So my girlfriend happens to be on her way to LA via Hong Kong for a tiny job (its a whirlwind tour really - 3 days in all!) -- anyway she's off to LA and today happens to be her birthday (please drop your wishes as comments! - she will love it i am sure - and its an excuse for me to get her to look at this blog!)
When she was checking in, the lady at the Cathay counter welcomed her with a smile and wished her Happy Birthday. She was also presented with a card. It really showed her that the airline cared - and guess what! - she spoke about it! She told me and i am pretty sure she will tell her family and 2 more friends for sure. And here i am - telling you about it! So a card which probably cost Rs. 20 - half a US$ is likely to reap greater returns - much greater than expected!
A lot of organizations collect Data - very few organizations manage the data well! Data mining, management and analytics on the consumer end is all about resulting in an end process that transcends in consumer delight. I hope other firms are looking and listening.
(If you'd like innovative ways to manage your data and delight consumers - call on FoxyMoron)
The following example also shows why viral marketing is important. I wrote about a social media wasteland that has been created - at the same time, reality bites. No matter what the ideal situation is, people will talk, write, tweet etc - so delight your customer and it's likely that your base will be more loyal, and also shout out loud. You don't need to give your customers 50% discounts always - delighting them through simple things can go a long way. With consumers being increasingly interconnected mostly due to Web 2.0 tools and the sharing barriers to entry limited - prepare yourself - get your brand in the YAPspace.
I need to spruce up this blog - a bit!
I met up with Kiruba Shankar - THE MAN when it comes to the Blogosphere in India. Received his famous card as well.
Kiruba did a quick session on 'Why You Should Blog' - i jotted down a few points. I will not add too much. To read my thoughts on Blogging in the last 10 years - check this post.
So Kiruba feels that the collective intelligence of the audience is much better than the speaker which is why he let other do the talking.
So the conference was all about anectodes.
Some of the things that came out of the anecdotes:
Be a thought leader in your field. Provide valuable content. That can be done by even challenging the thought leaders, ensuring that the right tags are placed, if you're on WP, use the All in One SEO Pack. Use Post slugs appropriately.
(i said i wont add but i saw an IPL Blog with the slug '-ipl' at the end of every post. The content was relevant wrt to the tags and slugs so obviously the blog was a success)
Interestingly and not surprisingly enough, Kiruba had the best anecdote:
He spoke about an orthopedic surgeon on YouTube – he records video surgeries by giving discounts to his pattients. He then puts up these videos online. He thus has started to get clients from the US – people who were over 60, whose medical insurance has expired. He books tickets for them, books rooms. They find him credible, they have a better experience at a better price. They are 80% of his clientele.
If you want a blog to become successful:
- Don’t drum yourself down; just start!
- Whatever you write, there is an audience!
- Start writing and continue writing and don’t bother about site stats.
- Link to big blogs – trash big bloggers.
- Be a thought leader. Be the best. Or try.
- Blogging as an identity check for getting hired. Be a thought leader. The big guys are looking. Your blog can get you hired.
Blogging is also about purity of intention.
Don’t have the time for a full-fledged blog? Start a MoBlog, or a MicroBlog. SMSGupshup and Twitter await.
Be a Part of the Web 2.0 Revolution!
PS - If you need help setting up a MoBlog, MicroBlog, Blog, Website - like Blog or a completely integrated Web 2.0 & Social Media Solution, call on FoxyMoron
Mahesh Murthy spent some time at Proto.in - he spent time telling start - ups about marketing strategies.
If you don’t have a product that is great, don’t even bother.
Marketing has to be built into the product.
Word of Mouth has to be built into the product.
That can come through a clear, deep observation of human behaviour and also intuition in my opinion.
Here's a SlideShow that might help:
According to Murthy, “The ultimate testimonial is a satisfied customer”
All advertising agencies, if Murthy's advice is anything to go by, then a lot of tech product stat ups are not coming to you. “If you need to advertise then you need to die”, he says. Technically he's right because if the product is great then word of mouth will spread and people will take to the product anyway.
Does your product solve a real world problem? This is taken into account in the above placed Slideshow as well.
Spend as much as possible on the product, spend as little on advertising.
Price:
Charge, and charge a lot.
When you’re small, have super premium products. According to Mahesh, Competition will not be worried if you are cheap. They will be worried if you are expensive.
The thinking is simple. Larger companies have more resources, more economies of scale and thus competing with them on price parameters is not necessarily the best way to upscale them. Companies with your competition have more than just the direct price they pay. They have switching costs as well.
For a while, Mahesh was quite generic often talking about the importance of great UI without giving any direct tips.
A Ppt which should help with respect to Social Media Design.
So Mahesh asked the question - Where do i get my first customer?
- Events
- Conferences – become a speaker, a media partner (have a blog! - call us)
- Go to places where your customers have stalls.
- Don’t pay for events/ conferences
According to Mahesh - “Your competence as a marketer is inversely proportional to your marketing budget.”
Rajiv also often says that when you are boostrapped, the most innovative ideas come out - and you find innovative ways to make them work.
Here's a few more tips:
- Be seen as a thought leader (Blogs, industry study, industry data, reports)
- “You can almost never be successful by following a trend”
- Choose a field where you are the trend setter
- Don’t start anything that is quoted as the ‘next big thing’ in the press. If its written about – it’s too late.
- Do not expect to be covered for the 1st 2 – 3 years of your life.
- Don’t ape.
- There’s almost no merit in doing a copy – paste company.
- Where there’s a need to being local and culturally relevant – then do that. But don’t do aped generic products.
No one can outline hot trend setters.
Be a great speaker. That's something you can learn from Mahesh Himself.
This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.
How exactly does one calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) for internet advertising?
Lets first look at why web metrics are important.
Imagine you are an advertiser who is looking to put up ads on the internet for various purposes such as branding, sales etc. You would need to examine which site is most visited, how long people stay on the site, and how often they visit. That will enable you to do your math and figure out how much you need to pay for your ad on one medium as opposed to another.
You can thus get an idea that there already seem to be various measures of web metrics and analytics. Before we get into the specifics of the various measures of web metrics, lets get an overview of web metrics with respect to other mass media metrics.
In the good old days of broadcast television and radio, firms such as Neilsen or Arbitron gave gadgets to samples of volunteers who measured what their televisions or radios were tuned to; or they asked people to fill out diaries describing their reading, listening and viewing habits. Both methods produced results that were almost criminal in nature in terms of market research.
Even today, TRP ratings are generated through only a representative sample of 500 TV Sets by TAM India! True – it’s a representative sample which means that those 500 TV viewers are further subdivided in terms of income and socio economic classifications (so if 50% of India is SEC C, then 50% of those 500 TV sets monitored will be in SEC C households); despite that, I still feel that 500 TV sets representing 120 million TV households is too small a figure. Hardly ‘representative’.
Newspapers also have had their fair share of controversy with prestigious brands such as Indian Express opting out of circulation and readership analysis studies with the allegation that such studies are rigged by those who have deep pockets.
So in a sense web metrics are much better off (by miles) because pages have access to tools such as Google Analytics, Site Meter, and Stat Counter or better where they can track users by their Ip’s and get a good idea of new users vs repeat users and all the other required information that an advertiser would actually need (maybe more than required).
Let’s now take a look at all the different measures that are used to analyse ROI for the web.
Broadly Speaking there are 4 measures to calculate ROI.
1) Page Views
2) User sessions
3) Unique Visitors
4) Time Spent on a Site
Page views is a metric that has been around for a decade or so. It is the number of times web surfers call up web pages on a given site. Thus if a visitor comes on to FoxyMoron and visits the main page, then visits the about page, then goes back to the main page, and visits another article – FoxyMoron will generate 4 page views from this user. Page views became popular in the late 1990s, because they were far superior to the existing measure of “hits”, also known as “file requests”. Hits are confusing because every graphic on a page, as well as the page itself, counts as a hit. If a site owner puts more graphics on his pages, he gets more hits, even if visitors, clicks and everything else stay the same.
Old timers in a relatively young internet advertising industry have gone on record to say: “We produced hits numbers because we could, not because it was useful,”
Page views also became popular because media planners at the time were obsessed about pages and the revenue generated from each page (because they were working on newspapers and magazines with a relatively closed mind).
Another important thing to note about page views is that when a page automatically updates itself by reloading, which counts as another ‘page view’. All was well and media planners were solely concerned with page views till something odd happened. Certain web sites which seemed perfectly healthy saw declines in terms of their page views (and the got worked up).
The explanation has to do with “Web 2.0”, and more specifically with a constituent technology called “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, or AJAX. This is a method that lets web pages update parts of themselves—a news update, a share price ticker, a new post on your blog or an e-mail inbox, say—without having to reload and redraw the rest of the page. The result is that web pages now that behave less like documents and more like pieces of software. Only small amounts of data are exchanged with the server for a web page and thus the page becomes more responsive and also saves the owner of the web page a lot of bandwidth. But this means that a user of an AJAX page, such as Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Finance, can spend the entire day working on the same page, and this activity counts as only a single page view!
Perhaps advertisers should therefore ditch page views in favour of “user sessions”, since that promises to count actual people, and show how many of them use a site. Except that it doesn't, because this measure counts browsers rather than humans. So 2m sessions could mean, theoretically, that 2m people visited a site once, that 1m people visited twice, or that one astonishing individual visited 2m times. People tend to check their favourite pages in the office, at home, and even from their mobile phones, which leads to an overestimate of the number of users. Conversely, sometimes several people watch YouTube clips when gathered around the same screen, which leads to an underestimate of the number of users. Nobody looking at user sessions would ever know.
To negate the defects of user sessions, web metric experts are now propogating the concept of Unique Visitors – which is the same as the concept of user sessions except that the Unique Visitors format tries to filter out repeat visitors by not counting IP adresses that have already been stored as cookies in the sites analytical tools. This metric too is fundamentally flawed because most ISP’s have dynamic IP adresses allocated so on any given day, if people login to their networks 10 times and log out 10 times, they would probably have had 10 different IP adresses during the course of the day. So if they visited a page 10 times, they would technically be “unique visitors” each time when technically they are not! In certain other cases such as in large offices, the entire office is provided a static IP which is then distributed among all the computers in the office. Thus if even 10 people click on the same site it will register as 1 “unique visitor”. So in this case as well there is either an over estimation or under estimation of people visiting the page and thus the metric of “unique visitors” does not really do anything new!
As websites, and especially those migrating to the Web 2.0 platform, become more interactive, advertisers are therefore interested in other measures (because of the flaws of Page Views). “Duration” and “time spent”, for instance, suggest how long one or more people are interacting with a page, which in turn hints at how “engaged” users visiting the website are. Using these criteria, social-networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut, and Myspace become extremely attractive on the advertising front. (Read here about Facebook’s advertising strategy).
(Which is also what we specialize in; check out FoxyMoron)
So the best thing an advertiser can do is take into account a combination of time spent and unique visits and think about how they want to engage the viewer in accordance with their communication objectives. New developments such as placing ads in social conversations is also becoming extremely popular due to the sheer impact of such ads on recall.
Having examined all the criticisms of web metrics one still has to conclude by saying that for advertisers, the web is like an open book. For text links, they pay only per click or per thousand click, or even per sale generated. In terms of Flash ads, advertisers pay for how many people see the ad as opposed to television where a lump sum is paid on speculative measures such as TRP’s. Advertisers still need to look at web metrics carefully but they must remember that no other medium will give them as much control over their communication strategies.
Since last year, one trend that seems to be catching up with marketers is that of building communities online through brand related social networks. The question is – will they/ can they be leveraged effectively by marketers.
I just came across a few Stats with respect to India’s 1st full-fledged Brand Community – Sunsilk Gang of Girls.
There were 6 lakh members
35, 000 Groups or ‘Gangs’
Hits in excess of 2 million (remember ‘hits’ does not say anything – have a look at my article on ‘Web Metrics’)
Average Time Spent – 15 Minutes (Pretty close to Facebook!)
9, 500 Bloggers
So the numbers are impressive and it seems like a worthwhile investment because brand related networks essentially:
- Permeate the brand into consumers’ lives
- Participative Belonging. Closeness to the brand is achieved
- Share connections and experiences. Winner is the Brand
- Consumers drive the attitude of the brand (this may not always be a good thing)
Even thought the Gang of Girls figure was impressive, HUL has not really revealed the cost of marketing Gang of Girls, which had a pretty huge media budget.
I understand that Gang of Girls was a trendsetter and that is why it may have spent large sums of money on media but expect other social networks to get popularized virally over the Internet. It makes more sense, is more cost effective, and guarantees impressions, well almost. FoxyMoron would be more than happy to help :)
I think brands have essentially 2 ways to capitalize on Social NetWorks:
1) Build Networks that are not directly related to the brand but are related to the category.
2) Build Networks related to the Brand. Eg. Gang Of Girls
The idea of building social networks related to categories has been largely unexplored. This essentially allows brands to extend the pie and subliminally push the brand and its values and attitudes.
Often users may be skeptical to associate themselves completely with brands. GoG was successful but I don’t think we’ll see those kind of numbers for too long. Consumers are extremely aware and are not looking to ‘sell their souls’ to every brand they see.
Even social networks that are completely associated with brands will have to generalize content with respect to the product/ service category. “Engagement” and not “push” is the name of the game.
Expect to see a lot more brand related social networks in 2008 but expect them to have niches and smaller, more engaged audiences.
