How companies still screw up EMAIL marketing

September 24, 2012 Leave a comment

Recently I got this interesting email from Remit2India.com . For those who don’t know it is a remittance and money transfer service owned by biggest newspaper company of India which has several diversified interests.

I recently got this offer email from them which landed into spam folder of my inbox. I never marked them spam and in fact I used to use their services till a few years back until their agents started harassing customers with mid night phone calls begging them to remit money. I just decided to analyse how companies which enormous marketing budgets and years of experience behind them can make glaring mistakes in email marketing. Here’s this screen shot explaining what I mean ….

 

Remit 2 India Email Marketing

 

Filed under Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Reviews

Amazon MP3 Sales at Youtube – Is there something deeper there ?

September 13, 2012 Leave a comment

Google Amazon MP3 @ Varun Mittal

I just saw that in spite of the Google negotiating all the contracts with music labels for its music solutions, it has probably decided to throw in the towel already. As seen in the screenshot above, Google’s Youtube is promoting Amazon MP3 sales through its videos. It is not a regular advertisement because it comes along with Google’s own artist search service.

Either it is a partial roll out or lead user testing or something else, much bigger than I can think off at the moment.

Implications of this deal if it really is a deal -
1) Apple now has to deal with combined marketing and outreach muscle of Amazon and Google. Apple can’t invoke anti trust rules since it is the bigger player and Google has highly limited success in MP3 sales area

2) It can be a pointer to what might happen between Amazon and Google in future , considering Google so wants to get access to content distribution powers of Amazon and Amazon wants Google’s support for so many other things

Interesting Read - Google, two labels spar on cloud music

Waiting with baited breath to see, is this is a one off deal or a real alliance between Bezos and Page !

Filed under Conspiracy theory, Marketing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

BREAKING : Google +1 button now can send content to Google Plus

March 27, 2012 Leave a comment

Google has quietly converted all the Google +1 buttons spread all across the internet to buttons capable tof sending and sharing content on Google Plus. This 1 step will be the biggest thing done by Google since the day they launched Google Plus. Suddenly the reach of Google Plus has increased manifolds and this is the first insight into the fact the API of Google plus to let third party apps work with it is almost ready. Soon we should be able to potentially see more uses of this API though Vic has said that he won’t release the API for third party unless he is confident enough that they won’t pollute the user stream. I totally agree with his view, he is right that Google should not fight Facebook by following in its foot step. It needs to create reliable alternative which ensure Google changes the competitive field instead of fighting with Facebook in areas of Facebook’s strength.

For all those who were criticizing Google for going slow on supporting its Google Plus platform and writing it off need to see these statistics – Google +1 button had 4 billion page views per day ,way back in Aug 2011. Now each of these buttons is a potential window to stream and share content to Google Plus. Also to note than I am not counting the number of more pages who would have adopted the +1 button till now.

Vic Gandotra – Respect for the MASTER STROKE !!!

Referene : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/08/cross-posted-to-official-google-blog.html

Filed under Brand Talk, Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Technology

Finally Google Plus integrated with Youtube

March 27, 2012 Leave a comment

Google has finally done what the Google Plus users have been asking all this while. Youtube now provides automatic sharing option for Google Plus unlike the +1 button which was adorning the Youtube videos till now. Even now the biggest source of videos on Facebook is Youtube and Google never mind it since it was still making money on the ads shown on its videos at Facebook.

Youtube which is most prized jewels of Google’s crown by virtue is its position of pre eminence in the world of video sharing and viewing. It has consistently being among the most viewed sites in all the surveys.

It was only a matter of time before Youtube had to come to support its brother Google Plus but it is nice to have it now. The sooner the better.

Bringing a more seamless experience for users by tying all the Google services together will help Google leverage its resources and network much better. While the whole tech world is going ga ga and crib crib on Google putting GOOGLE PLAY ( new name for Android market, for those didn’t follow the news lately), there are some simple common tech  lovers who are smiling on how the playing field is being levelled.

There are several meanings for the sentence above and hope the wise can understand the true dimensions of the argument. Good Going Google, keep it up !!!

 

Filed under Brand Talk, Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Reviews, Technology

Why GOOGLE PLUS has finally arrived ?

February 26, 2012 2 Comments

A lot of marketing and social media experts keep on quoting numbers, statistics and all sorts of stuff about how successful Google Plus has been. The supporters say it is fastest growing social network.

Strengths quoted  -

1) API has not been released yet so there is immense potential left to be untapped

2) Google drive will and its SDK support to third party apps will give Google Plus more muscle. Hope to see the drive being released soon.

3) Google charges less commission from Game developers than facebook does leading so several gaming flag bearers like Zyga to launch games on Google Plus as well. In future we might be looking at Google plus only Games being developed, not to forget Google is an investor in Zynga.

Weakness quoted -

1) Lack of clarity on how much people are actually using Google Plus. No data on average user time spent on Google Plus is available. Considering most social networks have their revenues driven by ads, average time spent is very critical aspect

2) Facebook is believed to be too big to fail and with its impending IPO it will have access to huge amount of funds. These funds can help it rapidly acquire complementary companies and give the search giant a tough time

3) The Open Graph and time line have finally taken off. Publishers and vendors like Digg, Spotify, Yahoo News have witnessed massive upswings in their usage from their core target audience YOUTH.  Facebook has made lot of people stakeholders thereby having more than Zuck and team itself left to defend the FacebookVille.

4) Google which has no dearth of competitors, after ending its search deal with Twitter and driving it into arms of Yandex has one more fund rich company gunning at its turf.

Now coming back to the title of the post … it is inspired by what my 14 year old cousin sister told me when I saw that she added me to her circle in Google Plus. I just casually teased her saying Welcome to G+, now you finally made an account on G+

It was her reply to my question which got me thinking -

Bro, please don’t tell mom I am there in G+. She knows Facebook but it is tough to explain her G+. But you see I gotta be there on G+. It is this attitude which lead to demise of Myspace, Bebo and Orkut (almost) when the dominant player failed to understand the user sentiment and didn’t innovate fast enough and importantly were not COOL any longer. I was reading this article on MIT blog – Why dominant companies are vulnerable … and I could make a correlation , why Facebook is vulnerable and is being  seriously impacted by Google Plus.

Welcome Google Plus … if the youth has started moving who don’t understand the big tech wars and platform openness kind of nerd concepts, you have really arrived

 

Filed under Brand Talk, Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Audio advertising – the new post display ad frontier

February 25, 2012 3 Comments

I recently noticed some sites going retro to the days of Radio Advertising and applying interesting innovations in that -

The two primary modes I noticed the way websites are deploying this

1) Normal – There is ad being played on the web page with Audio ad along with a static images. A user may or may not be provided with option to stop the ad. Sometimes there is an option to turn off the volume of ad and sometimes users just have to live with the voice ad. They have no option to do anything about that. However this is a very old way of advertising and is not much of innovation.

2) Stealth – These are the kind of audio ads which I recently noticed being used by the sites. They are real innovation ( dunno for good or bad) & are  embedded somewhere in the page. The moment the page loads they start playing.  Any normal user can’t find the ad on the page since it is hidden. Neither can it be stopped, volume level changed. The web portal manager can guarantee the ad owner with a much higher degree of surety that the message is reached to it audience. One of such sites is rediff.com .

Implications:  I am still evaluating how much it can piss off your readers and how much ad dollars it can bring in for web portal/site owner. As a user, though I hated being forced to listen to an ad for female stockings whenever I would try to read news on my favourite news portal. Did I stop using the portal, not really ? Did I get pissed off … yes I did.

So what is the threshold till which an ad rendered stretch their users ? Future of sites like Facebook is all dependent on the answer of this question. Looking forward to see if Facebook also would like to follow audio ads or if the privacy advocates look into this and  find an issue worth probing .

Filed under Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Reviews, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

Contextual Advertising – Desperate for Innovation

February 4, 2012 1 Comment

Contextual advertising which is bread and butter of several big companies today but to my understanding is in desperate need to reinvent itself. Contextual advertising is loosing its relevance in current times.

Following is an example of weird ads being displayed for dating / porn sites when I am watching a Punjabi Song  which is hailing the glory of culture in a specific province in India.  I don’t understand how does context for these two things match up.  Perhaps the algorithms for rendering ads have not kept pace with the surge in possible scenarios.

From Blog References

Facebook, the recent darling of stock markets because of filing if its IPO is no behind and actually at some points leaves behind Google in proving my statement.

Two examples of wasting ad dollars of advertisers in the image -

1) A student of NUS MBA ( information which they have by my willing disclosure) being served advertisements of another business school. What does Facebook expect me to do – leave my course and join course of another school midway my course at current school.

2) A person living in Singapore being served ads for renting a car in Punjab ( a province in India) when I don’t have that place ever checked in or in place of my belonging. At no place in my profile that place is present, yet cars for rent in that province. The place is several thousand miles from my current place.

From Blog References

I hope contextual advertising evolves before it gets obsolete.  Several years ago a start up made by 2 PhD students revolutionized the way information of world is organized. Looks like time is coming for another revolution to take place. Amen.

Filed under Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Emotional Connection or Breach of Privacy

November 20, 2011 1 Comment

I am very fond of using Avira Antivirus. I am a regular user for past several years but I never registered on their site for the simple lack of need of it. I was just curious how the hell they know I am an Indian and Hindu … are they just spying on my data behind my back :(

Weird but intriguing …

From Blog References

Filed under Marketing, Technology

Amazon Empire – The Secret Kingdom

August 31, 2011 3 Comments

Amazon has been at the for front of innovation. This slide deck uncovers the unknown forts of the Amazon Empire.

PS: I don’t own right to this slide deck. I am only sharing this

Filed under Brand Talk, Marketing, Opinion Uncensored, Technology Tagged with , ,

Rob Schuham – Brand in Common

August 28, 2011 Leave a comment

PS: I don’ t have rights to this video and have only shared it.

Filed under Inspiration, Marketing, Opinion Uncensored

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,990 other followers

%d bloggers like this: