Status Message Marketing-Part 2

I am participating in the Airtel Real Fans Challenge, and its been an interesting build up to the end of the competition. Here are some data that I observed for my video

• It pays to submit your video the earliest, for a slight first mover advantage. This way you will also get clicks from Youtube reccomendations and the top videos when people come to the competition site. Add a few more clicks purely from the perspective of having spent more time in the gallery.

• You need to really promote yourself really well to get many clicks. This is where the strength and depth of your social network matters. I generally participate in 2-3 competitions a year which involve public voting, but even then I guess my friends would be fatigued seeing my entry for some competition or the other.

• I started my promotions with Gtalk Status messages, requesting them to share my link on their status. This helps as a status message stays for a longer time and pops up whenever you sign in and sign out. A Facebook status or a twitter status doesnt catch your attention quickly, as it may be submerged in a zillion other updates, but Facebook has a better hit rate when it comes to friends being influenced and perusing your link. Gtalk is incremental growth channel as it involves your friends only, and if it is compelling content, friends of friends may want to have it also as a status, while Facebook is an exponential growth channel.

• When I started off, I did my math as follows to set the expectations.On Facebook- 700 friends, 10% of whom may want to pass the link(70 people). 70 people having an average of 400 friends, means reaching a potential consumer base of 28000 people views. Now given that reality lies between 5-10%, the page view numbers expected from Facebook could be around 2000. It now turns out that the total views are 2000 so far, and Facebook has contributed around 750 views. So just as every marketing launch plan, I over estimated the strength of the network, but nevertherless its interesting to go and see what makes a viral tick.

• 18 friends shared my link on Facebook, I wrote on the wall of about 20 friends, and I gave 2 reminders on the contest on my wall. With my link shared 40 times, I have noticed Facebook contributing 36% of the page views. It matters at what time of the day friends post your link. It generally helps if friends post between 7 pm and 10 pm on weekdays and anytime between 4 pm Friday and 10 am Saturday(Post that, everyone is out for the weekend, away from the virtual world).
• I noticed that having Youtube embeds helps, as opposed to just posing a short URL external link on Facebook. I guess the preview of the video and a short description helps in people click on the content.
  

• Since You dont want to be the scourge of your friends on Facebook by spamming them, I did a few incremental activities to help drive traffic. I sent out emails to friends, sent messages on Orkut, Wrote articles for other social media sites with a subtle hint of my link, wrote comments on other cricket based facebook groups where I had to wait patiently in the conversation to provide my video as a relevant link.

• One learning is that unless you have compelling content, its going to be tough to sell the video and get clicks and go viral. Promotion on Youtube is largely binary. It is either slow incremental growth( of about 150 views a day) or exponential growth of about 500 or more views a day. I belong to the former, where I see that the growth is linked to marketing. Initially heavy marketing, gets you page views and then any amount of marketing doesnt help, as most in your social network have seen the video, and your clicks come largely from Youtube reccomendations and from other videos.

• Today, on Friday the 3rd September, I have about 1950 views, at number 7 and in reckoning for a trip to South Africa. The contestants who are ranked 1-6 have managed to do heavy promotion on youtube and through their social networks to get page views in the range of 2600-5800 page views. I realise its tough to grow further and even beat the guy who is 6, but I guess if my growth is just enough to be at the poistion where I am by Sunday evening IST, I should be and also hope that numbers 8 9 and 10 dont really scale up. If they do scale up, I'd just have to surrender to the fact that I have been washed away in this tsunami of page views, and I'd need to understand the web much better to manage a promotion, sustained for 3-4 weeks.

So here's hoping that I manage to win this contest and travel to South Africa for the Champions League Final. Meanwhile do check out www.fanlogue.com, a place where I have decided to write articles for this edition of the CL20. Its good to be in touch with writing articles all over again.

Sales of Media at Cinema Theatres

Sale of ringtones/Audio CD's/Cassettes and memorabillia are generally assosiated with the retail format in a showroom specifically meant for selling a range of Musical collections like a Musicworld or through a book store like a Landmark or a Crossword. I have always wondered why these shops dont set up licenced outlets in cinema halls for selling music/ringtones as an additional channel on a revenue share basis with Theatres.

I am more likely to buy the Audio CD of Raavan after I come out of the theatre, if I found the movie or the songs a great experience, while I walk out from the hall to the parking lot. This pathway is monetised currently by painting the walls of some brand, but a more related monetisation is through the sale of media related to the movie being screened.

If I attend a Raavan movie, its high probability that I am a fan of Mani Ratnam's previous works or A.R.Rahman's previous audio masterpiences, which would command an impulse buy. This is a wonderful window of oppurtunity for theatres to also increase their revenue base, especially if the theatres have a national prescence. This platform could sell movies/audio CD's, pen drives of ringtones and MP3 Music(if piracy hurts, then put it in a DRM format).

I dont know if there is any entry barrier for Theatres to start this line of business, but I'd defintely be more curious to know more on this topic.

Sports Marketing- Can We Look Beyond Cricket?

That's what my latest article explores. Read my article here

Philip Kotler at Great Lakes!

This happened a couple of years back. Came across it in Youtube. I guess the next time I visit college, must ask the library copy of the whole talk

FMCG Week

The last 2 weeks have been great with the kind of insights I have recieved from my faculty K.S.Ramesh, who teaches us FMCG Marketing. His real life experiences at FMCG companies and his simple ways of teaching have made me understand the intricasies of FMCG marketing very well. His suprise tests and quizzes, have ofcourse, jolted me, but the case study assignments and the nights spent in decoding the case and having Microsoft Excel/word and Powerpoint for company, has made the last 2 weeks an amazing journey. I am now delving for the final case study tonight for a presentation on Wednesday. K.S.Ramesh is a visiting faculty at Great Lakes and IIM-Indore and runs his own strategic marketing consultig firm.

What is Marketing?

I have 2 Marketing Projects and 3 case studies over the last 2 days. I have finally learnt what Marketing is all about.

Dr Nirmal Gupta at Great Lakes

Dr Nirmal Gupta at Great Lakes


Prof Sriram, Uncle Bala and Prof Nirmal Gupta

Nirmal Gupta's knowledge on the Indian marketing scene just bowls you over. He is a prof who can very unassumingly engage you in a class discussion when he goes about substantiating his arguments with data about the Indian advertising and Marketing scene. We at Great Lakes, were just listening in rapt silence when the man taught as Marketing Management II. If you want a session with clear takeaways and a feeling of enlightenment in the Indian Marketing scene, Prof Nirmal Gupta is the prof to have. There was so much of insight in the numbers thathe was throwing at us and his course was all about suggesting to us to always play the game at your strengths and not the opponents strength.

The course was over in a breeze and the amount of marketing insight we have gained out of this interaction was really something which makes your mind delve deeper and ask a lot of questions. It was no wonder that Nirmal Gupta was voted thrice the best faculty at ISB. Dr Nirmal Gupta's profile can be read here.