Friday, November 14, 2008

New media means new ways of doing marketing

In this following writing piece I will have a look at the rapidly growing world of new media. Who are the ones constantly logging online to internet and using the new technologies? What kind of opportunities the new media has given to make online business? What kind of applications there exist and which are the successful ideas that have earned big profits for the inventors?

According to the internet usage statistics by June 2008 there are around 1,5 billion internet users worldwide. This is more than one-fifth of the world population. With just global digital divide between countries meaning great disparities in opportunities to access the internet affecting education and business prospective success and most of all getting information. The last eight years growth (305%) in internet users rate have made online community a strong marketplace to do business or make private connections.

Like the Google corporate information pages points out: “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But what is the business behind it? Company has to have resources to make investment on building new innovative applications and in these critical economy situations to survive. On the same page there is described the following “Google business is generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page.” As it may seem from Google`s development in mapping systems, social networks or as e-mail provider it is just an advertising company that gets 99% of its revenue from advertisements.

For companies one of the biggest internet advertisement vantage is the possibility to reach to the end potential consumers trough advanced targeting. This kind of advertisement is mostly used in socal communities. The customers profile can be created based on location, age, sex, education or by any other keyword. These advertisements can be directed straight to potentsial end consumers.

In August 26, 2005 Alex Tew, a student from England, launched a website called One Million dollar webpage. This wise mans idea made an internet site to sell image-based link were sold for US 1$ per pixel. With just half a year he had sold all 1 million pixels. Now after more than 3 years of existence the website it still has considerable amount of viewers.

One of the most widespread ways of making electronic business is to do e-mail marketing. An easiest way to make e-mail marketing is to announce a consumer game and for the bait promise attractive awards. People love free stuff and that is what the companies have done. Making a simple web page, putting a big award and letting the people to have a chance to win just by registrating to the contest and doubling ones odds when forwarding the link to friends. This causes message chain with lot of people receiving unwelcome e-mails. Also referred to as e-mail spam has been a big issue since mid on 90-s when the internet was opened to general public. Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group 2007 second quarter statistics show that over 85% of received e-mails are abusive. I used to receive e-mails in English from the category “adult/mature” but now more and more Estonian companies use e-mails as direct marketing. I am not sure if it is the declining economics situation or upcoming Christmas but most the advertisements look really awful, have no design or are just wrote in plain text. But overall it does not matter because the advertising message and product or service awareness has spread and most probably many of the e-mail receivers have made their next buy in based on this.

Because of complex bureaucracy and idiomaticalness of the market it has been hard to build up businesses in a foreign country. But why to make huge investments into furniture and goods, train and hire human recourse`s, pay high rent while you can make online business. This kind of business Recourse need much less money, the market can be bigger than the home market and with considerably lower expenses there can be made lot of sails. On customers prospective it is just perfect to be able to compare the prices, have variety of products to chose from and make a sale according to it. E-shops like Amazon, Zappos together with many others have been very successful. These shops big advantage is that they do not need to have “the real thing.” They can just have product sales advertisements that show which kind of goods brokers are they. While a purchase has been made they make the order from supplier and then forward it to end consumer. There is a technique called drop shipping where the product is forwarded from the wholesaler to customer without being in retailers warehouse.

It is fairly easy to build up e-shop but how to be well known and earn good profit. One way of making promoting activities for your company is to hire professional blogger. There are several ways on paying the bloggers. Pay based on number and length of posts, internal metrics or external metrics. These metrics can be the ground for success of a page. If your page has content-rich information then potential customers are more likely to become back. Pages that have bigger number of page view can have higher advertisement price rates. According to research firm TNS Emor Estonian weekly webpages visits statistics neti.ee , delfi.ee and postimees.ee take the first three positions. With the last two it is obvious how the advertisemnt profit is earned but the first page need to take more closer look. Even though it has just got one banner on the page there are other ways to advertise. One option is to buy keyword(s) and pop-out the banner when these reserved words or phrase are being searched. The most interesting part is that one can also reserve competitors companies names, trademarks or even slogans. It is very powerful way to steal customers over your competitors.

The politicians have used the new media opportunities to make their party more visible, gain support on among internet users or make propaganda against competitive parties. From one of the biggest Estonian political parties "Keskerakond" homapage has a link to a page "Play like Ansip" which is a rally game to ridicule the present prime minister of Estonia. The game is about being a prime minister and seeing how much "damage" you would cause being head of the country. Another example of anti-advertisement are called "Google Bombs". It is a method of linking one specific keyword into needed page. If one makes Google search to "masendav" which means “frustrating” in Estonian it gives on the result top 2 the web page of the Political party “Keskerakond.” Similar bloggers initiative made "Miserable failure" link to George Bush. By know Google have defused this last bomb together with an overall algorithm change but we can see that very easly someones company or persons identity can be ruined. The late Barack Obama U.S president elections victory is a clear example of the power of internet marketing and online public relations using new media applications. It has been even been called as the e-campaign of the decade. Like Adrian Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post has said in her interview, “when there had not been internet, Obama would not be the president. “ Obama`s team and fans spread his word through blogs, social networks in motion and pictures. One great example is the launch of webpage for everybody to create commercials about Obama`s support. He was able win the support of the young and mostly uninterested in politics voters who like to spend most of their time in internet or playing video games etc.

As can be seen from the examples I have pointed out above the new media success has defenetly helped to launch different applications and new ways to do business online. With the increase of the internet users this community will become even stronger medium where people are searching for answers or communicating with each other. The better applications one bild and the wiser one is able to "hid" the advertisement is most probably going to make good profit in the new future.


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