Get Ready For Social Shopping

People have long shared product opinions with friends and family through word-of-mouth. Today’s social media tools enable consumers to share and extend their connections and opinions in powerful new ways even further, enough to build in a whole new layer in the sales funnel for marketers. Yet e-marketers have barely tapped that potential to leverage the opinion of consumers to drive sales on social networks.

Traditional Sales Funnel

Forward-thinking retailers are changing that very quickly. Most are bringing their Web stores to the environments where their customers like to spend time. As a result, almost three-quarters of the merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on at least one of the major social networks or social shopping sites.

Social network users are also a highly coveted group of consumers. Across all age brackets, they are more likely than average to make an online purchase, according to a May 2009 survey by Anderson Analytics. What’s more, social network users are also more likely to share recommendations with greater frequency than generally expected. A Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while 10% said they made such contributions at least every few days.

Etailers have already seen amazing results through social media tools like Twitter which is now becoming the defunct channel of Customer Service and a Promotion Vehicle of ‘Deal of the Day’. They’ve seen proven benefits through the ratings and reviews systems, which are already the mainstay of every e-tail store. It is now how etailers tap into this shift from a transactional experience to a social one which will determine the winners of tomorrow.

 

Age Of Engage – Digital Marketing Strategies For The New Age Customer

ITCN – Age Of Engagement

View more presentations from Umair Mohsin.

 

Dalda Instore Digital Activation

Dalda Foods Pvt. Ltd. has recently engaged with their customers through an Instore Activation. Tuesday handled everything from ideation to the execution of the activity.

Dalda customers buying 10 KG/ Liters of their products got a chance to play ‘Dalda’s Wheel of Fortune’ and win great prizes like passes to the Dalda’s Iftar being held at the Maritime Museum in Karachi whilst in Lahore & Islamabad Dalda customers could win the Dalda Cooking Kit. Customers also had a chance to win Olive Oil Bottles and Dalda Dastarkhwan Magazine.

The activity is being conducted in 15 modern trade outlets in the three metros namely all Makro outlets, Imtiaz Store, Al-Fateh, Hyperstar, MySuperStore, etc from the 10th of August to the 31st of August.

This is what you’ll see when you approach the game after buying Dalda products from the store.

First the brand ambassador will tell you about the activity, the prizes and how to play the game.

She’ll tell you about the three prizes you can win if you purchase a 10 Liters / KG products. In Karachi, the highest prize is the Dalda Iftar Coupon (worth Rs. 600).

In Lahore / Islamabad the highest prize is the ‘Dalda Cooking Kit’.

She’ll also tell you that you can win prizes other prizes too such as DKD or Olive Oil Bottles.

After this, simply press the Dalda Logo on the Touch Screen and press ‘Start’. You have three turns /chances to win prizes.

Head on down to the store today. Happy Winning.

 

Consumers Trust Real Friends & Virtual Strangers The Most

A recent post at Nielsen Wire (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/global-advertising-consumers-trust-real-friends-and-virtual-strangers-the-most/) said that

Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries.

According to the post:

Brand websites, globally the most trusted form of advertiser-led advertising, hold the greatest sway in China (82 percent). Following China are Pakistan (81 percent) and Vietnam (80 percent). However, brand websites tend to be trusted least amongst Swedish (40 percent) and Israeli (45 percent) Internet consumers. In the US, 62 percent of Internet consumers said they trusted brand sponsorships, placing the United States 21st out of the 50 countries surveyed.

Seems to me that companies in Pakistan should start thinking more towards digital media and brand worlds this year on… The Consumer in Pakistan is ready for the digital revolution.

Trust in Various Forms Of Advertising

 

Marketing 2.0 – Leveraging Facebook For Brand Building

Facing Up To Facebok

Published Dawn, Aurora Magazine, Jun-Jul, 2009 Issue.

Facebook

Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman first discovered walls. Thus it can be said that the phenomenon of social media and social networks is not new. Even in Pakistan, the most popular applications that were ever installed on PCs were framed around communication and sharing – bulletin boards, mIRC, instant messaging through software like MSN Messenger, AOL or ICQ, chat-rooms, etc were very popular in the last decade.

In recent times, however technology has enabled the twin modes of communication and sharing on an unprecedented scale on what are called social networking sites examples of which include MySpace, Zedge, LinkedIn, Orkut and Facebook. These are changing the human fabric of the Internet in Pakistan with over 1.83 m users on Orkut and over 500,000 users on Facebook alone.

Pakistani marketers are eager to tap into these platforms. They have realized that it’s critical for them to reach the tech-savvy youth demographic that thrives on these sites. On Facebook e.g. out of the total 574,740 (Figure: May, 2009) people from Pakistan, 436,680 are between the age of 18-30. Thus social networks do have the potential to pay off big for marketers if they learn how to use it properly.

There has been ample growth in advertising on these sites and the figures speak for themselves. Eyeblaster Pakistan, a leading internet marketing company reports Adex on Facebook in 2008 was USD 150,000 out of the total USD 1.6 million (some sources cite USD 3.0 m) spent on online advertising and increasing every year.

Facebook Apps

However if we take advertising on Facebook (the most advertised site) as a case study, it has continuously produced less than stellar results for advertisers. Facebook is a social network site that brings friends together according to interests, existing connections, networks and groups. Yet while the targeting on the site is phenomenal, Facebook users are more engaged by the content within the site rather than the advertisements. It can even be said that Facebook is a little too engaging. The metrics tell the story. With historically high CPMs (current avg. CPM on Facebook for Pakistan is $0.95) and historically low click-thru, Facebook is facing a challenge to produce effective campaigns for the marketers. The graph below highlights the problem with objectives set around CTR.

EyeBlaster Data of Various Campaigns runs on FB & Zedge

Description	Facebook.com	Zedge.net
Standard Banner – Average CTR Range	0.10 % to 0.12%	0.4% to 0.75%
Rich Banner – Average CTR Range	0.53% to 2.67%	0.95% to 4%
Average Dwell Time	0.41 Seconds	0.44 seconds
User Engagement (Brand interaction Rate)	10% – 40%	30% – 75%

Source: Eyeblaster, Pakistan

However this same graph might be viewed differently if the objectives of the campaigns were to be changed to ‘User engagement’ or ‘Brand awareness’ instead of how many leads were generated through CTR. e.g. in terms of branding efficiency, you’re getting your name, logo and ad in front of thousands of people for pennies per thousand. If such were the objectives, then the efficacy of campaign will boil down to the advertised content – what do you advertise that works and what sort of rate do you get? However even then it’s not as simple. The world average of User Dwell Time on FB is around 20 minutes a day (Figures: Jan 2009) with global 50% daily logins (both numbers for Pakistan are not available). The peak amount of time spent on the site tapers off at 190 minutes. That means that a ridiculous number of impressions are being spent on the same user and that will understandably will generate low click-through rates.

Another thing marketers need to realize about social networks like Facebook is that unlike say Google, users on Facebook don’t want to leave the site. With Google the goal is to redirect the user to another site as quickly as possible. Facebook’s goal is to hold the users attention as long as they can.

Tip: When creating ad campaigns on Facebook, consider linking it to your Facebook company page instead of an off page website.  This way the user remains within Facebook and can continue utilizing the full functionality.

Facebook advertising also will never be truly effective for the users who have even a tiny bit of knowledge about PCs. For example any display banner can simply be blocked automatically with the Firefox Browser’s adblock feature.

Facebook Pages

Thus keeping the above in mind, advertisers need to approach the Facebook medium differently. There’s a lot of focus on advertising, banner ads and the amount of traffic but to really connect to your customer it’s important to look beyond traditional forms of web adverting to see the real potential… that Facebook is a great place for relevant traffic, without the need to pay for ads! There are millions of groups associated with all kinds of subjects in the Facebook empire, so whatever niche you specialize in there is usually a collection of individuals talking about it somewhere in that world. The challenge is leveraging the connectivity of the sites and using them to form communities around products, media or services. This approach will also ensure that you are actually connected with your users.

It would be wise for marketers to take a page out of the history of MySpace, another very popular Social Network. MySpace when launched was effectively ignored by the press and digerati. They gained traction with the musicians who were just starting to get that social network sites were valuable. Based in Los Angeles, they had an upper hand. They managed to attract club promoters and others catering to 20-something urban hipsters who were looking for a tool for coolhunting. Slowly, a symbiotic relationship emerged on MySpace as bands and fans became mutually dependent on one another. Against this backdrop, the youth phenomena emerged.

What companies can learn from this case is that social networks have the power beyond ad revenue to act as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for them. As in much of media, creativity is the key here. If you can find the type of ad that Facebook users will click, that’s one thing, but if you can build something they’ll click, engage with (or buy) and help you spread, you’ve got something far more exciting

FB Users

and effective. One campaign that used this technique very successfully was the Burger King “Whopper Sacrifice” application, which recently also earned a Grand CLIO in Interactive. BK developed a Facebook app that once installed promised to give the user a coupon for a free hamburger if they were to delete 10 people from their friend’s list to prove how they preferred the Whopper over their friends. The “sacrifices” showed up in the activity feed. So it said, for example, “Caroline sacrificed Josh for a free Whopper.” Facebook ended up disabling the WHOPPER Sacrifice, after the love of the user for the WHOPPER Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.

All things said it also has to be remembered that not all products can be successfully marketed on Facebook. A new company or a brand that’s not a household name will have a tough time jumping into the mix, but so will established companies that don’t necessarily have public opinion on their side. It’s tough to get the conversation started when no one’s primed to talk about it and this is the challenge on Social Networks that brands must muster. They must remember that it’s not the marketers who are powerful on these sites, it’s the people and people empowered by technology won’t always go along.

Media isn’t neatly boxed into little rectangles called newspapers, TV or magazines anymore. People now connect to other people and draw power from crowds, especially IN crowds. If you want to be part of the Social Networks marketing process, than you have to be part of the conversations – that’s when real marketing takes place.

 

Green Computing – How Green Is Your Computer?

How Green Is Your Computer?
Published Dawn, Images, July 13th, 2009

These days it’s hard to move anywhere without being urged to make ‘green’ changes in your lifestyle. To answer these consumer trends, computer manufacturers worldwide have embarked to align business concerns with the broader issue of greening the environment. There is

HP MINI 110

cause for concern. IT’s CO2 emissions have been estimated to be at 2 percent of the world’s total, thus the entire community is waking up to the challenge of sustainable development.

At the manufacturing level, leading firms such as HP especially are improving their processes, accounting for environmental impact, operational impact and end-of-life impact for their full range of products. They try to do this by minimizing harm ‘before’ use by employing cleaner, leaner sourcing and manufacturing techniques, by designing products that consume less energy and materials ‘during’ use and helping with reuse and recycling ‘after’ use. This is why the new devices (esp. based on Intel Atom Chipsets) are highly energy efficient and form factors across the board have been reduced greatly.

HP Thin Clients

Corporations too are joining this trend, as being green serves the twin advantages of catering to consumer sentiments and business profitability. One way businesses are becoming greener e.g. are via using ‘thin-clients’. This is a setup where you have a low-power device on your desktop instead of a PC Processor box and all the work takes place at a central server or data center. This can take a lot of hassle out of desktop computing (and resulting maintenance, upkeep, etc), increases security (since all updates are at the center), is economical and requires minimal upgrades, since the average life-span of such a setup is around 8 years.

Another area enterprises are addressing is their servers. It has been estimated that worldwide most servers never run beyond 30% of their capacity and though more powerful than desktop machines, this is not utilizing them for their full potential. To address this challenge, virtualization software has been introduced which allows centers to double the amount of work done by the same servers. This allows businesses to halve the total number of devices and decrease environmental impact as well.

Green IT is also taking place at home e.g. a standard PC can consume around 350 watts (that’s ~1800 watts for 6 hours usage daily @ a minimal Rs. 7.5 per KW). With increasing awareness & electricity prices, consumers are now investing in products which use

HP All-In-One PC

less power, give off less heat and are recyclable or made of renewable materials like bamboo. These include new forms such as netbooks, ‘All In One PCs’, Ultra-portables and ECO PCs (less than 100 Watts consumption). There’s also a side benefit to this. Unlike traditional devices, these products fit anywhere in the home.

 

Global Entertainment and Media Practice

Marcel Fenez, global leader of the entertainment & media practice, talks about why there’s nowhere to hide from the migration to digital, and how the economic crisis is accelerating this process.

more about “Global Entertainment and Media practice“

To add to this, a new study from market research firm TNS and digital marketing firm Eyeblaster concludes that the digital era is blurring the line between channels designed for branding and those that trigger consumer action. The study, based on a worldwide survey of 400 marketing executives involved in branding, advertising and media buying and selling, was conducted in March.

“The common misconception among marketers is that brands are built offline and response is driven online,” the study contends. However, data from the survey suggests that “all media channels share a dual role: brand and response.”

With digital creeping across the media landscape the line between online and offline is becoming very blurred. It’s no longer either/or with respect to branding versus response. All channels will do both.

The PWC Outlook supports this trend and findings.

Here’s to a great digital future.

 

A New Era Of Mobile Computing In Pakistan & N97

I was one of the people who was invited at the sneak preview of the Nokia N97, held at Kamameshi (TSB) in Karachi on Friday and found it to be a really exciting experience as it heralds what’s coming now for the mobile space in Pakistan. You can read a wonderful coverage of it at http://senseapplied.com/index.php/nokia-n97-sneak-preview-karachi/. Now onwards.

Nokia Pakistan aims to usher in the era of the personal Internet with the Nokia N97. The device itself is simply part of the miniaturization trend  that’s been occurring since the early days of computing  from mainframe to the desktop to the laptop and now to your pocket. With each iteration, however, it gets more powerful than ever.

Dubbed the world’s most advanced mobile computer, the N97 aims to transform the way people connect to the Internet and to each other. Designed for the needs of Internet-savvy consumers, the Nokia N97 combines a large 3.5″ touch display with a full QWERTY

keyboard, providing an ‘always open’ window to favorite social networking sites and Internet destinations. Nokia’s flagship Nseries device also introduces leading technology – including multiple sensors, memory, processing power and connection speeds – for people to create a personal Internet and share their ‘social location.

The phone adjusts to the world around us, helping stay connected to the people and things that matter most and helping to transform the Internet into your Internet.

The Nokia N97 is the most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence and Nokia Pakistan is launching this together with Ovi services including OVI Shop which will be a boon for Pakistani developers on the mobile platform. Given that Pakistan is a price conscious, mostly entry phone level market for Nokia, they’re ensuring that OVI is compatible even with Series 30 devices.

This wasn’t the biggest news for me (at least). The really big & exciting news was the fact that Symbian is going Open Source. Giving that I firmly believed that HTML 5.0, combined with Silver Light on Android is the way forward for mobile computing, this is wonderful news. Finally we have a contender in the mobile space to Android.

Nokia’s moving quickly to make Symbian a free and open mobile operating system. This is excellent because it will start putting pressure on the company’s competitors to keep innovating and giving customers — device manufacturers, consumers, and carriers alike — what they want. Nokia said that it aimed to make Symbian  the “most widely used platform on the planet”.

I bet Microsoft will be less than thrilled at this. Not that they’re very aggressive in Pakistan in this arena. Internationally however to sell its WMP (Windows Mobile Platform) which is suddenly looking very expensive, I’m sure Microsoft will make Windows Mobile Platform a part of a larger, integrated experience, leveraging its desktop user base to make Windows Mobile more compelling to consumers whilst making it easier to connect to Windows Mobile, Windows, and Windows Live. How will they do it in Pakistan, i’m not sure.

Speaking of which, Nokia Pakistan also announced that they will bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users, which will be available for S60, Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Given that today’s consumers are looking for easy access to tightly integrated services and data on any device adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

I bet Adobe’s feeling sick right now. This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic. This partnering will also have a large effect on mobile content support on the Silverlight platform in Pakistan. This is something i’m looking forward to.

All in all, great work Nokia Pakistan.

 

A Glimpse Into The Future

– Microsoft Labs Vision 2019

This is a beautiful glimpse into the future and what it will mean to be productive, to share & connect, to express yourself. This is a future where technology is a natural part of your ‘being’.

However, personally I think that this is a glimpse of what technology will be to the rich world mostly the west or perhaps the top 1 billion or so people at the time. What about the other 7 billion or so people (projected 2019 figs) who will still live under the shackles of poverty & still lack access to even the basic facilities. Unless Microsoft decides to give those devices away for free, I don’t see those people having the monetary strength to buy it. Technology like this requires basic literacy which the developing world is lacking in. Can this be the future we envision for the majority of our world or it is more likely that technology then also will serve only the rich and the connected (pun intended).

Beautiful futures like these also require asking big questions about sustainability. The big global problems remain – deforestation, coal plant emissions and natural gas emissions from power plants, and emissions of hot water into lakes and rivers, that affect the balance of ecosystems, and tailings and ash ponds from coal plants and industrial waste and other non-sustainable items that we read about everyday.

Unless there are constraints there will be nothing of value. When technology creates those constraints and develops sustainability, that is when the future will play itself out and I think it’s going to be a very different future that will result.

 

Why Did We Call Our Company Tuesday?

Tuesday
Originally uploaded by mikey6p

Do you believe that ‘Things Happening For A Reason’, a universal power, a sense that life creates its own purpose.

Tuesday itself was fate’s sleigh of hand. The six of us – Salman Abedin, Irfan Kheiri, Zaka, Zafar, Ahmed & myself were all people who had been evangelizing digital on their own in one form of another. I through my articles in Aurora, Pakistan’s leading advertising & marketing magazine, speaker sessions and setting up my interactive division with my previous company ‘Media Idee’, Zaka through his blogs, Ahmed did his final thesis at Indus Valley School of Arts in ‘User Interface Design’ and so forth.

However it was Tuesday which brought us together. Salman used to have meetings with Irfan about setting up his own digital firm on the Tuesday of every week. As luck would have it, we all ended up recommending each other to these meetings and thus was formed the core team which met once a week on these Tuesdays to develop the way forward.What a team it was – MBAs, Technologists, Creatives, Strategists & geeks, all one one platform.

It was in remembrance of these meetings, the amount of creativity & ideas that were generated and the bonding that developed between the core members, that the company was called Tuesday. A fitting tribute to the day that brought us together.

It was Tuesday, 03rd March, 2009 (another sleigh of fate here: 03x03x09), that the company was incorporated. Incidentally our first pitch was on a Tuesday and the first contract we signed with our client was also a Tuesday.

Do you believe in Fate?