Suhit Anantula's Bookmarks tagged marketing →  View Popular

If you are too lazy - and I know my audience well :P - basically do this:

1. get involved, read what's out there, source top bloggers, forums, bulletin boards, Twitterers, Digg fanatics and Facebook discussion groups - read and understand them.
2. create - or better yet, find - social media assets you didn't know you already had. Powerpoint presentations from the shareholder meeting? Put 'em up on slideshare. FAQ's and Customer Service Tip sheets? Put them in a wiki or a blog post. That sort of thing. Don't waste money on made-for-web 'viral' crap. It's useful, not buzzy stuff that social media wants.
3. Discuss - any campaign you create that is not discussed in social networks, doesn't exist.Make sure the tools for discussion exist, don't lock it down with pre-moderation and pdfs.
   
4. Promote - use distribution, not content networks for promotion. That would be Facebook, Digg and the like (you can't blog on those sites, they are not for Citizen Journalist, but for Citizen Editor). Better still, offer widgets for customer to customer promotion.
   
5. Measure, analyse, get your metrics. Which ones are meaningful? A top blogger blogging or a Facebook group discussing? Hits to

The report was prepared by VitalWave Consulting, a firm specializing in consulting and research for technology companies growing businesses in emerging markets. They performed a study in India, funded by Microsoft, on the TCO of computers deployed in schools. They built a model that took various factors into consideration when estimating the total cost of owning a computer over a period of time.

Purchase cost, maintenance, support, training, replacement cycle, and electricity cost are just a few of the elements they factored in. They looked at desktops, laptops, and ultra low-cost laptops like the XO and Intel’s Classmate PC. The report also compares the differences between TCO in India and TCO in a “global” model

A few years ago I stumbled across a fascinating website from a New Zealand gentleman called Sean D'Souza. His website offers another perspective on marketing from a psychological perspective.

One of the marketing techniques D'Souza promotes is the idea of the “Power of 3s”. It’s something I’ve never forgotten, and I try to integrate into my blog writing, week after week after week.

For some reason, our brains really love 3s – ABC, 123, three musketeers... you get the picture.

We understand and retain communications more readily when we’re fed three at a time. If you start to bombard people with, say, 10 marketing messages in a row, retention drops off significantly.

Acer has adopted a channel-only policy – it does not sell direct to end-users. This was a key factor in the rise of Compaq in the eighties and early nineties. But nowadays, in a maturing market, channel-only PC companies are as rare as hen’s teeth. In the developed world PC vendors make market, not resellers, and they are just as happy to sell direct, if the custom and the profit warrants it.

So Acer’s channel-only policy may be a throwback, but the policy is reaping dividends.

The company was early into notebooks and this is also paying off in a big way, especially in Europe, which accounts for about half of the company’s expected $20bn revs in 2008. That’s right, twenty billion dollars generated by 5,500 staff, flogging 30 million units through computer dealers and retailers. In the first half of the year, the company grew four times faster than the global market, thanks to acquisitions as much as organic growth.

Imagine you're trying to launch a new software product, book, web service, church, small business, social cause, consulting practice, school, podcast channel, rock band, whatever. The most important skill you need today is not fund-raising, financial management, or marketing. It's not knowledge management, IT, or human resources. It's not product design, usability, or just-in-time inventory.

The most important skill today is... teaching.

Whatever it is you're launching is probably not in short supply, and there's always someone who's doing it better, faster, and cheaper (or will be within weeks). Most of us authors, non-profit evangelists, indie software developers, small start-ups (the soon-to-be Fortune 5,000,000) can barely afford broadband let alone a "marketing/ad campaign". We can't hire a publicist. We aren't going to be on Oprah.

But you're not interested in using deception and bulls*** to manipulate someone into buying a product, membership, or idea that you don't believe in yourself. And that's your big advantage over even the biggest and best-funded competitors: your belief.

Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. While in the past, those who out-spent (on ads, and big promotions) would often win, that's becoming less and less true today for a lot of things--especially the things designed for a younger, more-likely-to-be-online user community.

Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don't need an ad campaign when they've got user evangelists doing what evangelists do... talking about their passion.

Individualization and customization are two other marketing buzzwords. You can now order regular M&M’s online with an image of your face on them. This enables you to eat yourself, so to speak, an act in which narcissism and individualization merge. Yum.

I’d say premiumization is a pretty good emblem for our 21st-century world. The growth of a global elite is accompanied by a hollowing out of the middle. The base of the social pyramid remains large. Staples like rice and corn still sell; superluxury water (whatever that may be) sells; stuff in the middle does less well. Countries like Mexico increasingly resemble two societies: enclaves of Santa Barbara surrounded by Santa Nada.

Did you get the drift? If you are a local search player - you know what sort of queries (and most importantly, category) you need to cater to?




Most importantly, you get an idea of the target geography and queries  - so define your strategy accordingly (i.e. you can always say Bangalore is hot and serve this market, or say Delhi is growing and serve that - point is that you can get a good idea about the market and top category keywords people are looking for.




Similarly, look at ‘hosting’ query::





• Kerala, Delhi and Karnataka top the chart.


• What are people looking for? web hosting, free hosting, etc.