“Think About It”- Ideas shaping digital media and marketing in the new decade

Its love’s labour. Really.

After more than a year of running ChasingTheStorm – with loads of loving time spent- and acquiring loads of loving friend circle, this is it. I put together a book.

“Think About It” is a book inspired by Ideas from this website. With more meat, more thoughts and well, in a different format. The title of the book is actually the signature I use in most articles.

The book covers Digital Media and Marketing trends in the new decade, Mobile Media, new marketing paradigms and Marketing Case studies.

It is written not as a tutorial to digital media platforms or Digital marketing 101. Rather- it attempts to raise a storm on specific Digital media issues. Offering an easy read for the evolved, thinking marketer, it is a book to raise debate- and expects a degree of interest in Digital Media.

I’ll talk more about it later- but since I am quite excited about it, I decided to put up the news anyways.

It’ll go in print soon (and available online and on the Kindle)- but as usual, not without your support in its making. I need you to help pick up the right cover design.

My good friend Ankur Khurana volunteered to get the cover design done- and boy- he did get them designed in two days flat. Many thanks buddy. And many thanks to MG Harti- the Art Director who helped the idea come into reality by doing many iterations.

So here are the designs- (the copy/text and some elements are dummy).

Just from a design layout perspective- let me know which ones do you like the best?

You could comment here, or

Email me: shalabhpandey at gmail dotcom

DM or @ at Twitter : @shalabhpandey

The cover Designs for “Think About It”

GROUP 1:

Cover One

Cover 2

Cover 3

Cover 4

GROUP 2:

Cover 5

Cover 6

Cover 7

Cover 8

Comment here, or

Email me: shalabhpandey at gmail dotcom

DM or @ at Twitter : @shalabhpandey

Think About It

Shalabh

Recently I am seeing a lot of content on the web- by nouveau SEO guys, Public Relations professionals and even web developers on how PageRank might be a useless metric to look at.

Many people say that like Tehnorati Authority- PageRank is dead. Well frankly,  Technorati Authority diminished in importance to me some time back. Specially in the Asian context- even for English language blogs- it is not a very useful criterion to look at. Maybe that will change with their re-found focus, but as of now- it is clumsy, not widely adopted and just not suited for the Asian context.

However, PageRank is different.

It might have lost some importance – or rather, ‘corrected’ in perception over the past year. Even Google lately removed it from its list of webmaster tools- stating that people obsess over it too much (perhaps without understanding it much). Clear signals have been sent that PageRank does not singularly impact your SERPs (Search Rankings).

Understand that there are allegedly about 200+ parameters that Google takes into account while evaluating your search rankings. PageRank is one of them.

Then why do I think it is not entirely useless? First of all- it is important to understand in all its simplicity that PageRank defines the incoming links to a page. Every incoming link is a citation and the more the citations, better is the possibility that your content is relevant.

But more than, PageRank also assigns weightage to links.  All incoming links are not treated equal. The value of that link also depends on the Page Rank of that web page sending the  link itself.

Google says:

“PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance”

Explained more mathematically here and more in detail here:

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation ‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

“share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

So if you were a scammer- willing to put that effort into creating web pages pages having a high rank themselves, it might be too much work. And there is always the risk that sooner than later, it will be discovered. Even if it does not result in getting banned, it will have zero benefit at the minimum- for all that effort.

It is important to notice that there are other attributes that Google uses to identify relevance- interesting ones being  age of domains, IPs of incoming links (are they the same as your web site) , On page elements, etc. As I mentioned earlier- 200+ criterion.

PageRank does not seem to take into account anything else other than the number  and ‘weight-age’ of the incoming links. It clearly says that things like your content (and frequency of update etc) are not a part of Pagerank calculation. Of course these things matter for overall SERPs- but for PageRank calculation- they do not.

Similarly, there is evidence to say that a wikipedia or a dmoz, yahoo directory link or a .edu or .org domain inLink does not impact pageRank; contrary to popular opinion.  It does to your overall SERPs maybe- but not to PageRank.

So the thing worth keeping in mind: PageRank is not just a total count of incoming links (Yahoo incidentally is favored for a closer match to that count- amongst professionals)- but includes weightage of links too.

What’s more- PageRank is not a flat number of random ranking. The original score is corrected on a logarithmic scale to fit a scoring range of 0-10. This also brings to the forth- another interesting observation.

When comparing different pages on the web on the basis of PageRank, it is important to note that the ‘point’ difference is not simply the difference of the higher and the lower number. If you have a PageRank of 5- does not mean you are just, 1 point or 1%  or 10% better than someone with a PageRank 4- every percentage point implies a significant difference by itself. So a Site with PageRank of 5 will have significantly higher value than another one of say PageRank 3. And the one with PageRank7 will be significantly significantly higher than PageRank 4.

To me this metric imparts value to relevant content. Not just widely reached or widely linked back to- but I’m saying that every link does not have equal weightage. That itself is an important thing.

I agree that the criterion to impart weightage/value is not great- but at least it gives context relevance to the links. And even to those pages that are linking back to you.

What does that mean to you? Further explanation-

• If you get a linkback from a page that had PageRank 6 Vs a page that had PageRank 4- you get more weightage from the former link. Keeping in mind the next point-
• If you get linkback from a page with high pagerank but high number of outgoing links, the impact of each outgoing link diminishes in value.
  • So as an example- If you get links from a site with 100 Outgoing links and PageRank 6- Versus a site that had, say 10 outgoing links and PageRank 4, you will get more weightage from the latter

And worth repeating: PR alone is not the factor that will get you front page exposure; however, it does provide a measure of the value of your website. Some people (Google-Matt Cutts- Head of Webspam team himself) say that even if PR is not the only thing you have to worry about, it still determines how often and how deep google crawl your website for updates, which is important if you update your content often.

On the web today- one thing is clear- you cannot have obsessive focus on one metric or tool. In the state it is today, you need to consider multiple factors. And so you need to clearly understand those multiple factors.

Page Rank is one of them- and probably one of the most misunderstood.

Think about it

Shalabh

thumbnail: http://www.mobilestorm.com/seo-sem-online-marketing/does-googles-pagerank-really-count-anymore/

Larry and Sergey

These guys are the stuff dreams are made of. They ruled the world before thirty and double handedly (single handedly won’t be an appropriate phrase right?) altered the online advertising space.

For this company, at one time, normal was ordinary.Excellent was not good enough. And Extraordinary was default.

Buying a private Jet matching Air Force one wasn’t good enough. These guys had permission from NASA to use its landing strip. Now that is something.

Yes it is Larry Page and Sergey Brin- the founders of that Dream factory called Google.

As I always used to say- It is tough to form a company that hires its own celebrity chef. ( Google hired the chef of the rock band ‘Grateful Dead” once). But it is tougher to form a company that makes news when their menu changes. Or sweeps the press when the chef leaves.

Author- Richard L. Brandt

No these are not the facts Richard Brandt’s boook : “Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain” delves on. These are things dotcom mavens like me have professionally grown up experiencing.

Richard Brandt’s book is a different take on Google- and actually it is about it’s two young and talented founders from Stanford University- and what goes in their minds while deciding the future of not only their company, but decisions impacting the Internet itself.

The book hinges on the moral stance of the duo- and the “Don’t be evil” motto of Google.

Richard does succeed in painting a picture of the duo in your minds. They actually come across as aggressive, resolute (unyielding) and brilliant (obviously)- quite contrary to the warm smiling faces that one is used to seeing in pictures.

It is an easy read- one of the few books I finished in about 2 days- and a good read for anyone who is starting up- specially in the Internet industry.  These guys are icons and we needed to know what is happening in those sharp brains resting on the smiley faces.

Larry is the main strategist – with business acumen and practical drive, while Sergey is the primary technologist and idealist, with brilliant ideas and strong moral positions. But they work closely together- almost like complenentay halves of a single brain.

Many things struck me from the book-

• Like AdSense was not developed by Google. Why even the name “AdSense” was not by Google. And all the while I thought it was a nice name to match “AdWords’
• Like what the founders said on their hiring policies- they like someone with a “slight disdain for the impossible”. It struck me because I have been searching for a single line short but powerful explanation to the question people often ask me- What is Chasing The Storm about? Well, it is about “A slight disdain for the impossible”.
• Even Adwords might not have been an original idea. As a matter of fact, Google settled out of court with Overture with regards to a patents battle in 2004 in exchange of 2.7 million shares. But Google did fine tune and develop the product in a fantastic way.
• When Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo, Larry, Sergei and Eric Schmidt opposed the scenario- saying almost the same things- as I mentioned in this post of mine in May 2007 . (Being a bit pompous I know- but feel happy that the thinking is similar. So what- if one is writing a post in the middle of the night and the others are probably sipping martini on a private island?)
• OK, on that- another common thread- while most web watchers are betting on Augmented reality and brain scanning as the next thing on the Internet- I have often said one of the next big things (media wise) is probably Video- both on the web and digital rendering over the TV. Interactive TV with targeting and measurability rivaling the internet- and so on. Google has tied up with Echo Star- a company that makes cable set top boxes and is working towards  delivering a better system to achieve its goals
• Perhaps the best quote from the book: Entrepreneurship is a crime of passion. It requires motive, means and opportunity.
• The ratio of revenues per employee at $1 million each- is the highest in the technology world- Microsoft weighs at $700,000 Revenue per employee
  
• “Don’t be evil” is a phenomenally simple and yet powerful philosophy. Simple yet difficult to achieve. Simple yet difficult to live up with. And to me, it should be the mantra of every single person on earth.

There are too many things to mention from the book. At least more than a mere blog post can merit- for what it is worth.

Facts that I think went missing from the book:

• No mention of Sir Vincent Cerf- and what impact did he have in the shaping of the company or future goals. Richard talks about a whole host of people but leaves behind Cerf- popularly credited as the Father of the Internet, who is now the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Google has a coup with the most respect respected brains- Sir Cerf, Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian- Chief Economist- whose writings we have read while in college. (Yes I graduated in Economics and sucked at it – coming from a science background- the only thing I liked was statistics I think)

• The second thing that I found conspicuous by its absence is the skipping  of click fraud as a topic. I mean if we have chapter or two dedicated to Google consenting to China censoring - we have totally missed a big huge debate in the digital media industry. An issue that every client spending their millions and every small business spending their hard strapped funds is worried of.

Of course Google is doing all it can (we hear it all the time- and see the credits in our ad words accounts), but if there ever was an issue- on transparency and Don’t be evil- it is probably click fraud. This book could have been a good excuse to tell the story on what is being done and how.

In case you happen to buy and read the book, let me know some discussion points. Thanks to Christy from Penguin Group for arranging to send this over.

Sometimes my mind plays the Gemini tricks. Indecision. Yet sometimes I grant it the liberty to fly. Like when I am in one of those futuregazing whims.

Been observing the case of some niche services around Social Media offerings that have entered the market and got themselves flush with VC money. One cannot but wonder if they are riding the wave OR really have a solid ground OR are here for the taking (buyouts). Or worse, for the kill (low entry barriers by more established players).

Come to think of it. The web is becoming dangerously monopolistic. Or maybe cartel like. Or maybe we need to device a new term.

Where the big 5 or so players (across media/platform/services) take over anything with a probable potential. Like the lesser publicized acquisitions made by Amazon. Or in cases where they can’t, they decide to kill the infant in the cradle. By launching against their offerings with their own version- only with bigger and better resources.

Ironically, many a times, it might not be so evil as it sounds. Specially in cases where research has already been done, markets have already been explored and a solid product has already been delivered.

In such a scenario, if there is a new product in the market that sells due to package innovation, and makes money (and noise), there are obvious reasons (and lesser barriers) for the bigger brand to get a foot in that market’s door.

I talked about the lesser known case of Amazon acquisitions. Now take the more well known case of Google. Probably the most powerful force on the web- with its fingers in every pie and head in the rolling cheese.If it wanted, what are the new offerings it could eat up today- if it wanted to?

And Google is just an example. Though a strong contender to bulldoze through many niche and upcoming services, there are some services dangerously in Google terrain and so especially susceptible. I am listing three of those here.

Buzz monitoring/Social Conversations


• The PR folks have ruled and brought about the Web 2.o communications revolution, according to me. And they probably brought with them this entire idea that people are talking about brands in online various online forums. “If you could track down how many events for discussion around your brand are taking place- it would give you unprecedented tracking abilities”.
• Sure enough- many companies including traditional research agencies to web security agencies to nimble programming-business brains- sensed the opportunity and launched products that are being sold and used by many today.
• Companies- the likes of Google- have been delivering some of these services since ages.  Google has services like Alerts, news, Blog search, maps and local search, trends, insights and now the likes of Video insights. These products are free to use.
• So if there are free products, why would someone pay? The common contention for going to paid services is that they have less noise and could dig deep into forums etc- sections not indexed well by Google (or others) Other reasons listed here . Alongside others contend that the tools don’t matter, efforts do.
  

The question then is- how much does it take Google to scale up/package? It already has the reach and the infrastructure. Not to mention the products.

Sentiment tracking/Social conversation Search


• This is another differentiation by the niche service providers. While the likes of Google could provide instances, how would you know their relevance and context? Enter Sentiment tracking- where these companies identify positive or negative references in context of your brand
• How do they do that? Many ways- including ‘semantic’ methods to a mix of human-machine analysis.
• Again, the likes of Google have been doing this research for ages now. If they want to enter this space, will they hesitate?

Examples of both buzz/sentiment (and others like influencer tracking etc) are Radian6, Buzzmetrics/Nielsen Blogpulse, Techrigy, Samepoint, jamieQ, CC, Brandtology- just a few that are top of my mind


Enterprise Group Collaboration systems

• There has been a lot of talk around Social Media-tizing the organisation. Inspite of the fact that many group collaboration systems have been around since ages, like (Zoho or webex), the social media element was missing. Of course they are charged for, or at best freemium.
  
• So smart entrepreneurs grabbed a chance at it- and developed products that employees could use for better project management efficiencies (like Yammer, or SocialWok- a good Asian alternative) and where employees could co-ordinate via tweets 0r other popular social media tools

Google has been delivering some good products around the enterprise space. Their offerings on emails on custom domains etc have been quite successful. Similarly Yahoo with small biz solutions. Lately with the demonstrations of Google wave, it becomes clear that the likelihood of Google entering this space is not a remote concept to say the least.


Real time search

• This is where the big fight is. Though many smaller players are in the fray, the frenzy of the big guys is what makes this a different category
• Another reason that niche conversation tracking tout- real time search for “in time crisis management”- is where the big guys have already taken big steps

Facebook and Twitter are in the fray, with Google already working on some solutions in this area (Google Caffeine)

• This is the area where the fight is concentrated right now
• Latest developments like Facebook buying FriendFeed might have future impact in this domain
• On Facebook’s search capabilities, Mashable reports: While the new Facebook Search only launched this week, the new real-time search platform can search far more than status updates. With access to 250+ million users, the world’s largest social network can tap into photos, links, events, apps, and more for its new search engine.

Long post. I will try to highlight in the next post why historical evidence proves it might not be such a bad thing for the niche players.

Shalabh Pandey

(twitter.com/shalabhpandey)

Thumbnail courtsey : http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkiepinkie_infinity/2658569216/sizes/m/

As mentioned in a previous post, I attended the Search Engine Marketing Expo in Singapore.

It was a good insight- interesting questions raised and some interesting sessions conducted. But I could see that many service providers were still not at complete terms with the unique nuances of the Asian region and even search engine marketing issues. Or maybe they did not come across like that.

I have always maintained that what this market needs is evangelists and champions- with experience in not only the discipline but also knowledge within the region. The international companies have more experience- and once they get good people within the region, they stand a better chance at succeding in the market- and free markets imply they should- if they deliver a better package

Will summarize the learnings and some photos and slides from the conference:

The first day had interesting sessions on:

• SEM for the CEO: By Gillian Muessig of SEOMOz
  • Topline overview. Good but stats were outdated- recent stats could have added a great deal to the presentation
• Measuring offline success of Search Marketing: Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media
  • Addressed the common issues that marketers face. I get this question all the time from CEOs, product managers and brand managers- how could we attribute offline sales to online and vice versa. Having actually implemented some of this stuff, I know that there are some things that work better than others- and great to see that International counterparts in more advanced markets also had similar concepts
• Reporting and performance Metrics for the boss: Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal
  • Good and insightful for a session addressing decision makers and Search metrics and reporting professionals. More like web anlaytics 101 but presented well. Key takeout- put data in context and always balance data with the right counterpart.

Gillian from SEO Moz

• An interesting session was the end of the day Site clinic- where the panel took site addresses from people and briefly discussed what could they improve in their sites to make them more SEO (and user) friendly

Day 2 Search Engine Bootcamp

I had decided to attend Search Engine Optimization/SEO sessions but ended up splitting my time with Paid Search sessions.

Michael Motherwell from MMIT at Search Marketing Singapore Expo on Web 2.0 and Search Engine Optimization. I felt a lot more could be covered in this session on topics like- How to utilize Social Media and Web 2.0 for search Engine Optimization OR more specific issues like ‘how to make your digital assets like video, articles, press releases, audio content etc work for you’- could have been more interesting.

Good slide from Gillian of SEoMoz on Search Engine Friendly Web design

Cindy Krum from Rank-mobile, Gillian from SEoMoz and Wayne Eo from OOM

Goal of keyword research- One good slide

In case you are looking for Search Engine Marketing agency from Singapore or South east Asia, let me know

Attending SMX Singpaore on the 2nd and 3rd of July 2009.

Update here on the proceeding and pictures

Seems like expos and events are getting more and more niche. Though there are bigger ones like Ad Tech that could have been called ‘niche’ a few years back; they now cover a broad spectrum of digital marketing streams.

I attend many events- across all domains but specially in the field of marketing/advertising/digital marketing/technology and internet within Asia- and though many invite me due to my previous stints- only to back off hearing that I no longer work with an agency (like the iMediaConnection summit in Phuket) ; many others also call me out of either having known me, trusting my take on some of the proceedings and many others due to Chasing The Storm.

One such event that I am attending soon is the SMX Singapore.

Search Engine Marketing has been close to me- having executed millions of dollars worth of campaigns for various blue chip clients in both Pay Per Click and Search Optimization campaigns.

I think it is a great leveler where  a relatively small player could take a big giant head on with almost equal chances of acquiring a customer.

Hope to learn from the event and contribute.

I recently answered two questions with regards to Digital Advertising/Digital Marketing/Social Media Marketing in Asia- and as usual, thought of sharing with you. The good thing this way is that even though the answers are spontaneous, they do give a chance to spread further and open newer discussions. Of course this blog also serves as a bucket of ideas and reference points (for me and hopefully for you) and documenting these questions and answers helps in many ways.

So here they are:

Question 1) Can only large corporations leverage the Social Networking platform or small companies, as well?

No doubt Social Media Marketing (as it is called) is quite labour, time and expertise intensive. However, it is just that the ‘big’ names get more publicity- sometimes because of the ‘familiar brand’ factor and sometimes as a stamp to the success or legitimacy of this stream of this marketing (“If the big guys have started getting into it, it must be working really well”).

Actually, till sometime back, the debate was quite the opposite- is Social Media Marketing only good for small brands- was the question. I have seen businesses from all categories- from really small units (cyber cafes, blogshops) to medium size early stage businesses (read zappos) to really big ones (read Dell, Skittles, P&G, HP) to people (Obama’s legendary use and follow by all political leaders across the world- including now India’s Advani and others) and even rock stars (nine inch nails, Britney). There are numerous cases of Asian brands- many in Singapore, Malaysia, South east Asia and India that are using this medium with good results. Though I must admit- we in Asia tend to get inspired a whole lot by our Western counterparts when it comes to Social Media Marketing in particular and Digital marketing in general.

Net Net, the scale (of Social Media audience participation) is huge, whether Singapore or elsewhere and tha audience is quite heterogeneous. The spirit of collaborative/participative marketing and platforms and channels galore- make it an ideal launchpad for any business.

Question 2) What single Internet technology is making the biggest impact in the marketing and advertising industry and why?
If Google, then what Internet technology could possibly unseat Google in the future

By “making an impact” I think what is meant is ‘buzz’ within the marketing community.

There are too many things as of now actually- some directly marketing related and some with derived uses for marketing-from cloud computing to semantic web. But if I had to pinpoint to one stream- that is here and now, then (at the cost of sounding cliched) I would say something that is being referred to as “Social Media”- even though it is yet unproven for “advertising” there is a huge buzz around collaborative/participative/proactive marketing lately. Though WoM (Word of Mouth marketing) has been around for ages, there is a new found interest in this field kindled by the waves that this channel is creating. Even if it sounds hyped by now, many organizations have not been able to crack it (yet) and with that respect, it is still pretty new.

What is fantastic about this is that applications could be built around existing platforms to give unprecedented insights to marketers basis which marketing campaigns are built. The insights and learning from this media could be used across channels- including paid search.

Another trend is the marketing fraternity’s increasing understanding that all platforms or channels have impact on each other and cross media conjunction can heighten impact of a singular channel. I have seen organizations buying Paid Search to increase their Twitter followers for example. It is already proven that TV ads drive more searches and sooner or later there will be studies done on how Social Media Marketing campaigns can increase your display advertising RoIs.
Apart from constant fascination with future gazing, marketers are also realizing that it is important to harness the latest but “here and present” stuff.

So thats it- two relevant questions and my answers.

I know Nick since some time now. He has sharp wit and a distinct intellect. When Nick started off his venture “ThirdSpace“- a networking hub for the digital advertising fraternity in Asia Pacific, I promised to tell (my part of) the world about it.

And here it is. In the “brainstorm” feature that was introduced here sometime back, we had featured some upcoming stars: TAWA, MMA Asia, and now, very appropriately, in the third feature of the seriatim- ThirdSpace. In Nick’s words: Third Space Consulting is a networking hub for independent interactive expertise in Asia Pacific. We support their business and drive commercial success by offering an authoritative brand, research, marketing and skills development services.

Frankly, The Brainstorm actually starts post this discussion- when you put in your comments, ask questions and maybe give a few answers yourself. Maybe I need a podcast or vodcast, but anyhow, this makes for a very interesting read:

Nick

Shalabh: Wish you the very best of luck. I’m sure Third Space Asia is going to shape up great.

Now, since the new year has just begun, here is a customary yet important discussion:

What are the top 5 online advertising/online marketing trends for 2009- specially for Asia Pacific?

Nick Fawbert: We need to recognize that the Asia Pacific market is evolving independently of the global scene. We start from a lower base, and limited investment can only support a slower pace of change. International pundits hype Web 2.0, Social Media, Mobile and sophisticated consumer targeting; however if we’re honest about the APAC digital industry then for most regional marketers these issues are being looked at down the wrong end of a very long telescope.

We need to recognise that commerce here is conservative, and that in the words of Deng Xiaoping we’re “crossing the river by feeling the stones”.

So for APac 2009 digital marketing trends, we need to look to the UK in 2003 and the US in 2001. For cash strapped regional marketers searching for ROI models that satisfy Finance Directors, digital is likely to be raising its head for the first time. This would make my trends dull but worthwhile:

• A doubling of proportion of the top 500 regional advertisers who have a viable online marketing and distribution presence (in my view from 20% to 40%)
• A dramatic increase in the use of Search as a marketing tool, manifesting itself in improved search results and increase keyword prices
• A tighter focus on campaign analytics and ROI for online display campaigns, and an associated rise in affiliate sites
• A doubling of digital’s share of the marketing spend to 4%

Shalabh: Quite pragmatic and I agree with most- The number of regional (and even local country) advertisers going up; widespread and better use if search marketing- we’ve already seen Keyword prices getting very high since last year, (specially on Google); and the digital media share of ad spend in APAC. To add, I think the focus on analytics will be higher too- not just from a campaign/media perspective- but even ‘client’/webanalytics side. Brands could start finding value in even hiring specialist staff for analytics (and not leave it to the site admin/webmaster). Another trend I think could become big is the rise in spending in what is referred to as “The Social Media”.

Since this topic was touched upon in the previous point (…International pundits hype web 2.0 and social media…), it’d be interesting to discuss this in detail: Marketers seem to be rediscovering what is being referred to ‘Social Media’: The substance, the hype and the trend- specially in Asia.

Nick Fawbert: I don’t believe that social media has a relationship with the regional marketing industry at present, let alone a hype. Other than SMEs running PPC campaigns on Facebook, social networking sites seem to be normally no more than bit players on display advertising schedules.

I haven’t seen evidence that corporate profiles receive much traffic, and I’m not sure that modern media-savvy audiences really want to engage in conversations with their brands, they have better things to do.

There are clear benefits to brand management strategies, to keep an eye on consumer views and discussions of products in social areas and where possible to address concerns and invite consumers to express their views and respond to them. I feel that this would entail a move away from perceptions of a brand as an authority to being a part of the consumer’s ‘team’, but I consider this to be an almost impossible task for global corporate to achieve whilst retaining a cohesive and consistent message.

I think that the landscape is unnecessarily blurred by social concepts such as twitter. As individuals we employ many coping strategies to edit our interface with the rest of the world into manageable chunks – we zone out the chatter of fellow restaurant guests for example.

There’s sound reasons for doing this, and we’d go nuts otherwise. It’s interesting that twitter allowed us to eavesdrop on the thoughts of Mumbai residents in the recent tragic attacks there, but if we’re honest it was not particularly illuminating. This isn’t to suggest people won’t post on things like twitter or their Facebook status, as everyone likes to talk about themselves: twitter’s like a social event where everyone’s talking and no-one’s listening. I simply don’t think that sufficient numbers will read it. Since this is a marketing cornerstone, it’s a non starter.

Either way, for APac this isn’t even on the horizon.

Shalabh: Whew! Strong views. I have strong views on this myself, but somewhat to the contrary.

I think it is time that the way marketing is conducted as “business as usual” (centered around media trading- buying, selling, ad exposure, inventories, negotiations et al) changes a bit. And adds another element to it. More intelligently. More subtly. And that is best achieved today, by the intelligent use of Social Media. I am imagining that zoning out of restaurant chatter similar to zoning out a TV commercial or even (devil be damned! I never imagined I would say this)- a banner ad? Different platform. Similar challenges.

Even for APAC, now that some numbers have started coming in, it seems very promising. Asia boasts the fastest growing social networking and social media market on the planet. Figures say that in China alone, the share of marketing spending on Social Media is about 20% of all digital marketing spending. Even if that is exaggerated (that implies about $280 million being spent in China alone), in contrast, an emarketer report says- in Asia, social media advertising might be worth $250 million plus this year. This report is limited by its classification of social netowrks and the platforms, and therefore represents a small proportion. Hence settling for somewhere in between, I think this market is going to be significantly large this year onwards in Asia- even if we exclude Australia, Korea and Japan- as they have been significantly ahead than other countries in Asia digitally.

But then again, let us change the topic and come to the next point:

In one of my earlier posts, I wondered if there is pervasive Americanization/westermization of thought leadership when it comes to the Internet. I wondered if Asia needed to produce some thought leaders in this respect. I get some emails on that post from time to time, and I think will be relevant to discuss here as well- specially since you have had experience in working in the UK and then for many years in Asia. What are your thoughts about it?

Nick Fawbert: I don’t believe that America has thought leadership, I simply think that it is supporting sufficient revenues to allocate investment to R&D projects. The majority of successful ideas on the internet are both simple and uninspired. Ten million people would have independently come to the conclusion that social networking and blogging are useful implementations of online technology, but someone had to pay for server time.

Facebook for example was neither ingenious nor original, it lucked out in that US students like to bask in the reflected glory of an ivy-league university social group. Anything it’s done since has really been tweaking.

Shalabh: Small businesses are increasingly utilising the internet, yet many feel flustered about where to start, and what are the most important channels that they should concentrate on. Hat tips for 2009 (and beyond)?

Nick Fawbert: First a viable online presence, and then a search strategy to bring customers easily to your door.

Search should always be first in the schedule, as it brings your most productive customers to you:  people who are already in the market for your product.

Shalabh: That was short and pragmatic.Utilizing search effectively can bring significant enhancements to the RoI.

To add (and at the risk of sounding a social media junkie) I think small businesses (and large ones too) can utilize Social Platforms to market themselves as a low cost yet effective instrument.

Not to mention, a good social media campaign can boost your search (and other advertising) results.

Shalabh: That brings me to the last point. Agencies are extrememly important when it comes to marketing. Yet many, inspite of all their earnestness, have been struggling to establish a framework for integrating digital marketing with their offerings. Why is it that some agencies have failed repeatedly and what is the right paradigm?

Nick Fawbert: APac agencies lack sufficient investment from their clients in online solutions to support the expense of bringing localised sector experts to bear in sufficient numbers. It’s not a new challenge, the same thing applied in the UK market before 2004 and the US market pre 2003. The consequence was the stellar rise of online dedicated agencies such as i-Level in the UK who derived the necessary revenue by dealing with much larger numbers of clients than a typical media agency, but dealing only with their online solutions. The market in APac is ripe for this.

Shalabh: Agreed. I see the ‘forward looking’ clients taking advantage of niche agencies. Those that experts in a vertical- like search, direct response or specialist Social media marketing firms. At least for the time being till the bigger agencies crack the code and consolidate or realign.

With that, the actual Brainstorm for this post begins- with you- do you have a points of view on this? Do you feel about certain things said here?

thumbnail: Flickr

If you are a small business, many a times you might have faced this issue of tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. Now, the biggies can afford to use DoubleClick, Eyeblaster or any of those expensive ad serving companies, but really, most SMEs cannot. And frankly, for many marketing campaigns, they need not. Not after you have used this tool.

If you do initiate some online campaigns to promote your stuff, but are concerned about tracking the effectiveness of those campaigns- specially, say, email marketing campaigns, conversions from any link building exchange initiatives you might have done, or even adding extra tracking layer for SEM campaigns- worry no more. You can use this basic, simple, yet effective campaign tracking tool. And I’ll tell you what- if you want, and are creative about it, you can even track your offline (physical) marketing campaigns.

Interested? Read on. One caveat though. This works if you use Google Analytics (GA) as your web analytics tool. Not too much of a problem I presume- as GA is free and going by the success of it, it is likely that you’d be using this any which ways. In case you do not, I recommend that you do. (No- not getting paid to say this).

To access the tool, click on the link: ChasingTheStorm campaign tracking tool

It is a Google Docs spreadsheet- so you can log in using your Google ID, export the sheet in excel or spreadsheet, follow some simple instructions- and there you go.

What are the ways you can use this (there could be many ingenious uses that you can use this for- just a few that I use them for):

• You could insert it as links in your email newsletter- and track not only one link- but use to track what call to action drives most traffic to your website
  If you track conversions, you could attribute this to conversions as well
• You could use this to update your status messages on your social network- and track people coming to the site from your social network
• You could even use it in your offline campaign- use URL shortening using a web service- and put the URL in your offline DM or newspaper classifieds ad. Track how many people visit your website after seeing this ad. Cool eh?
• Any other uses that you could think of? Use the tool and let me know some other uses or suggest me changes, if any

Understanding the working:

GA can track campaigns by identifying variables associated with that campaign. These variables are assigned by you- to generate a unique “identifier” hyperlink and help to understand the source of clicks to your website.

For example, if you include links to your website in an email newsletter, you can attach variables at the end of each link. When a user clicks on a link, your reports will show you on which link he clicked, as well as which newsletter contained that link.

Properly tagging your links will ensure that your reports include useful information about your marketing efforts.

When you click on the link above, you will get a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is all you need to generate bulk tags for tracking your marketing campaigns. In the spreadsheet tool, I have explained with examples from ChasingTheStorm campaigns. You can delete the data except that in the last cell (redirect URL) and generate your own tag.

I have just formalized the tool, though details can be found at Google Learning Center. Some parts are explained very well there, hence I have picked some parts, and simplified others to make it more understandable.

Essentially the tag is generated basis some variables that you- the marketer inputs. There are 5 campaign variables that you need to understand(and one URL cell):

• Name (What is termed as “campaign” in the sheet)
• Source
• Medium
• Content
• Term

• Name/campaign : With this variable you can track the different advertising campaigns or product promotions that your business creates. I have mentioned this as Campaign in the sheet- is more explicit. AdWords also allows auto tagging, where this field refers the name given to the originating AdWords Campaign.

• Source : Visitors to your website must come from somewhere. That is, each referral to a website has an origin, or Source . Examples of sources are the Google search engine, an email newsletter, or a referring web site. There may be several Sources for each campaign. For example, the “5 star Hotel in Singapore” is advertised in both an email newsletter and a banner ad. In this case, both “newsletter” and “banner ad” would be possible Sources. For AdWords auto-tagged accounts, the Source variable could be “Google”. I have, in my example, used some publications which I write for and hence you will see names like “thinking aloud” and “Community 2.0″ for source.

• Medium : Medium gives depth to the source, and helps to ‘qualify’ it. Together, the Source and Medium provide specific information about the origin of a referral. For example, if the Source is “Google,” the medium might be “CPC,” indicating a sponsored link. In the case of a “newsletter” Source, examples of Medium can be  “email” For AdWords auto-tagged accounts, the medium variable is “CPC.” In my example, I usedan identifier according to the content eg “twitterlink” – when I view the report, it could give me a snapshot indication (eg ThnkingAloud Twitterlink= 1000 visits)

• Content : The Content variable indicates which version of an ad on which a visitor clicked. Labeling your content versions allows you to determine which one is most effective at attracting profitable leads. For example, if you had two versions of a banner ad, you could use the Content variable to identify which one is bringing more visits to your site. For AdWords auto-tagged accounts, the Content variable is the first line of the originating advertisement’s ad text.

Some people could argue that I could have used ‘content’ and ‘medium’ interchangeably. Well, it helped me understand reports better- though you are free to follow convention. And frankly, the lines blur somewhere, so you could use according to the reporting structure you prefer. For me, practical supersedes theory.

• Term : I placed three links in my article and defined them by their names/terms. While using this for an adwords camaign, you could use this as the keyword that a user could type in.  For example, a link in a cost-per-click (CPC) ad would be tagged with the Term that triggered the ad.

How to view reports in GA:

There are several reports that allow you to view traffic from tagged initiatives (links which you have tagged with campaign variables).

1) On the left hand side, go to “Traffic Sources” report > Traffic Sources section.  It shows all the traffic that comes to your site including traffic from tagged links.

By default, it sorts the traffic by Source and Medium together, but you can use the ‘Show’ pulldown menu to organize the traffic by Source or Medium. Your tagged sources and mediums will be included in this list.

2) Traffic sources > Ad version :To see your traffic sorted according to Content

3) Traffic sources > campaigns report. To see your tagged campaigns. This report will typically list your AdWords campaigns, your tagged campaigns, and “(not set)” traffic that is not associated with any campaign.

So there it is. Do let me know if you used this tool or you found this tool effective, or any tips if you’d like to suggest to improve this tool.

Cheers!

thumbnail courtsey: http://www.addletters.com/index.php
Disclaimer: I, or ChasingTheStorm.com do not claim any liability for this tool. Please use at your own discretion.

I had this blog of mine for the longest time and recently started to optimize it in a bid to re-initiate and brush up my SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) skills. This was a topic of interest some 6-8 years ago and I wanted to test and see if things have changed drastically since then.

I was pleasantly thrilled to see Google love for my blog- as a matter of fact Google ranked my blog at number 2 position globally for “digital media trends asia” AND 4th position globally as an authority on “digital trends in Asia”. The one above me is a harvard university document. Not bad- eh?

Digital Media Trends Asia

I have two blogs that I author- one on the blogger platform and one on wordpress. I needed to see which one gets more Google Love- slightly difficult and maybe not a ‘control’ assessment- as one is on general interest topics and this one on digital marketing/ integrated marketing communications.

Of course, effort that was put into making this popular, but by and large this cries out loud- about the power of relevancy and recency of content, and the weightage that intelligent search engines attribute to these parameters.

My blog on Digital Media trends in Asia is also ranked in the first page results on Yahoo and number 2 on AOL! That’s pretty awsome considering it is such a widely watched and researched and written about topic. What about MSN? Well, Windows Live Search does not seem to love wordpress it seems- try it if you want- quite strange- it does index the site but does not seem to favour it- as a matter of fact- it seems to give more authority to custom domains or maybe even not favor user generated content sites like wordpress! Remains to be researched properly, but for me, no harm done as rest of the top search engines do give me their love- and I ain’t greedy in love- threesome will do. Thank you.

My main site shalabhpandey is not ranked so high on these keyphrases yet- I think it will always be a challenge- Why? more on that some other time- so many things, so little time- what’s a guy to do! Ahem!!

Comscore says, there are more than 60 billion searches conducted worldwide in any given month. (OK- they said this for Aug 2007, but the numbers can only go up right?)

An interesting and self sufficient study in itself- there are interesting takes on the growing influence of APAC users in search. I did a quick analysis on the various regions:

APAC therefore, accounts for more than 1/3 of both total number of searchers and total searches worldwide! What makes it interesting is that though the overall numbers are high, the number of searches conducted per unique searcher are much higher in Europe- and Latin Americans love to search it seems (around a 100 per month!). The overall numbers are not very surprising I guess. Inspite of the limited online penetration in Asia- the absolute numbers of people online are very high. 

Talking of absolute numbers, here’s the table for the absolute numbers of region wise search consumption:

Now I thought this could make one do some basic extrapolations on what could be the search market size in Asia- there are various resources available – but mostly to do with US and European markets. It must be something to do with my bad keyword search skills,  but I haven’t really come across some good numbers for the APAC Search market. There is some stuff on the China market- expounding the market size that Baidu corners, or even some India centric numbers (and then some for Australia and usage in Japan and Korea) but consolidated numbers are rare to find. This leaves the smaller markets like South East Asia and parts of North Asia rather in the lurch. Not surprisingly, because online marketing is rather in infancy and the size perhaps too small to even merit an extensive research.

But basis these tables and using other surveys + making some (convenient) assumptions, one should come close to judging the market size.

There are some surprising results though if we combine another research and our own campaign management experience: emarketer claims in the US, search marketing accounted for 8.6 billion USD:

Now, if you do some calculations basis assumptions like 100% of all searches in US run paid sponsored links, the dollar numbers somehow don’t match. If you take an average of say 0.2% CTR on all searches and a CPC of $2, the total market size North + lat Am comes to just about a billion USD ( I know assumptions are not completely right in that all search cannot be monetized etc but again, help in putting a perspective- I have kept differentiated CTRs and CPCs across though). Does that mean emarketer includes contextual and SEO in Search Marketing revenues? AND if so, are contextual ads (ad sense mostly) and SEO worth apprx 7 billion USD?

Here’s the ‘table of assumptions’ and deribation of dollar numbers:

Which means keyword-search marketing should be about 12%-13% of overall marcom dollars spent on search. Something wrong here- on the same basis, APAC, with a 0.3% CTR and 1 USD CPC comes to around 700 mill USD. But just Australia should be around 480 mill and China should be around 500 mill USD.

I might have been conservative in some numbers- but even doubling the CPC will not help us match the surveys. Maybe the CPCs for countries like Australia/Japan/Korea are  much higher. Another thing to be noted is that both in Japan and Korea, Google is not number one, (like China)- so can the total search traffic from APAC even higher than touted by Comscore? (Comscore used top 50 search properties worldwide for their survey- not sure if Naver or Yahoo Japan figures in their top 50 list)

Well, let me figure that out and post in my next blog.