Yes! We are running a campaign successfully paying the absolute minimum CPC.

See the image below

Minimum CPC bid on Facebook

Today sending business messages or advertising on mobile phones costs next to nothing. 1 Lakh SMS at 3 paise  or 5 paise per message! As a marketer, i would think this is a very effective price to reach out to a targeted audience. But apparently there lies the catch. Targeting is not part of the package.

Having recently explore the medium myself, i was appalled at this bit of information.

Mobile service providers have been instructed by the government, no less, to capture as much information about their subscribers as possible. From a security perspective too this is vital, as the mobile telephony explosion rips through this nation creating companies that are buying out other companies near and far, it is important to be able to say that the person who is talking into the phone does not have an anti-national agenda. Before we digress further, so why is this basic targeting data not available with the marketers?

I asked the vendor SMSGupshup to give me a very targeted database. The database needed to contain people who would be interested in signing up at our new website, bookmybanquet.com, like business owners such as caterers, decorators, wedding planners etc. “Nopes, we don’t have such level of classification of subscribers”. So where do these companies get these databases in the first place? apparently they are purchased from the service providers directly, third party agents fronting for them or other enumerators. “What do you get”? “Mostly just names and numbers”.

It is this indiscriminate and inefficient bludgeoning of this medium that lead to the creation of the DND directory. Why is it not possible for the mobile companies to ask the consumer a) what messages he would be interested in? A shopaholic would be interested in discounts on premium brands, a student would be interested to know about colleges/admissions, business owners would be interested in accounting/hr/ services, film buffs would be interested in latest releases, you get the idea. b) How many messages in a day?

Use the above collected information, update it periodically and you have a proposition which marketers would pay more for, a lot more i’m guessing. An audience receptive to actionable messages is kind of the holy grail of advertising, isn’t it?

I would be happy to hear from anyone who’s had a better experience with sms marketing companies and/or companies who already have such services.

• I’m sorry, I just can’t hear you over the sound of me being so awesome
• You instantly piss me off when I see you.
• tripping but not falling and then pretending it never happened
• I forgive but i never forget
• I stay up late every night, and realize it’s a bad idea every morning.
• WERE AGAINST FACBOOK CHARGING £14.99 A MONTH FROM JULY 1ST 2010
• Talking to your pets as if you’d expect a response
• I don’t care how full my wardrobe is, I still have nothing to wear!!
• I don’t sleep enough because I stay up late for no reason
• I redo high fives if they weren’t good enough the first time
• I Brush My Teeth With Toothpaste, Not A Bottle of Jack You Disgusting Woman
• no one will ever put up with you like i did. GOOD LUCK replacing me;)
• Rumours inform you amazing things that you did not even know about yourself
• That’s so funny, Last time I heard that I fell off my dinosaur.
• I play with my phone when I’m waiting for someone so I don’t look stupid
• Don’t you hate it when you die from not passing on chainmail?
• I used to climb on the furniture pretending the floor was lava!
• I Dont care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass.
• Dear Mr. Spider, Unless You Pay Rent… You CANNOT Live In My House! :]
• i’ve thought about punching you in the face on multiple occasions.
• pleaseeeeeeee shuuuuuuut the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck upppppppp
• Hearing someones story, and thinking ” Fu*k, you’re so full of s!*t!”

If you find such interesting and thought provoking facebook groups..do tell us

Apparently,

Surprised? Yeah! we were too when we noticed that they had shifted from measuring time in boring old seconds  to these nerdy alternatives.

Yes! we’ve already started reading up on what all of them signify. You should too….it’s fun.  We were intrigued by the unladen swallow reference and went hunting. This is what we found,

In an early Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Geordi is looking for someone in a bar. He is told to talk to a Gorn bartender who knows everything. “He knows everything, huh?” states Geordi, sceptically. “What,” he asks “is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” “What do you mean?” asks the Gorn. “An African or a European swallow?” “Boy, he’s good!” Geordi responds. Source: Wikipedia

The funniest one off course is the ” 2.00 shakes of a lamb’s tail”

A shake is an informal unit of time equal to 10 nanoseconds, or 10⁻⁸ seconds. It has applications in nuclear physics, helping to conveniently express the timing of various events in a nuclear explosion.The word comes from the expression “two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” which indicates a very short time interval.

But the top prize goes to 23 Skidoo. Building located on 23rd street,  swirling winds, men gathering to watch women’s skirt go up in the wind and cops breaking up the groups of men. Rich history on this one! read it here, 23 Skidoo.

See below two examples of the use of meta description tags and the resultant display on FB,

Bad Meta Description tag

If you are considering popularizing your website through social media, you should get the basics right.  Stuffing your description tag with ‘prize’ keywords is definitely in the ‘not getting it right’ section. As always remember, your website and everything on it is for the user and the Search Engines should always come second.

Good Meta description tag

This tag explains gives an overview of the article, the published date and a thumbnail for good effect. There is not much effort involved either. just pull the first few lines of the article and add to the description tag. Simple cron job!

This is the last post for 2009.  Here’s wishing everyone a great year ahead!!

Nudity in display advertising

I saw this display ad while browsing through a tech site! Before you think it, yes it did catch my attention and let me assure you with confidence, it will do that to for all males of the human race.

But what did it make me think? cheapshot, loud, vulgar, desperate, tricky are some of the words that came to mind.

In fact, according to this Princeton Study,

“The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands,” Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly.”

The study also found that men’s perceptions of scantily clad women may be closely related to the ways people “dehumanize” groups from which they wish to distance themselves, such as homeless people and drug addicts.

So there you go…advertising is about getting the message across and inducing action, but not the kind this particular ad would

Facebook is luring users away from Orkut

And now that Diwali or Deepavali  is close at hand FB is trying to use the festive season to tell people to connect to friends using what else, FB!! Diwali is a festival of lights, sweets & fireworks in addition to celebrating the victory of good over evil , hardly the day you would want to sit hunched over your laptop and update facebook. Grow up FB and understand the social and cultural intricacies of every nation you are in…

Marketing 101, an event organized by Altius Consulting was held at Hotel Atria on the 11th Of September 2009. Designed to act as a primer for SMBs, Startups and entrepreneurs the day long event had interactive sessions on Market Research, Consumer Behaviour, Branding & Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing Planning and Venture funding through Marketing.

This is a copy of the deck that i presented introducing “Digital Marketing & Social Media Optimization” to the small but enthusiastic audience on that day.

*Search category market share based on share of searches conducted, not share of time spent like the other categories

ComScore released data recently on the two most powerful emerging markets, Brazil and India. As a backgrounder look at this data;  Google Sites ranked as the most visited Internet property worldwide with 854 million unique visitors age 15 and older in July, an increase of 18-percent during the past year. Nearly 75 percent of all Internet users worldwide visited the Google Sites property, which accounted for 9.4 percent of all time spent online. Nearly one out of every ten minutes a person spends online around the world is spent on a Google site.

Facebook General Growth

• More than 250 million active users
• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

Facebook User Engagement

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day

Facebook Applications

• More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 2.5 million events created each month
• More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

Facebook International Growth

• More than 50 translations available on the site, with more than 40 in development
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Facebook Platform

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than 200 applications have more than one million monthly active users
• More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Facebook Mobile

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Source: Facebook