Posted by Keith Tan in Marketing, Web 2.0 on July 4th, 2008
Here’s a different (and pretty long!) spin on the Long Tail theory from Anita Elberse, associate professor at the Harvard Business School. Armed with online sales stats from Nielsen VideoScan and Nielsen SoundScan, her article seems to persuade marketers not to take their eyes off the big hits, which is still highly profitable and very much in demand. Interestingly, Chris Anderson, who coined this theory back in 2006, replies with his thoughts as well.
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Keith Tan |
Marketing, Web 2.0 |
Posted by Keith Tan in Marketing, Web 2.0 on July 1st, 2008
In between booth manning duties, I managed to squeeze in some time to attend some of the conference sessions. The ones I went to covered topics such as widgets and mobile marketing, and the new darling, social media. The one thing which resonated throughout most of the sessions were these 2 words: Relevancy & Social.
“Hangin’ with da big boyz”
Relevancy refers to how information will be presented to you, the user. It means having a website “customizing†or “personalizing†your surfing experience, only displaying information which you will find useful/interesting.
Social refers to the connections and interactions which you and your friends share online. This could be done via email, instant messaging, forums, groups, and social networking sites, to name a few.
Interestingly, in his keynote speech, Brad Garlinghouse, SVP, Yahoo! demoed some screens on how the future My Yahoo page could look like. It would sort your mail and display it accordingly by your social group, for e.g. family, friends, co-workers, etc. It would do this based on “connections†which you may have specified on your list of contacts or perhaps by studying your previous communication behavioral patterns.
Your network of friends belongs to you, not Facebook.
Currently, users that migrate from one social networking site to another have to re-build their network of friends from scratch. This process can be extremely tedious, especially when history has shown, users’ loyalty to social networks isn’t exactly built on solid ground.
In the future, it is envisioned that websites will be connected to a single source to access your social network. By doing so, this would not only make your network portable, it would enable you to enjoy richer experiences across multiple sites. For e.g. On your iTunes page, you would be able to see which new track that Julian, your jazz cat pal, bought yesterday. Julian and you could be connected in Facebook as sharing similar musical tastes. Hence, by only showing you relevant information, iTunes would stand a higher chance of you downloading the jazz track as opposed to just showing you the latest hip hop tracks.
Cha-Ching!
This presents a great opportunity for marketers to provide even more targeted messaging to consumers. Beyond just behavioral targeting, now there is this vital layer of “relevancy†& “social†which could provide just that extra motivation to make that sales purchase.
Rise of Social Media
Most of the speakers couldn’t reiterate enough the importance and relevance of social media today. When used properly and skillfully, it provides an extremely cost effective method of marketing. Classic examples sited were the Diet Coke/Mentos video contest that got massive viewership eyeballs.
Leap of Faith
When dealing with social media campaigns, marketers also advise agencies to encourage their clients to take a leap of faith to do radical or unique ideas. It may bomb or score. But if it scores, it usually scores big time. (Think GoDaddy’s Superbowl ad campaign). What is most important is that these campaigns still continue to reinforce your branding and image to consumers in a positive manner.
Don’t get stuck in between
In the session on “Widgets in the Media Mixâ€, Derek Callow, Marketing Manager, Google SEA, sketched a simple bell curve to illustrate the point that on the web, both extremely bad or good ideas get viral. The in-between usually just fizzles and sometimes doesn’t even float. A good and bad viral campaign would reap you many times more in terms of publicity and awareness. But of course, not all publicity is good publicity.
image source: http://www.davidmeermanscott.com
Power to the People
Some companies have embraced users’ input in shaping their products and services. Several case studies were mentioned on how users were involved in determining what features should be built for a new mobile device. Or how users were polled to decide how a movie should end.
In short, we will continue to see more instances of how companies will embrace social media to provide their customers with relevant and greater experiences. This will in turn provide new opportunities for them to build, create and maintain long-lasting relationships.
Keith Tan |
Marketing, Web 2.0 |
Posted by Keith Tan in Creative, Web 2.0 on June 24th, 2008
As an interactive agency, we’re fortunate to be in the business during a time when the Internet is aggressively stamping its authority as the most pervasive form of media ever.
The Internet is a great field leveler, enabling smaller agencies like ours to compete with the big boys with larger teams and fancier coffee machines.
Websites such as iStockphoto and to a lesser extent, Template Monster (yikes! did I say that?) have revolutionized the way the industry works. These sites sell digital media files such as website templates, icons, photos, illustrations, videos and flash animations at low prices, enabling our designers to whip up visualizations and mockups quickly and effectively.
Want an image of a sunny beach resort? Or even a 1960s retro Caribbean-styled illustration of a tropical palm tree? You can almost swear by your grandmother’s grave that you’ll find it on one of these sites.
iStockphoto is one of the pioneers of microstock photography. They became a significant enough player to be bought out by industry giants Getty in 2006. Beyond offering low cost access to their stockpile (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun!), they successfully built a large and active community of independent contributors. This enabled them to provide an unrivalled range of files for sale, at a very good refresh rate. From just photos, they now offer almost all types of digital media files. In May this year, they announced that a new stock audio service would be available in September 2008.
With the ease of browsing and shopping online, coupled with access to an amazing range of design work from designers all over the world, we may be witnessing yet another paradigm shift in the creative industry.
Keith Tan |
Creative, Web 2.0 |
