbolizes a Beluga Whale in distress. A beluga whale is known to utter high pitched twitters. The image of a whale in distress being resucued by birds seems like a quirky, open, honest & endearing way of communicating a problem and this is what I guess, keeps people loyal to twitter, although if the glitches continue unfixed, the user patience might run out.

The message here is to maintain a dialogue with the users about a genuine problem and this in a way fosters transparency and trust in a brand. This is also a great example of how building a community around your brand can help during bad times.

Rolling with the times

As a marketer it is very important to have a pulse on the mood & sentiments of the market. A message becomes all the more powerful when it comes in context of some mood and hence is all the more powerful. A good example of this is when brands start associating themselves with the festive season. I'm not talking about consumer durables promoting special festive season offers, but of a more powerful variety of messaging such as say Cadburys and Diwali, Coca Cola and Christmas etc. The message is apt because it resonates with the audience completely.

When a product or brand adapts itself to the prevailing mood or sentiment the connection between the brand and the consumer is strengthened. Take for example, the special Date Frappuccino®, that starbucks introduced last Ramazan in the middle east. The date is the fruit of the season during Ramazan in the middle east and when a company comes out with a special edition coffee to commemorate a special festival, the market instantly connects to it and the association with the brand becomes all the more stronger. I mentioned in my last post about MacDonalds giving out Daandiyas with their combos during Navaratra last year. That was more than an instant hit. Acts such as these make the brand less global and more local and helps in building a local level loyalty

But these are annual seasonal trends- these festivities happen every year and one has ample time to incorporate it into the grand master plan for the year, but what unforseen trends? like the oil crisis? or inflation or the energy efficiency drive? all these are macro economic trends that happen suddenly but need to be incorporated into the messaging to reassure the consumer. I'm facing this particular dilemma at work. Thanks to the current macro economic trends ,I'm talking to my audience more in terms of asset utilization and energy efficiency.I didn't expect Oil to breach the $140 mark at the beginning of the year and so didn't plan for it. But inorder to keep up with the times and to send out a more reassuring message, the communication focuses on such aspects and strongly resonates with the current mood. And it works. People react to it more than they would to a more normal sort of messaging.

Take for example the topic of energy efficiency. If your product is remotely energy efficient, now is the time to shout about it from the mountain top because people will pay attention. As purse strings get tighter, the new buzz word is "cost saving". Having such words incorporated in the communication makes it more effective and current.

So anybody else having to restructure communication plans because of the economy?

McIdea

I'm often amazed at how McDonalds has this uncanny knack of making me buy what it wants me to buy. As a marketer, in my book, thats a bloody coup. Marketers are generally wont to begin with the matching the cutsomer's expectations. This is what you want, this is how we'll match the need - very rarely do we go on the path of telling the customer what he should have instead, because in our world, the customer is king. But MacDonalds has the gall to tell you what you should have. I'll tell you how

I generally go to MacDonalds to have a quick bite when I'm in a hurry or if I'm not too hungry. I have a set preference - Chicken Mexican Wrap. Always. Unless MacDonalds is running some special offer and then my world goes topsy turvy. The special offers on combo are generally the high priced combos and with them you get a free something that's really attractive and tempting. Right now there's a Fear Factor offer going on and one gets a penknife free with every combo. Now do the math please. Initially I was going to spend Rs 65 but because of the combo offer - Burger+Fries+Coke I pay Rs 117. Thats Rs 52 more than I intend to spend. Now consider that MacDonalds buys these penknifes (If they do that at all!) on large volume discounts from its supplier, so its fair to assume that each costs Rs 10. But since a joint promo is paid for by the company doing the promo - in this case - fear factor, we can negate the Rs 10 that Macdonalds had to shell out. Plus the extra food might be considered at Rs 25 extra. So net profit for MacDonalds from this offer - Rs 27. and thats just me. Multiply this by millions and you know why they call it the Golden Arches.

Sheesh! these buggers (or burgers?) are geniuses. Instead of looking down on cheap fast food. We should be genuflecting in front of these people. I have learnt a big lesson today.MacDonalds has learnt succesfully to tap into the culture of the mileu they operate in. They have low price entry barriers, playing very well in the Indian Psyche of low prices and then they upsell through the combos. The upselling usually takes advantage of the mood of the market. During Diwali, MacDs had a combo offer where they were giving out Daandiyas!!. And these things were literally flying off from the shelves. People were falling over themselves to get one of these. And again I'm sure the profit per person must have been something close to Rs 40. MacDs has been successful because they've adapted themselves to the Indian Psyche. No just talking the language but reflecting the culture in the menu too - Tikki, Tikkas and what not. I hear the they even have an all vegetarian outlet in Ahmedabad. Thats the one lesson MNCs need to learn from MacDs. Adapting the brand to the local culture but yet maintaining the brand identity. Who knows once we perfect this we may we even develop the gall to do what MacDonalds does - Change the customer's mind. I'm sure then we'll be lovin it too!

Top 8 Tips For Marketing Your Blog

Its finally happened!! Google has started indexing my blog!! yaaay! *passes out imaginary glasses of champagne* Well jokes aside, as I had chronicled before, I was finding it increasingly difficult to get my blog indexed - it was not showing up in any searches of my name and this continued for upto 5 months. I checked out Google's Site Analyzer and found that I needed to apply basic optimization tecniques like adding more links. So I made it a policy to add links in any post I write. I guess the links need to be relevant. Other than that I didn't do anything much except update the website on a regular basis. I guess both the above techniques are key to getting the blog indexed, because after I implemented these two things in a month or so my blog got indexed.

Now that my blog has been indexed, the question arises on how one should market the blog. I've tried out some of the methods and they have worked fairly decently in increasing traffic. Then there are others that I've not yet tried but are sounds techniques nonetheless that surely would garner more traffic, so here they are, in no particular order:

1. Publicize Publicize Publicize - If we are really desperate for traffic then the Blog URL must be ubiquitous and visible in all our communication - Things like email signatures, Status messages in Gtalk, MSN & Yahoo, on facebook, linked in & orkut profile or even custom T shirts! (I kid about the T shirts thing, but you can implement if one is really desperate ). Email signature at work is a bit risky but its a sure fire way to ensure that your colleagues visit your blog

2. Blog Directories - Registering with numerous Blog directories really work. Some of the blog directories are free and simply request for a link back in return for a listing

3. Search Phrase Analysis - Analyzing Search Phrases & focusing on the kind of people coming to the blog will definitely help in ensuring that they come back again. I mean if you find that one particular post is attracting a lot of traffic, it makes sense to write more on that particular topic

4. Regular Updates - Regular updating of the blog always always sees an increase in traffic. It gives people a chance to check out the blog on a regular basis. This also means that there is more of your content out there for google to index and more content means more search traffic

5. Social Bookmarking - This one especially worked for me. Social bookmarking blog posts means that traffic from social bookmarking sites such as Digg. Del.ici.ous, stumbleupon etc will come to your site. This also helps in raising the page rank due to the link back from these sites

6. Make the blog interactive: Write stuff in a way that solicits comments, views & opinions and make sure that those comments are responded to. People who write comments always come to the post to see if their comment has been answered *I wouldn't know about this particular point because nobody comments :( *

7. Visit other such blogs & comment: This is the easiest way to attract traffic to ones blog. Pick 4-5 high traffic blogs about your area of interest or on what your blog is based on. Comment, comment, comment regularly on it so that you start attracting some of that high traffic on to your own blog. Oh you can also email the blog owners discreetly and beg and plead that they include you on their Blogroll

8. Email Subscription or Plain Prostituting - Inform & email everyone you know that you updated your blog and ask everyone to go check it out. Doing it 2-3 times in the initial stages should be fine. This will atleast register in everyone's mind that you have a blog atleast. Doing it regularly makes one look need. Setting up an email subscription app on the blog once traffic has reached certain critical mass will also help in getting those regular readers back. Setting up RSS feeds is also a good idea

I'll definitely update this list as my own blog grows *hopefully* till then read this absolutely awesome article for more great tips on blog marketing. I suggest this link be added to your favourites list and also my blog hehehe

Publishing Assembly Line

I Continue to be amazed by Futures Group, India's Retail Giant, owned by the Retail King, Kishore Biyani. Now we all know that Depot is a future's group retail foray into books, music, stationary and gifts. But what you didn't probably know (atleast I didn't!) is that it is also involved in something known as "Self Publishing"

Now Self-Publishing means that Depot provides end to end solutions in publishing for a price. So Basically if you've always harboured notions of becoming an author but thought that you were prolly not the prize catch of the big publishing houses, then depot comes to your rescue by charging a small fee for publishing your book!! whoah! So if you decide you want to write a 200 page book with roughly 40,000 words in it, depot charges you for the cover design, proofing, editing, lay-outing, and printing. It calculated that it would cost me 2.5 lakhs to publish my book if I took all their services. Now the best part is that they also promise you a snazzy "book launch" through their retail platform and if it has a potential to be a hit, they'll even retail it for you!

Wow, so now writing a book is like a business investment. I invest 2.5 lakhs, price it competitively and if it sells like hot cakes, I rake in the moolah? and all this without the disappointment of rejection letters from publishing house and without agency cut and tiresome editors. Sounds too good to be true, but I wonder if this will work. There's too much of an aspiration element here, but considering it is coming from Biyani, I'm sure he's thought this true.

What do you think? would you invest to publish your book? I don't know actually. The old fashioned way of being cherry picked by publishing houses has more credibility to it. But this new method has to it the very agressive retail arm backing it. So if your book has potential you can be sure Depot will aggressively market it in their stores.

Read more at http://www.depotindia.in/self_publish.php

My Raison D'Etre

Things on the work front have been quite good. I got the 2nd Highest Individual Award from my company for my work in developing the marcom activities for my business. It feels great to be recognized but more importantly its a sign that the management views marcom as a strategic function important for generating revenues instead of just some random department making brochures.

I love what I do, I wake up in the morning everyday in love with the world simply because I love what I do *touch wood* . I know I don't have the age, wisdom or experience to give advice but please please PLEASE, don't waste a single minute of your life not doing what you love doing.

Go find your bliss!

Hard Bounce - Soft Bounce Dilemma

As a marketer, nothing gives me more pain than cleaning up my email lists. Deleting email addresses that has taken months togather after searching high and low. But clean we must inorder to be efficient and to save money.

Cleaning of email lists generally begins with the email bounces list provided by the emailing software. The bounce list as people aware of such technology will know, usually consists of 2 lists - a Hard Bounce List and a Soft Bounce List. Now herein lies the confusion. The definition of what constitutes a Hard bounce or soft bounce varies over various over Recepients and ISP.

Some email clients consider a Full Email Inbox has a Hard Bounce whereas some consider it a soft bounce and multiple attempts is made by the mailing software to ensure deliverability.So it is pretty difficult to clean lists based solely on Hard-Soft bounce reports as perfectly good email addresses might get deleted if only hard bounces are considered or bad email addresses might remain on the list if soft bounces are considered clean

This article by Derek Harding provides a decent overview on tackling the dilemma. Its worth a read if you are in the same spot as me. My two cents of advice on dealing with the issue:

1. Bounce is bounce so something must be amiss, so its better to take them all from the main mailing list inorder to ensure better efficiency
2. Bounce email Ids to be black listed or flagged seperately
3. Seperate mailing activity to be done only on the flagged email ids.
4. If email Ids consistently feature in the bounced list 3 consecutive times spread over a decent timeline like 3 months then it is wise to delete the email Id completely

what say?

Web Analytics

(One of my published articles. Anyone interested in referring to this is most welcome although a citation or a link back would be greatly appreciated)

One of my favourite books on marketing is “End of Marketing as We Know It” by Sergio Zyman, the legendary, former Chief Marketing Officer of the Coca Cola Company. The basic tenet of this book was that Marketing was more science than art. No more was marketing all about that genius creative or ad campaign. Marketing, instead, as he viewed it was all about delivering results. How many units of coke did that Ad sell? Did the sales grow after launching that campaign? Did we profit from the direct mail campaign? Marketing was less Ad agency voodoo and more about measurable outcomes.

Yes, I’ll repeat it again “Measurable Outcomes”. As a young marketer, learning the ropes, this book opened my eyes to the raison d’etre for any marketer – Metrics. Marketing exists not to create beautiful Ad campaigns or killer direct mails. The sole duty of marketing is to generate demand. I truly believe that for any marketing activity to be truly successful, it should necessarily be metrics driven and ultimately be tied to the goal of the company. The outcome must be ..(don’t kill me for saying this) measured. So it is with great glee that I write about Web Analytics. For a data driven person like me, Web Analytics and Web analytics tools are like panacea to my soul.

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is basically the study of traffic to a particular website – where it’s coming from and its subsequent behaviour on the website. Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as “the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which Landing Pages encourage people to make a purchase”

Web Analytics provides insights on a range of traffic related questions like:

1. How many people are visiting your site?
2. Where are they coming from?
3. What is their activity on the site?
4. Which page are they viewing most often?
5. Which page are they dropping off from?
6. What keywords did they use to visit the page?

The analysis of website traffic began in the early 90’s through the scrutiny of Logfiles. Logfiles are files maintained by web servers, consisting of all transactions that take place on a website. It wasn’t long before, these file were being used to provide insight on the amount activity that was taking place on a website.

In the early years, Web Analytics primarily consisted of counting the number of “Hits” or the number of requests made to the web server. This method was fairly representational of the site’s popularity as web pages in those days were pretty basic and consisted of a single HTML file with no images, animations, videos or downloads

As the late 1990s saw the emergence of Search Engines which brought with them their spiders and their bots, it became more and more difficult to identify unique human visitors through Logfile analysis alone. The uses of Web Caches also posed a problem as subsequent visits of a person to a website could not be tracked through Logfiles

In order to address issues thrown up by Logfile analysis, a new method called page tagging evolved, which used JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. This not only solved the issue of caching and search engine bots but also enabled web analytics to be outsourced to a web analytics company as Page tagging could now be performed by companies who did not run their own web servers.

Importance of Web Analytics

Web Analytics is not about merely analyzing website data. It’s about understanding what drives people to the site and what features effect their subsequent activity on the site. Most importantly, from a business perspective, Web Analytics gives you an insight on if your site is meeting its intended objective.

As we mentioned earlier, put simply, web analytics helps us measure how many people visited a site, how they got there and what they did subsequently. Measuring and monitoring these data parameters helps us understand the individual user behaviour. The valuable insights provided by this data helps us analyze how people came to a particular site, what keyword or phrases they used to get there– whether these keywords are relevant or not, what they did subsequently on landing, what were the most frequently visited pages, what were the least frequently visited pages, which page saw a high drop off and most importantly, if the user ultimately did what the site wanted him to do. For example if it’s an E-commerce site, did all the user activity ultimately lead to a transaction? Or if it’s a social networking site did the user creat a new profile?

Web Analytics provides us the data to makes tweaks and enhance the ROI or conversions from a website. To quantify the advantages in simplistic terms, Web Analytics helps improve :


1. A site’s Search engine Rankings so that one is able to attract more & relevant traffic
2. A site’s usability and helps it become more user friendly so that people are able to navigate better
3. Conversions or sales transactions – What ever is the ultimate objective of the site

Basic Metrics

Ok, so now we know what Web Analytics is, we have gone into the history and we even know why it’s important, so great, how do we start off? Analyzing a whole bunch of website data can be clearly overwhelming, more so if one is not familiar with the basic web metrics and their definitions. Most web analytics softwares offer the following web metrics that one can track to start off with.

Hits: This metric is frequently cited to indicate site popularity but infact very misleading. In most web analytics discussions a ‘hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the above components referenced by that page. Thus, a single page load can result in many hits.

Visits: This is most basic of all web metrics and indicates the number of visits (unique and otherwise) a site receives. It provides a quick indicator of how effectively a site is being promoted.

Pageviews: This is the total number of pages viewed on a site and is a general measure of how much a site is used. This report also provides an insight on what pages are being viewed the most and hence give an idea on what’s working on a site and what’s not.

Pages/Visit: Average Pageviews is a good way of measuring visit quality. A high Average Pageviews number suggests that visitors are interacting extensively with a site. A high Average Pageviews results from one or both of the following factors: (1) Appropriately targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who are interested in what a site offers and (2) High quality content effectively presented on the site. Conversely, a low Average Pageviews indicates that the traffic coming to the site has not been appropriately targeted to what the site offers or that the site does not deliver what was promised to the visitor.

Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left the site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to the site’s visitors.

Avg. Time on Site: Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using a site.

% New Visits: This report lets you analyze the amount of new visitors or return visitors that a site is attracting. A high number of new visitors suggests that one is successful at driving traffic to a site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

Traffic Sources: This report gives an insight on where are all the traffic is coming from - If it is Direct traffic or from a referral site or if it’s coming from search engine. This allows one to invest marketing resources on the right channel

Search phrases & keywords: This report gives a detailed list on what keywords or phrases are driving search engine traffic to a website. It helps us understand if the traffic that the site is getting is relevant or not

There are many metrics that are offered by numerous web analytics softwares in the market. Most metrics also offer fascinating insights on the working of the website but the key to understanding metrics is to hone in only on those metrics that have a direct relevance on the objective of your website. For example, bounce rate is a misleading metric for a blog because most people exit a blog after reading the latest post. The ideal metric for a blog would be the number of visits.

Tools & Resources

There are a lot of web analytics softwares in the market and most of them differ in the way they measure metrics. But if one is just starting out with web analytics and if one has some time to play around with data, I would personally recommend, Google’s Web Analytics Software. It is free and can be easily integrated with Google Adwords Campaign and hence helps one get an insight on how ones keywords are performing. It is also easy to integrate Google Analytics with one’s website and just requires one to add a couple of lines of tracking code to the website’s HTML code

Bottom line

Ultimately, what web analytics gives you is the data. What makes web analytics effective is the inference drawn from them and that can only come from within the organization.

An organization I once worked with had an elaborate user profile page that was used internally to capture web based leads. Upon employing web analytics, it was found that this lengthy profile page had an astounding drop-off rate of 85%. This led to a drastic shortening of the page and helped the organization get more people to fill the page and ultimately more leads

Web analytics data only provides insights on what is happening on the site currently. It is up to us on how we use this data to improve the website and ultimately the ROI or the bottom line