e Magus

E very Brand out there on social media wants huge number of people or fans following them. Even then analytics talking about brand page popularity in social media - decides it on their reach and followers. A quick look on their Facebook page or Twitter profile shows how many Million followers/fans they have (source: www.socialbakers.com ) Image 1 Facebook Best Brands (global)   Image 2 Twitter Best Brands (global) One obvious column that most miss are how few people the brands are actually following (in Image 2) Traditionally, brands have been built like the way great Empires were built in the past. It is the length, breadth, and the populace they cover that matter. Similarly, one important aspect of any marketing campaign is “REACH”. And, Hey! did it ever occur that we call the marketing activities as ‘campaigns’ - as in Military operations, and its etymology is rooted in the Latin word - Campus/Campia, meaning wide open fields  Since, Milit...

E xcept for HPTOs (Home Page Take Overs), it seems as if re-marketing drives the entire online display advertising. Be it OTA ads, e-commerce sites, review sites, or even some corporate websites, everybody seems to be riding on this bandwagon. It must be effective and hence the rush. I’m told that remarketing ads gets an average CTR of above 0.75% where as a similar communication through a plain display ad would give a CTR of about 0.25%. A 300% increase in CTR, coupled by the fact that the conversion from such traffic also will be high (can safely assume double the conversion). Such effectiveness will surely keep the interest level high amongst marketers and advertisers. However, like most people, I am being ‘stalked’ by these salesman-ads. Be it a review site that I had gone to, or checked out ticket price and availability on an OTA site, these salesman-ads with standard copy flyers keep popping up in almost all the sites that I visit. For me, after a few repetitive messa...

Some of my thoughts on Why this kolaveri di phenomenon. With over 24 Million views on the original video, (plus an equal number of views on the various versions of it)this have become a true viral/meme case-study from India. No more reference to the Microsoft-Pankaj Udhas 'viral' or any of those 'foreign' case studies. Added to it are dedicated Facebook pages and millions of search results trying to bask in the glory of WTKD (including this blog :D) If one looks in deep, this song had all the makings for becoming a viral success. Any digital marketer could learn from the success of WTKD song. Here are some of the recipes that went into making this an success: Simplicity: A song with least common denominator English words regularly used by the youth with couple of simple vernacular words... the song has the universality of nursery rhymes like, Twinkle, Twinkle Little star.... or a Johnny, Johnny, Yes Papa.. With no music knowledge required, little wonder anybody ...

Today is the age of personal media ownership. According to a recent news release from Twitter (http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html) on an average around 4 Billion tweets are sent out every month. From individual point of views, re-tweets, status updates, what’s happening?, and direct messages….Twitter has become the favourite platform for self-expression for many Every Twitter account can be measured on the following parameters – Popularity – The number of people following a twitter profile Pursuit – The number of people whom a twitter profile is following..either for information or interaction Publishing – The volume of tweets (original) and re-tweets being done by the profile Basis the above 3 P’s mentioned, we can organize the twitter users into different groups…and each group fit into the classical Archetype. The Twitter grouping: On the X- axis is broadly the values of Popularity/Pursuit (for ease of grouping have grouped into 3 categories – less than 1, equal to 1, and...

2010 has started off with a lot of promise when it comes to digital marketing. I have seen a sea shift in terms of the clients pro-actively seeking digital marketing ideas and solutions from the agencies. Some reasons for the same could be: - The user base of internet has grown to an extent, it can be called as a mass media. Reports say that the Internet users in the country is over 71 Million - The traditional news mediums (TV and Print) are quoting from twitters and blogs that has increased the awareness of these platforms. Quotes (nay tweets) from popular personalities (nay tweeps) are the source of information and content for many of the newspapers and TV channels… What iamsrk is saying, or the recent tweets from iplt20 (Lalit Modi) and shashitharoor has made twitter a household name.. - A phenomenon called Facebook has spread like a pandemic. In today’s world – People have started taking up professions which most will never plan to do in their real life – Farming, Cooking, Mob…et...

3 incidents. 3 clients. Same condition. Client #1 had to get a website done… their campaign was about to launch in 1 weeks time and they haven’t decided on what their website should contain and how it would look. Now they wanted a website FAST. Client #2 wants to do an online advertising… a lead generation campaign… The creative haven’t been cracked; the landing page not yet ready; and the database (lead capturing) haven’t been thought about. But they wanted to go live FAST. Client #3 just got an approval for doing some social media marketing. They want to do ‘something’ in SM space… why, what and how…they are not sure of… But they want to create a Facebook page, and they want it FAST. When it comes to Digital Marketing every client wants things done FAST. I’m curious to know who had sold the idea to the world that every thing about Digital Marketing is FAST. Looking back at my own experience, I realize that during the early days of internet marketing… there was resource time available...

Imagine you own a popular coffee chain in Denver that you want to promote. On Monday afternoon, it’s warm and 80 degrees in the city. You run a display ad campaign online that offers Denverites a discount coupon for an iced cold latte, with a searchable map embedded in the ad to show local branches, and a real-time feed from people who have tweeted publicly about your newest flavor. That evening, a cold front rolls over the Rockies. Your ad automatically and dynamically adjusts to present a photo of a hot, steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of a warm fireplace, together with a home delivery number and an offer of free marshmallows. Creative? Absolutely. Impossible? Hardly. You can do this today using technology from Teracent that we’re working to roll out for our clients who advertise on the Google Content Network or who use DoubleClick Rich Media. There’s no doubt that advertisers today are increasingly seeking to run campaigns that are highly measurable and relevant to users. Tha...

I had got this interesting article from WebProNews... More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That's why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result: - Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans - 59,000 people published the story to their news feed - Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds - In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to: - Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property) - Add depth to Bing's personality - Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other. - Yield passionate or emot...

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content… The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and th...

No one will argue the fact that we all live in a networked world. You connected to me, connected to another, and another, and to the whole world. True? Well, not quite. Take a detailed look into this networked world; you will find that it is a chain of islands, with spaces between each other…. It is islands of online communities, groups, niche networks, etc… You realize that this online world (especially the social networking) is not one big homogeneous society, but a collection of different types of groups. But looking at our past we know that human advancement has been on basis of creating a homogeneous society… From being a small group of hunters and gatherers, to forming large communities, building villages, city states, empires, and to nation states of today… Now that we have the technology and the medium to create this homogeneous society, even if it is online, why do we shy from doing so? If we look back at the start of the Internet – it was a repository of information that can ...