Archive for September, 2008
“Social Traffic” - Have You Been Getting Any Lately?
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The Final Countdown: Firefox 3.0 Launch evaluated
Without discrediting any of Google Chrome’s efforts, I just wanted to talk about how Mozilla Firefox planned its v.3.0 launch mixing the perfect marketing elements.
The myth behind event marketing asks for a decent amount of finances for an effective marketing strategy to be executed. However, Mozilla launch of Firefox v.3.0 proves quite the contrary. By setting up a Guinness World record of the most amount of software downloaded in 24 hours, Mozilla has proved that a good marketing strategy can get you what money can not. The download of 8 million in 24 hours confirm to this theory.
The basic driving force behind the success of this strategy was the involvement of the users. By clearly outlining the objectives of the campaign and defining the key features of the new browser, they managed to create a lot of hype amongst the people. They created a good promotional website, spreadfirefox.com. Their key features provided attraction for the users and in fact prompted him to spread the word.
The seeds had been sown. The army of supporters had gathered. So how did these evangelists show their diligence? Mozilla encouraged the community members to paste Firefox buttons, wall papers and links on their personal websites or even on their blogs e.g. on myspace and twitter. The advantage outlined here for the user was the idea of earning the maximum points on the “Roll Call”, through which Mozilla would direct the traffic on to the websites of the “top 5 climbers” and the “top 5 affiliates”. See, how along with fulfilling their own purpose, they also catered to keeping their users satisfied.
Even though Mozilla made perfect use of the phenomenon of “global village”, the spread of firefox was not just confined to the web; they involved print media in the picture too. Flyers, posters, banners, stickers of firefox were provided to the evangelists for marketing amongst their own social circle. Organic marketing through the evangelists also helped to encourage non-firefox users to switch to firefox v.3.0 as their default browser and participate in the Download day.
Furthermore, word of mouth marketing was also applied as a credible technique, as Mozilla encouraged its enthusiasts to speak up in conferences and interviews. By involving the end-user in to their marketing campaign, Mozilla was able to secure the success of the latest version of firefox. The community marketing website was a prudent step taken by Mozilla to keep the user involved and informed about the on-going promotional campaigns.
The harvest is infront of us: Over 8 Million downloads in the first 24 hours and the rate does not seem to drop. Thus, it proves that your strategy and involvement of your end user is the pre requisite for success; and not just money. At this very moment the number has mounted up to 654300882! Success speaking for itself!
Are we listening to our customers?
In an industry embroiled in acute competition, profits and losses, event marketers have to stay on top of all new marketing strategies. We’ve seen and experienced the shift from the traditional marketing skills to the new gorilla techniques. Why? Because we want to deliver the best and get the best return out of it. However, the rat race does not merely end on being in the run. It’s about acing the race.
Understand your potential customers. Keep in view the culture, heritage and habits of your target market. What are they interested in? Rather than applying the same formula, come up with something innovative that appeals to the aesthetics of your customer. Thanks to the internet, you don’t have to travel around the world for this. All you have to do is utilize the power of social media to your advantage. Post articles, interact with the natives of the places. Have a one-on-one interaction with them. Websites such as Sosauce will give you an insight to learning the culture and heritage of the places you aim to execute your event.
Empower your customers, don’t force them. Use straightforward words in your advertisements - intricate vocabulary would never impress your target market. Your language should be conversational and engaging. Viral marketing and word of mouth will help you a lot in influencing your customers by empowering them. Empower people to say their say – to share their ideas – the have a positive impact on your events - to be part of your promotional campaigns.
Use endorsements by influential people, particularly the ones that have a good reputation amongst your “target market”. Through these endorsements you will be able to play on the psyche of your customer. It would get them involved. It would make your event sound more like an experience; an experience of a lifetime.
Make sure your website delivers what the customers want. Irrelevant content can “shoo” away your customer. I would re-iterate the point I made earlier on, that understand your customer. Don’t bore your customer with what does not concern him. Provide some thing unique for him. Exclusivity and surprise would boost up your target market’s volume. In today’s world – you don’t even need a website to launch an event; you can build event pages and link them up with other social networking sites.
Stay pragmatic – listen to feedback. Don’t get carried away with the idea of being innovation to the point that you start earning negative publicity. Also never make the mistake of ignoring the feedback you are getting. What your customers say is always of pivotal importance. Use tools like Google Alerts to stay updated with regards to the feedback you are getting.
Remember, you have to be the one above; you have to stay at the forefront of the event marketing curve. So don’t hesitate to take up challenges.
Some additional words of the wise - read Seth’s thoughts on listening.
The power of Word of Mouth Marketing
Does W.O.M Marketing instigate informed consumer choices? Today’s consumers are not as prone to exploitation as they were in the past. The prime reason for this being the exposure to all different products and services – thanks to the evolution of the internet. Along with search engines, social networking sites, such as bzzagent, facebook, my space and twitter have aided in making the once ignorant consumer , well-informed about the variety of services and products available in the market; providing them the opportunity to make a wise choice suiting their needs. While on one hand social media is facilitating the consumer, on the other they are serving as a plausible marketing tool, primarily with regards to word of mouth marketing.
Word of mouth marketing functions through an individual’s personal recommendation regarding specific services and products. The biggest advantage it has for the event marketers is the maintenance of the trust level amongst the consumers, while your purpose is being fulfilled to the utmost. “Harry Potter” is perhaps the best example of how effective word-of-mouth marketing is. So, why not utilize this top guerrilla marketing technique along with others to give a boost to your business?
As I mentioned before, social media tools are serving as an event marketer’s right wing. Add informed consumers publicizing and reinforcing your product amidst their social circle, and you have the best marketing strategy lined up! By becoming a part of the online social utilities, you can have a one-on-one interaction with your customer; learn what they want and formulate the best possible option you can give them. Have the trend setters of a community recommend your product and soon you will have an army of enthusiasts marketing for you. By introducing an element of “surprise and exclusivity” you can further attract more customers to what you are offering them.
In a nutshell, having informed consumers recommend your product is a great way to boost up your ranking amongst the consumers. Why, we all would prefer purchasing a product which is being recommended to us by one of us, rather than all those flashy advertisements showing only one side of the story.
Google News is ensuring a 100% digital future
So when everything else is going digital, and readership stats of paper newspapers were decreasing - we had this thing in the back of our minds that it might not go away completely. We’d still need to access old papers in libraries, right? Wrong.
Google News just announced an update to its Google News Archive that it will store electronic text and scanned newspapers of the past.
This is great for researchers, who will then be able to ’search’ through actual historical newspaper data while working on their projects and papers. However, keep in mind that all of this content will take time to load up and integrate. So, only time will tell how well this initiative goes for Google.
Great things ahead!
Meetup wants us to MEETUP!!
Meetup.com has recently been promoting and encouraging us (internet junkies, techies, twitter addicts, and of the likes) to go out and see the sun. This brings us to an interesting question: Have people actually stopped meeting real people and socializing or has the social media landscape increased our social lives considerably. I guess the answer would vary from person to person and experience to experience. But generally, I have to admit that online interactions can get people carried away. I have been covering how virtual events are suddenly on the rise, but I had no idea its something for us to stop and seriously think about. Will our future generations know of no other means of communication rather than micro-blogging, text chatting virtual meetings? Is that the direction we are taking our kids future lives towards? OR are real events still the core of human needs and interactions?
Lifehacker has a good post on this here.
Testing your audience’s patience
Marcel has a great post on the importance of planning for backups, emergencies and contingencies. Although it applies to all marketing folks, the weight of it is far heavier for event marketers and managers. People don’t care about excuses, problems, issues when they arise - the idea is to prepare for events knowing how to tackle things when and if they go haywire.
Do check out Marcel’s blog post. Its a good read. Here’s an excerpt:
“You’re watching a movie in the cinema & the projector breaks down, leaving you in the dark for 10 minutes.
You’re watching a play at the theatre & suddenly, due to a technical problem, the curtains can’t be raised.
At an important presentation, the wireless microphone’s batteries go ‘flat’ & you wait for ages while the technical crew looks for new batteries.
The laptop doesn’t open the Powerpoint presentation; the speaker arrives late; a guitar string breaks right in the middle of a solo.
What do all of these have in common? Who cares?!”
Platform integrations - Facebook + There.com
Will has a nicely detailed post on there.com’s “Facing There” application that strategically integrates the experience of there.com users onto their social networks on facebook. It is an interesting way of extending the experience of their users a step beyond by synergizing with one of the more popular social networking platforms. This is also a good case to evaluate how people are planning virtual events on there.com and sharing the event details on their facebook pages. Does this level of syndication, synergies and cross-platform interactions help enhance user experience?
There.com recently launched a Facebook application, Facing There. Facing There’s app design, launch and roadmap are part of There.com’s strategy for operating in a world where their users have to manage participating in a growing number of social graphs.Michael explicitly cited the exploding number of social graphs online, and we discussed his company’s strategic decision making on how to partner with Facebook and MySpace versus compete with them. These large social networks do not have support for avatar based interaction, the core of There.com’s user experience. Facing There is an explicit attempt to allow users to take their There.com experience and make it a part of their social networking experience.
You can read the complete post here.
Top secret Intelligence agencies discover the power of social networking
I read an interesting article today on cnn.com about how CIA and FBI have built a social networking site, just like facebook, where their analysts can share information and have discussions. They figured that social networking platforms are the best way to gaurantee that there aren’t any unconnected dots or loopholes.
A-Space is ofcource highly classified and nobody without the right security clearance can access the space. However, I’m glad that agencies are finally starting to discover and utilize the power of social media to their advantage.
Here’s an abstract, enjoy!
“”It’s every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it’s much, much more,” said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis. The program is called A-Space, and it’s a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.
The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation’s entire intelligence community on September 22.”
Who builds online products?
We do, of course. Do we? Despite the growing number of online consumers? Despite the easy interaction that we can have with them? Despite the platforms that we can use to collaborate with them during the development of our product?
If you can involve end-users into your development process somehow by early stage testing or feedback mechanisms, the value of your product is sure to increase manifold. Its equivalent to investing in heavy research. Its a better position to identify usability and UX design issues. Its the best way to get prospects on board and get them excited about the venture so that they can spread it from there.
So, who really builds online products? We come up with ideas. We hire resources. We get the business models and launch plans setup. But who really builds the products?
We need to learn to allow ourselves to stoop low. We need to allow ourselves to stop and listen. We need to learn to allow ourselves to put our ideas aside and give others ideas some weightage. We need to learn to allow ourselves to understand what is best for the people who will eventually use our products. What do they want. How do they like to work? What do they currently do? What are their frustrations? What are their aspirations?
Who builds online products? The engineers who design it? The developers who code it? The designers who lay it out? The copywriters who sell it? OR The users who will use it? Add that special ingredient to your product development cycle and you’re sure to hit the right needs and make it big.
Dont presume, assume or come up with baseless needs. DONT estimate. Be specific. Talk to people. Understand them. Implement what you learn from your customers into the solutions that your products are marketed to solve.
Who builds online products? The internet more so than any other medium has meant that we all do, we collaborate in carrying our collective endeavors forward at a rate that is 7 times faster in online businesses than it is in off line business.
If building products or services for any online economy you must understand trends and you have to rely on feedback through ongoing conversations with your audience. If you don’t, the chances of ever getting online products that your customers need, when they need it, are very slim.
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