Sharing my talk which I delivered at OMCAR 2009 – The Online Marketing Summit, New Delhi. I am glad to get the feedback that the talk was well received and thanks to all the people who shared their feedback!
This session was blogged LIVE by: Deepanwita Chatterjee, from team OMShare.
Post tea, peppered with some avid networking, we gather for the next session, ‘Making SEO, PPC, SMM & Mobile Work Together’, presented by Mahesh Murthy, CEO Pinstorm and Paritosh Sharma, (SMM Evangelist, OMLogic). I am LIVE Blogging the session and I can’t help notice the excitement that has been generated in the room at the announcement of the session
Paritosh starts the session by explaining that he will be discussing his views about SMM and how business can benefit from SMM.
He starts by displaying a slide with a picture of a colorful grocery store with blue and red boxes.
I specially like the story telling method by which he makes his point. He says that once he went to buy a product of his favorite brand and that brand was not available so he had to settle down for his second favorite brand. So inspite of being a brand loyalist he had to settle with his second choice.
SMM can be explained in two words – message and media.
Paritosh makes the session very lively by citing an example of advertising for a bicycle manufacturer. He quotes 3 example campaigns
- A description of the specifics of the bicycle
- A picture of the bicycle
- A video of a woman riding a cycle showing how easy to ride
No need to mention the third method clicked. What really worked is the content, the message, and the media.
He cites another example of the inventor of sliced bread. The person patented it, advertised it still it didn’t catch up for 15 years. Another bread manufacturer came along and packaged the sliced bread in the right manner and it appealed to the user.
He rightly makes a point that there is no single rule for marketing. Advertising on SlideShare may work for a business and YouTube for another. It is important to understand the needs of the client and the client’s client.
He is explaining that the way to go about it is to create a message and target it to the right set of consumers.
He goes on to cite another example which triggers a lot of laughter – TataSky did an adult site, the moment anybody clicks on the site the questions like age and gender comes up which create the impression of the contents within. But the moment you click it it says ‘dude a paap hai’. The campaign sure has been done in a very witty manner which creates a huge recall value.
He also cites the example of jaagore.com and the ‘pappu pass ho gaya’ campaigns about which we all are well aware of. Both the campaigns and the were huge successes and the radio campaign ‘dot is hot’ was a runaway success as well. Jagore.com was a purely online site, and the message ‘chai peke jaago’ was very intelligently done. Kudos to the tata guys!
Television is a passe. There was a time people bought advertising space. But now people are spending more time on the internet on Orkuts and FaceBooks.
The audience silently agrees to that.
Paritosh says that SMM is more about customizing, customizing according to the needs of the customers.
He goes on to elaborate the four steps of creating a campaign.
The first step is to listen and learn. Even the customer is not clear about what he wants from SMM.
The second step is to audit and analyze the customer’s business model, whether SMM will be good or PPC.
The third step is to develop and test.
The fourth step is to execute and monitor. Metrics are difficult in SMM. But it is not that difficult if you understand the business perspective of the client. And till the time there is no metrics, one can always customize metrics for the clients.
He adds
Position your brand right. Do it with the right medium and to the relevant section of the audience online. And that’s where the PPC and SEO’s come into action.
He is now telling us about Skittles where every page is a social media, on one page there is twitter, on another YouTube and FaceBook on yet another. There is nothing good or bad it is about.
He then shares about Webchutney.com. On the home page, there are two tabs saying ‘I have 5 mins’ , and ‘I have plenty of time’, clicking on either takes the user to separate pages. He cites an example that if one sees a YouTube video of a bicycle gear that she likes and on clicking on it she is taken to the home page of the bicycle website, then one wouldn’t be too happy about it. The concept of separate landing works. I can’t help thinking that yes, that has happened to me many times!
He makes a point by reiterating that markets have evolved overtime and its time that one starts marketing to the innovators and early adopters. They are the ones which will take to your product and will do a much better viral campaign on the internet rather than the late adopters.
You have a great product…. You have identified the target market…
and people are talking about u….. and before the fizz goes out, market it…
Paritosh wraps up the session saying
The riskiest thing that you can do for your brand is to be safe.
Even if anybody writes anything bad about your brand, one can be alerted by a google alert and can pacify them.
Thanks for the useful insights Paritosh, it was great listening to you.
One of the most interesting sessions I have blogged. Thanks Paritosh
Thanks Deepanwita for blogging the session for me 
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Okay, so after a sumptuous lunch and networking around with people, I must say I have connected with some pretty young and amazing entrepreneurs. Good to be connecting with people with similar interests and background
And now we have the session being led by Jonathan, post lunch and the room is full of people enthused!
So, we start by discussing User centered Design and the User Centered Design process. I can very well see the interest level rising in the room. People are now coming up with queries related to their sites and other queries on how to really design according to the user, how to keep your design centered around the users psyche. I know of a few people in this room who have still not launched their sites, and I think this discussion would be of high value!!
What focus groups wont tell you?
Jonathan raises an intriguing point for the audience to comment upon, that is what’s there, that a focus group meeting won’t ever tell you, there are various viewpoints here, and Jonathan answers:
Well, what they wont tell you is whether someone would buy your site/product or not!
Usability Test happening LIVE
So now we are looking at a Usability testing happening LIVE on a web site hotelly.com. We have a participant who has not seen the site before and he would now be interacting with the site LIVE. So we are looking at the home page and asking the participant that what does the web site does? Well looking at the home page, you could not even realize there is a scroll!
The site is being analyzed with huge insights for the girl who represented hotelly at the workshop. I can see people in the room eager to share their inputs on the topic, but what I think is, we have this habit of acting as if we are the experts and we know it all, and that is what is happening in the room. There are all sorts of comments flying around, I personally feel hotelly guys have an amazing content value. The site is content rich, its just that they are not being able to leverage upon the content. I would advice hotelly on:
- Branding and Positioning their content right
And now we have a scenario by Neha, given to the participant leading the charge, “your family is going to London and you visit this web site and you want to compare the prices of the various hotels. What would you do at this website?”
So the guy is pretty confused and is not able to understand how to really navigate through the site. Okay so we are pretty much over with the test and wallah, we still are not very clear about the site. And now Jonathan is talking about how to define your target market in terms of sites who are in the recruitment space.
We pay people to get the do this research for us. But we do it keeping the task in mind and we track what the person is doing and whether he/she has completed the task or not.
Why does Motorola puts the alarm function under the settings option?
So after a brief tea session we have an exercise which tells you about how to really use persona as a technique and create a solid site map, creating a sense of priority from the content elements that you have for your web site. Jonathan says it’s a very powerful thing as far as SEO for your site is concerned and also really fasten your goto market strategies with a beta phase for your site.
I don’t mind how many clicks do you want me to do, till the time they are mindless clicks
Earlier the home page used to be the main navigation page for any website, but now due to Google we can land up in internal pages as well. So we need to understand the navigation intuitiveness from a users perspective.
Seduction points while designing a site
Its not a bad idea in travel to really give a separate window to the users to cross sell. I would not open this information in a separate window though, answers Neha to a question raised by a member of the team makemytrip.com. The question was realted to the fact that at times travel sites give supporting extra information on a flight search as a new pop up/window opening. Is this the right approach?
Squint test
Whatever you see at the first go after you squint your eyes, well that is what your users will see 90% of the times
Provide a quick access point to the user: 10 second is the frustration limit.
I must confess, this was one activity in the workshop which I really found useful amongst others. Squinting your eyes really tells you what 90 per cent of users would see at the first go. Amazing results, I am taken aback!! I think this would really help many a people to define and refine their designs.
We are almost towards the end of the workshop now and Jonathan now shares attributes of a good search results page
- Position the best hits at the top
- Indicate the number of results
We are now almost at the close of the workshop and well, I found the entire workshop highly useful and my interaction with various participants has gotten me the same feedback. Majority of people said that it was amazingly simple a technique in which Neha shared thus making the entire topic of Design and UI easy to understand by the audience.
I would love more such workshops, probably more focused, with integrated product reviews, as to why does a product work and how does the message on it/shape/design/color/packaging affects the perception of the message by the end consumers.
We now have certificates being distributed to the participants and I appreciate, Neha writing and signing the certificates singularly herself.
The event was organized by : TiE New Delhi (The Indus Entrepreneurs)
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