Mykarma.in

This is what I was talking about when I wrote my previous post on branded online communities.

In the netherlands ABN Amro has started a social networking site called “Flametree”

I think now Indian companies also should take cue from what is happening on the internet and what are brands doing. They should adopt these international inititatives as soon as possible and not wait 3-4 years to give it a thought.

Flametree offers solutions to share knowledge and information to entrepreneurs and SME’s and will also launch other new services this coming year.

Flametree is free, and ‘open’ to non ABN AMRO entrepreneurs. This creates a great acquisition opportunity for ABN AMRO. As per my previous post it’s great to see that ABN AMRO has listened to it’s customers and is willing to facilitate and help them by getting them involved in the brand.

Do read my previous post on brand online social communities to know more about my thoughts.

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I just bought a bike for myself… After 7 yrs since I got my driving license, after a lot of rounds of negotiation over the years with my parents I have done it. I am now safe from the mumbai trains and the rush that I blogged earlier about. I just wanted to share how I feel and this video just says it all.. The speech by Shahrukh khan in the movie “Om Shanti Om”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILXywgm0Q1I[/youtube]

The dialogue in hindi

Kitni Shiddat se Tumhe Paane ki Koshish ki hai..
Ki har Zarre ne Mujhe Tumse Milane ki Saazish ki hai..

Kehte hain agar kisi cheez ko agar dil se chaho to saari kayanath tumhe usse milane ki koshish me lag jaati hai..

Picture Abhi Baaki Hai Mere Dost…

English meaning (Its from the alchemist I know)

“When you want something, the whole Universe conspires to help you realize your desire”

The movie is not over as yet, my friend.

Next wish is to get a toyota camry.

But getting to the significance of this.

The Internet has helped me to get my bike.

What I did to get away from the maddening crowd of mumbai trains

I kept telling my parents… I felt suffocated in the trains, I have to hang by my fingernails while travelling by the trains etc and also I kept assuring them – I will ride below 40kmph (yea right), Ride on the side roads, Wont overtake and wont go anywhere else than office.

I started my research on the best bikes in the market on the internet as I did not want to buy a new bike as I would require the bike just for 5-6 months. So I started checking out blogs, Review sites etc and I finalised two bikes – The Bajaj Avenger for its looks or a Honda Unicorn for its engine

And my choices and my budget never seem to match. Both these bikes in a good condition will lighten my pocket by atleast 43-50 k so than atlast I bought a pulsar dtsi 150 cc silver as it was maintained really well and looks good too for 38k.

I started looking out for bike dealers on the internet and classifieds sites like sulekha.com, kijiji.in, cartradeindia.com

And i found my bike from a listing by a dealer at andheri… Shalimar bike bazaar… I went there and then selected the bike that I wanted.. First I liked a black colour pulsar but then I got one of my colleagues at my office Gaurav to check the bike.. Gaurav is a bike enthusiast and has three bikes.. A yezdi, bullet and a caliber So he knows bikes well.. He rejected the black colour pulsar that I liked because the engine was not worth it and was roughly used… Then we took a test ride of another pulsar.. the silver coloured one. He liked the condition of the bike and the engine. After I took a test ride I also understood what the difference was between the two bikes. I booked it and bought it.

While buying the bike I saw a banner on the dealer shop of cartradeindia.com and then found out that the dealer did not do the listing of his bikes but a representative from cartradeindia.com had done the needful like clicking pictures and uploading the listing on the site… This approach of getting listings is more of a offline strategy like the shaadipoint by the people group and job centre by naukri.com. The advertisers pays for premium listing and the representative of cartradeindia.com comes and does the listing. But this also shows the fact that more of small advertisers are coming on the internet in a big way. And they have also found out the advantage of using the internet to their advantage which is evident from the fact that the dealer also advertises the website on his business cards. The dealer told me that he is also listed on sulekha.com as a premium advertiser. And he gets atleast 3-4 inquiry calls daily from the site. I was impressed by the change that is happening in India. Nowadays professionals are not getting enough time to go out and look for their needs like buying a house or buying a car, bike so internet is the only thing that they can access and use. Due to that sites like magicbricks, shaadi.com, sulekha.com etc comes into use as it is very convenient and easy. and more are going to come.

In the coming years I can see most of the shopping like getting groceries, paying bills and even getting services of electricians, plumbers, painters etc will be done online and I am already planning to take the advantage of the coming change. I hope all brands are too.

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Companies spend crores of rupees every year to market their products and services online. Getting the user on the site and then persuade them to use their services or buy their products is a tough job. Use of banner advertising is also not giving us as many clicks as it used to give before. It may be due to the user being accustomed to seeing the ads at those particular spots. So the ad position becomes a blind spot… Then there are other ad blocking tools for internet explorer and Firefox that removes all the advertising when surfing the web. So what is going to work online? What should advertisers do? what are the new tools that can be used to make online marketing and user engagement effective ?….

The WEB 2.0 revolution as people call it has the answer.. The new revolution of blogs, wikis, social networking, folksonomies (collaborative sites) and content aggregators has to be leveraged for brand awareness. Right now, Offerings of all products are almost similar with other products. In order to create brand loyalty, a company looks at the online space to develop value that is different from other brands. A trend that is picking up from the international scene is that of building communities online through social networks.

We have heard about Sunsilk gang of girls, Beinggirl.in, Spillurdil.com etc. Brand Communities give consumers an online platform to express opinions, views, and exchange information based on the brand, its features or any other related experiences. International brands had realized the power of online communities’ long time ago. This is how the LEGO, Harley Davidson and Coca-Cola communities gained traction. The trend starter in India was Sunsilk with their gangofgirls… then one more popped up beinggirl.in…… You know that a brand community helps the brand to connect and engage with its target audience but what next. I still haven’t seen any community use the platform to get more customers effectively.

When I was doing a campaign for a major international bank… I used to plan media spends of crores of rupees just to get the user come to the landing page and fill up their information and go away… I ask why..? Why aren’t companies engaging the audience that it has spent so much money on to get in the first place…? Why just after filling up the lead capture form, the user is shown a page with a big thank you or is sent to the company’s homepage where finding information about a particular product or finding help is a hell of a task. I feel financial companies especially banks can use this thank you page to take the user to the next level of engagement.

For example take products like Money remittances or any financial product… In Indian context getting an NRI lead for the Remittances product is very costly….. Comes to around Rs. 500-1000 per lead and the final conversion ratio is around 50 – 1 i.e. Out of 50 leads 1 gets converted so that’s a final conversion cost of Rs. 50k…. If you give 50k directly to the user he will readily open an account at the bank…. No questions asked. There are lots of products in the market that are trying to get customers by spending millions of Rupees.

The only way a product can differentiate itself is by engaging with the audience….

Instead of showing them a Thank you page and waiting for the call center guys to follow up why not involve the user with the brand and company because any potential customer has lots of questions before buying a product or service. Creating a community that has a discussion forum and a Support ticket system is all it takes to involve the user.

The forum can be used by the user to ask questions about the product and clear his doubts till the time a representative contacts him. The forum is also a great place for existing customers to discuss about the products with other members along with interests like movies, music etc. All grievance settlement can be done through the support system. Moderators should be assigned to each and every section so that no customer can discuss about any problem they are facing and the moderators can direct such customers to the support system.

This will lead to greater customer satisfaction and brand engagement which is the ultimate goal for any company. Customers will voluntarily refer their friends and family to the forum to clear any doubts about the products and services. This activity will eventually help the bank to get more customers…. and don’t forget good link backs and SEO.

This strategy is not applicable just to banks but can be used by any company to get the best ROI on their Internet marketing campaigns.

But not every company or agency can do such activities. A specialist agency is required to handle such an activity as it has to be properly executed to be successful or it can take a wrong turn. Quasar is one of the agencies that I know of that has started a special service called Quasar talk to execute such activities related to social media which can effectively execute a Internet campaign with a community driven approach.

I would like to have a critical analysis of this marketing strategy. Please do leave a comment.

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Google has just launched a new service called Google Ad Manager (as reported by Wall street journal). The google ad manager is a hosted ad server which allows users to manage and sell their own ad sales and inventory on their websites. After the acquisition of doubleclick in april 2007. Google hasn’t wasted any time in developing its own ad business.

The Google ad manager promises to be a simpler, intuitive ad management system which will serve, sell, optimize and manage your ad inventory. Google is known to make products user-friendly by improving its usability and giving it free. It’s a boon for small publishers who tend to keep a separate adserver to serve ads on their site as big networks won’t take them and other networks will charge a fee to use their ad serving technology.

Google has developed the complete Ad Manager itself and says that it will primarily cater to web publishers with small- to medium-size sales forces, while the services of recently acquired DoubleClick will be for big publishers. It is being said that eventually Doubleclick services will also be rendered free.

Google hopes to make money if the users agree to carry some ads that Google sells in ad spots on their Web sites that are not filled and Google would also take a commission on revenue from any ads it sells through the ad manager system.

There are similar services like Openx, Adbrite where users allow the site to sell their website ad space directly to companies. But what differentiates the Google Ad manager from the rest is that the users can opt to utilize AdSense ads for the times when no ad is currently sold in a given space or from other competing ad placement networks like Rightmedia, bluelithium, Tribal Fusion, Tyroo, Komli etc so that there is no unsold or wasted inventory. The Google ad manager system will automatically serve ads from networks that offer the best eCPM… There are also other services like Rubicon project, Yieldbuild, Pubmatic that offer similar services of optimizing ad serving and giving the best eCPM but they act like a aggregator of ad networks as users cant run ads on their own.

According to the google ad manager site the system has features like:

• Inventory management
• Yield optimization
• Ad targeting
• Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
• Creatives and rich media management
• Reporting
• User interface navigation
• Account administration

You can read more about the features here.

As of Thursday, Ad Manager entered a beta testing phase and users require an invite to register for the ad manager system. Publishers may apply here to participate.

I have also registered for the service and waiting for a invitation myself to check out the system.

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When we give examples of user influenced “social media,” Digg.com, Stumbleupon is right up there with del.icio.us and Wikipedia is the torch-bearer for “user-generated content,”

The popularity of digg has skyrocketed within 2 years and is revered as the best place to get the best stories and also to get traffic for your site. That is why probably there were rumors of digg getting acquired by News corp, Yahoo and many others.

Unlike traditional news sites where editors decide what news is, Digg emerged two years ago as an alternative where readers post links to stories from other Web sites that they think are newsworthy. The users hit a “digg” button if they like it or a “bury it” button if they don’t like it. The most popular stories appear on the front page. Users are encouraged to comment on stories, and they can give comments a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

But the recent news of digg rigging its articles and companies that offer services of making your stories popular by buying diggs has really not gone down well with the internet industry and the anticipating userbase which thinks that one day their stories will also get dugged and be popular.

So whats with all the rigging news …..

There was an article where it said that the service is somehow rigging stories which get “dugg” or promoted to the front page of the website – and also Digg was censoring anyone who tries to post an article about the same. It was first covered in an article at ForeverGeek.com, which mentioned that two stories posted to the front page of Digg were “dugg” by the same people – and not just a few of the same people. The first 16 diggs were all by the exact same people, and in the exact same order, and Kevin Rose was one of them. When several readers tried to digg the article from ForeverGeek.com, they were banned and the article link was removed. According to Digg, the article had violated the terms of the user agreement, which bans articles that allege misbehaviour by other Digg users.

According to Digg.com, its URL has been banned because it has been “spamming” Digg with its own stories and trying to get them on to the front page. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg posted a response to the Digg blog, in which he said ForeverGeek.com violated the terms of service.

There are two issues here it seems one is the that Digg (like other social media or folksonomies) is susceptible to being influenced by a small group of insiders. That one is difficult to prove. The other issue is whether Digg.com should be banning people who post stories that are critical of other Digg users.

Another explanation of how a random useless story comes to the front page of Digg is by rigging and inducing the users with rewards or reciprocally helping them with their own stories.

Now, Internet marketers are planting stories and paying people to promote articles and are manipulating rankings on Digg and other social-media sites like Reddit and Delicious to get more visitors to their websites.

“People basically trying to use the user influenced system of Digg to their advantage by promoting a story with fake diggers or other methodology of link swapping.”

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg. And if a story becomes popular on Digg It generates good enough traffic and links back to the marketer’s Web site and that site rises in search engine results and would not be required to use search engine marketing.

There are other ways to buy votes. A site called “User/Submitter,” is paying people 50 cents for digging three stories and charges $20 each for stories submitted, plus $1 for every vote it gets. Another site Spike the Vote Web site boasts that it is a “bulletproof way to cheat Digg” and offers a point system for Digg users to submit and dig stories. And Friendly Vote bills itself as an “online resource for Web masters” to improve their marketing on sites like Digg and Delicious.

Then there are a few that I found are more of a link swapping and community driven dig rigging sites something like ” I dig yours and you dig mine” which require invites from existing users to take part in.. Every user has some points to start with and gets points on digging other stories which can be exchanged for diggs on your stories. I had one to check how it is.. there is one called piqq.us which was previously called diggboss.com.. there is also one called diggfreak.com .. the list goes on ……

Digg has become a big enough phenomenons that it does move ideas and in some cases generates enough traction that people are influenced and can get them to buy a product or can generate an interest. That is why it is becoming more of a concern for brands and companies alike to monitor such sites. And also use these sites to their advantage.

Digg – and others – need to realize this that the fuel that drives their services forward with users is trust, and once that trust is lost it is very difficult to regain.

Lets see how Digg changes and responds to threats like these. And lets see if this post goes up in digg or not or just gets banned.

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