Forget good or bad, just plain ugly

I recently got this in my mail. This should be put up there as the epitome of ugly advertizing:



This is the latest pop-up kind of advertizing. The portal promises that the advertiser gains because this latest method of pop-up advertizing "just jumps out and grabs attention" and that the brand "just cannot be ignored". I'm sorry but when did advertizing become this annoying. can you imagine how this pop up ad would massacre the surfing experience of a person? world over people are moving towards non intrusive advertzing platforms because there is a big realization that advertizing that is annoying does not transalte into ROI. It may grab attention but also creates an ill feeling about the brand in the minds of the consumer.

The reason why Google's SEO based text advertizinng was a runaway success was because it was simple, direct and clean. It didn't take away from the surfing experience but ingact complemented it. Facebook too, while contemplating and Ad platform took pains to ensure that the advertizing didn't detract from the user experience. Companies like Facebook have to be particularly careful because user experience is what makes or breaks social interactive sites. That's why this portal's latest venture is puzzling and frankly a bit annoying. This also sends a wrong message to your most valuable asset, your website's subscriber. By pissing them off, by putting annoying pop up advertizing, you are turning them away from your website!

Another side of ugly is the latest Yahoo Search Ad in India. The Ad shows a skydiver with a stutter failing to count from 1-10 in time (due to his stutter) and then eventually crashing to death, with the tagline going "Sometimes every second counts". I don't see how this Ad is even remotely funny. Its in extremely poor taste. As a marketer the rule of thumb is you do not make fun of people disabilities. Simply because, marketing is a very powerful tool. It has an incredible power to influence huge masses of people and must be used to promote positive ideas. I truly believe this. A brand that infuses or reinforces positive ideas will also be looked upon in the same light. When a brand tries to ridicule a group no matter what their ethncity will always end up leaving a bad taste and that's a risk a top notch brand like Yahoo should not take.

Cat got the cream

I was reading today on afaqs on the success of Meow FM, which is apparently a "womens only radio station" and the first niche radio station in the country. I have, on travels to delhi, heard Meow FM and the one thing that struck me was that it was extremely chatty. More prone to talk than to music. Ofcourse the talk centred on steoreotypical topics usually associated with women - relationships, clothes shopping etc. But what works for this radio station is pure differenciation

Differentiate or die. I feel I should create a T shirt and embrace this slogan. Its especially true in market which is overcrowded and the opportunities for differentiation is small. Thats the story of the Indian radio scenario where all stations pretty much play the same music and sound the same. Yes there are myriad types of music but if you consider the Indian milieu, if you're not playing bollywood music you might as well die. Some channels do play english music as a point of differentiation but the audience for that is still very small even in urban cities. The issue for radio stations is to cater to a mass audience and still be different. World space kind of attempted this by catering to various music like southern music, classical music and more but again the critical mass of all these channels, I feel, weren't significant. Meow's differencitation of catering only to women has apparently worked. According the article, Meow enjoys "a share of 3 per cent in Delhi; in Mumbai, the share is 2 per cent. In Kolkata, however, where it was launched recently, the share is 8 per cent".

In the name of differentiation, one might end up catering to a niche and that might be a risky proposition but as the Meow FM scenario shows, it might also work to an advantage especially with advertizers. As the channel is so niche, advertizers, for whom women are a major target audience, prefer to advertize on this channel as the effectiveness of advertizing increases. So more buck for your money because your audience is being appropriately targetted. Meow attracts advertisers who are interested in women’s products and women consumers, such as the FMCG brands, retail brands and educational institutes. "You won’t see too much property, banking and financial brands on our station," Meow's Chief operating officer, Anil Srivatsa asserts.

Meow in fact has gone one step further. The article goes on to say that because their channel is so niche, "Meow has a dedicated team called Meow Research, which conducts research on women, lifestyle choices, product preferences and the various aspects of a woman's buying pattern or behavioural pattern. This data is churned out every two weeks and will soon be made available to anybody – advertisers or media agencies – who wants to use it ". Who said advertising was the only way to make money?

Another interesting feature is that Meow has started a social networking site called merimeow.com which not only enables them to connect with their audience over web 2.0 but also, as most Social Networking sites require sign ups and profile entries, these guys get valuable profile information on their target audience. They get to know which dempgraphic listens to meow the most, what's hot, what's happening, what the buzz is and more!! Jeez these guys ARE smart! Infact on checking the site out, I was reminded of another brand that used web 2.0 very very smartly - Sunsilk's Gang Of Girls website.The Meow website has a virtual bazaar that no doubt markets women's products. Soon there will be tie ups with third party companies that cater to cosmetics, soaps etc and meow will end up creating another revenue stream.

A lot of interesting best practices from a radio station that no one took seriously when it first launched and which proved that differentiation is critical for survival. Read the complete article here

Also, I really do not want to say MEOW one more time

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.

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

Marketing During Political Times

Politics and Marketing make a heady mix and the recent primaries in the US have taken political marketing to a whole new level

We in India are well aware of the political debacle that was the India shinning campaign, but what no one noticed was the succcess of the congress party campaign - congress ka saath, aam aadmi ka saath (Loosely translated: Congress Party's Hand is holding that of the common man) It was successful in striking a chord with the people on issues like riots, price rise etc. Indian Politics is ofcourse still taking baby steps towards being marketing savvy. Leaving print or TV ads, our parties haven't embraced the net like their countreparts in the US. Ofcourse this strategy does make sense when you consider that the bulk of the population lives in rural areas and hardly has access to electricity let alone the internet, but...but... a sizeable urban population has access to the net and they get their information at their finger tips. I feel it makes tonnes of sense in investing in online marketing campaigns for our parties too.

The Obama campaign in particular has re-defined campaign funding and marketing in the US. This Washington Post Article explores the obama online campaign and the findings are mind boggling. Obama through internet ads has succeeded in building a network of $1 million donors!! this in stark contrast to the traditional route of having a small but wealthy pocket of donors. Obama through such tactics managed to raise $91 million in just 2 months thanks largely to this humongous group of small donors. Obama camapign also spent their money wisely - they out spent the clinton campaign by ten times on their online marketing budget.

The online campaign is also interesting in itself, according to the article. The Obama ads didn't take one directly to the donate page but focused on building an online relationship instead. People who signed up with their email Ids first got a welcome message, information about policies, information on the various ways one could volunteer and after building a rapport, only then was one asked to donate. I find this extremely fascinating. This is new age marketing. We'd call this lead nurturing only this is being applied to a political campaign

There have been other instances of the obama campaign being net savvy. A social networking group called ObamaCycle started by an enthisiastic obama supporter, actually ensured that Obama Campaign supplies were reused not wasted. This supplemented a situation where people who ran short of campaign supplies in states which were going to vote in the primaries could communicate whith people in states that had already voted and hence could re-use their campaign supplies!!

The obama campaign has been Web2.0 savvy with widgets and buttons on facebook and myspace etc.

I guess this tactic fits the american mileu but I strongly feel that our parties could easily take a leaf from obama's campaign book and make our political system more interactive, more participatory and more fun

Marketing – Web 2.0 Style!

(hey all, y'know how I love to write right? (note to self: bad sentence that), well I wrote the article about Social networking below for a magazine and since its been published, thot I'd put it up on my own blog as well. Btw all you copy cats, you can filch my article but a citation would be appreciated

Marketing – Web 2.0 Style!
I’m not much of a cricket fan, but having an older brother made me pickup the nuances of the game, albeit quite involuntarily. I know that there is a ball called the “doosra” that is supposed to completely flummox the batsman. The efficacy of the “doosra”, my brother tells me, lies in its surprise element. Just when the batsman has figured out how to play the bowler, the latter throws in the “doosra” to confound the former. That’s exactly I suppose how marketers feel, our “doosra” being the internet ofcourse. Just when we have almost figured out Search engine marketing and optimization, the internet throws yet another curve ball called "Social Networking”.

Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is clearly the new buzz word these days with more than 500 million citations in google alone. Web 2.0, according to Wikipedia, refers to the next generation of internet applications that “facilitate sharing and collaboration between users”. The term “Web 2.0” came into being during the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. If the first wave of the internet applications got users to seek content on the net, the second wave of internet applications not only lets users create content but also distribute and share it. Web 2.0 is all about using the internet as a platform to connect us and our online activities with the world at large. Technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 bracket include blogs, social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook etc, Wikis and more.

Social Networking Sites (SNS)
Social Networking sites, till recently, were largely considered a teen fad – a place where idle teens hung out but when Newscorp bought Myspace for $580 million last year and when Facebook went from the being the 60th to the 7th most visited website in span of one year, the entire industry started taking notice.

Although Myspace and Facebook are largely popular in the United States, here in India, the Google promoted Orkut is the overwhelming favourite. India has the second highest number of Orkut users apart from Brazil, accounting for more than 8 million profiles. Infact Orkut is the 3rd most popular website in the country, behind Google and Yahoo according the website tracking portal, alexa.com and was even voted the “Youth Icon 2007” by MTV!

Most SNS work pretty much in the same manner. Users are required to sign-up using an email ID and password. Once they have registered, they proceed to fill out their “profile” that has information relating to age, gender, political views, relationship status and ofcourse the ubiquitous, “about me” field. Once the, “profile” has been created, users embark on building the “network” through search tools. Most SNS like Orkut, Myspace and Facebook allow users to post messages to friends through “scrapbooks”, blog, upload videos and photos, form communities and even send emails. Users spend an estimated 20 minutes per day on social networking sites.

With SNS drawing so much traffic its little wonder then that these days a new site is born practically every month. This has led to the creation of smaller more niche SNS like LinkedIn for professionals who want to network with other professionals in the same line of business or Shelfari for booklovers who want connect with other enthusiasts. Experts believe that the future of social networking lies in “custom built” social networks, with users creating their own social networks for their own circle of friends

Marketing Potential of SNS
Most SNS rake in advertising revenues through simple banner and text ads. Although, Orkut has recently pulled out text ads from the site (due internal considerations it seems), marketers as still excited by the prospects that SNS seem to offer

Targeting & Segmentation: As most SNS take in information on age, gender, location, ethnicity etc, while creating a profile, the ability to reach the right demographic is greatly enhanced. For example a B-school could easily advertise to 20+ age group category or a Japanese restaurant could advertise to people who prefer japanese cuisine in a particular city

Nurturing Early Adopter Communities: Most SNS encourage users to build & join communities based on their preferences and affiliations. Its, therefore, not surprising to find communities on products such as Toothpaste, chocolates etc. a community offers a plethora of opportunities to marketers. As a community is essentially comprised of loyalists and early adopters of a product, marketers can use a community to test new products and innovative ideas, get reviews and feedback, create a buzz, use the community to spread the message by word of mouth. Infact a peer recommendation is considered the most powerful and persuasive tool in leading to a purchase.

Widgets: A major inflexion point occurred in the social networking arena when, Mark Zukerberg, Facebook’s 23 yr old owner, announced this May that he was “opening” Facebook to third party developers. Anyone could now build “widgets” or web applications on Facebook and propagate it. This led to the development of all sorts of widgets including comparing and reviewing books, trivia quizzes on favourite TV shows or generating random quotes from a comic strip. The potential of widgets to attract traffic is so enormous that even Myspace and Orkut have both announced that they would be opening their sites to third party developers.

For a marketer this means that one could promote a product and create a “buzz” by creating a cool application, like a game and then have it spread by the network.

India and SNS
One of the best examples of Indian marketers warming up to the social networking phenomenon is HLL’s Sunsilk Gang of Girls Website. Since its launch in June 2006, the unique all girl community has over 600,000 members and over 36,000 “gangs”. Besides content that primarily relate to the brand like hair care and styling information, the portal has features such as blogs, Job Section, Book Bar, and a user generated video content section called GOG TV

The Gang of Girls portal has allowed the brand to propagate its message to the large user base more effectively than what a 30 second commercial could. It has created a space for loyal users to congregate where they can now give feedback, test and review new products, fill out survey sheets (a marketer’s dream!) and build even stronger associations with the brand. The brand in turn gets to learn the pulse of the market and get valuable information on what the next trend is going to be.

Another interesting aspect of the website is the tie-in with third party agents like Monster.com for the job section and oxford book store for the book bar section. Although these features add to the overall experience of the portal by making it more wholesome, it also means products not directly related to the brand get a weigh-in by the community.

MTV India’s relaunched website – mtvindia.com also incorporates a lot of SNS like features that finds favour with its target demographic – the college going youth. The MTV U section enables one to join ones college community and also interact with people from other colleges. Apart from the now usual features like blogs and message boards, there is also a section where products that appeal to the college crowd are promoted. Interestingly MTV India also has a link on the site to join its group on Facebook

Social networking features like blogs, communities, message boards are being increasingly adopted by marketers inorder to make their marketing campaigns more 360o. These features enable a marketer to truly engage and interact with the audience being marketed do

While the traffic that social networking sites attract is making marketers scramble to hit upon the right formula, the fundamental difference between search engine marketing and social networking must be understood. Search engine marketing works because people are essentially looking for things, in social networks people are essentially hanging out and not looking for anything specific. The advertising in such spaces needs to be subtle and should add to the experience of social networking. Anything that disrupts the experience is bound to be a big turnoff.

Another important aspect to keep in mind is that most of these sites have a youthful userbase that is prone to fads. The space needs to constantly to re-invent itself to have members coming back and not flock to the next site with cool features. This requires constant monitoring and large budgets. One must therefore decide what features one needs to implement to maximize the marketing effort

Trendspotting

One of most important aspect for the success of any Google Adwords campaign is choosing the right keywords apart from across bidding the right price. That's why my favourite google app is Google Trends

Google trends is an app that tells you what the world is searching for. Literally! You get to know how popular your search term is and which part of the world is searching for it. I'll tell you how I used this app in my Adwords campaign.

In my previous company, us marketing folks got to play around with Google Adwords as corporate dearest was funding the whole project. It was quite fun and they loved it when we wanted to experiment with some of the search words, especially to settle the debate between them "long tail" type keywords versus the popular more expensive keywords. So my company was hosting this huge seminar for customers and I wanted use the power of the net to drive traffic to the site. I was playing with Google trends and happned to type in the word "Seminar" and saw that a lot of people in India were searching for the term. I bought the keywords and created an AD for the Event. Within 15 days it was my highest performing keyword. Ofcourse we also tested to see if there were any clicks on the landing page and it was fairly decent. That's why I *heart* the net so much. It gives you so much data to make the right choice.

Google trends also in a way lets you check out the "buzz" about your product versus your competition. Take for example, the comparison between people searching for Myspace, Facebook and orkut in india

Orkut is clearly the hands down winner and if you were a marketer wouldn't this information be priceless? Trends also throw up other curve balls. It also lets you pick a region to find what the buzz is in every part of the region. For the same comparison as above, I selected India region to see which part of the country was searching the most on these keywords. The results were as follows:What's surprising is that non metro cities are searching for orkut. Not so surprising as its already popular in the metros I suppose. Still very good data to work with when say launching a product

I also recently stumbled upon the Orkut Trends Blog, where the google team shares some interesting stats on Orkut usage and user perceptions. This might come in very handy if you're considering doing some social networking marketing in your campaign