Archive | July, 2012

View Your Google Cookie: See What Google Knows About You

31 Jul

When it comes to advertising, personal data can be incredibly valuable. And when it comes to personal data, few organizations know more about you than Google.

As you browse the web, Google tracks the sites in its sprawling ad network that you visit. As Google tracks your browsing patterns, it builds a profile of your inferred interests and demographic categories which are then stored in your Google cookie.

Here is how Google explains it: “For example, if a user browses many sports-related websites displaying AdSense ads or watches sports-related videos on YouTube, Google may associate a sports interest category with their cookie and show the user more sports-related ads. Similarly, if the sites that a user visits have a majority of female visitors (based on aggregated survey data on site visitation), we may associate the user’s cookie with the “female” demographic category.”

My cookie was quite accurate: it included valid generic categories such as music, business news, consumer electronics, enterprise technology, CRM, Air Travel, andMobile / Wireless. It also knew my gender and age band.

If you want to see what Google knows about you, you can view the contents of your cookie here.

SMS: The Only Effective Digital Communication Channel?

26 Jul

In 2012, we’re living in an era of ignorable information.

According to a study by Mogreet, 88% of emails are never opened, 84% of Facebook news feed items aren’t viewed, and 71% of tweets are ignored. But there is one digital communication channel that almost always gets attention: SMS. An amazing 98% of SMS and MMS messages are opened and read by recipients.

Here are some other interesting statistics on SMS:

– There are 234 million mobile device users in the U.S. with access to SMS capabilities vs. 161 million Facebook users, 28 million Google+ users, and 18.7 million Pinterest users.

– 174 million Americans text daily. That’s 74% of people with mobile devices. In comparison, 91 million people use Facebook daily (57% of users) and just 2.8 million use Pinterest daily (15% of users).

– Every day, 6.4 billion text messages are sent in the U.S. During the same period of time, 3.2B Facebook “Likes” are awarded and 300M new Facebook photos are uploaded.

– While 58% of users login to Facebook daily and 57% of people check email fewer than 4 times per day, mobile phone users look at their phone an incredible average of 150 times per day. That’s roughly every 7 minutes during waking hours.

For marketers, the prominence of SMS shouldn’t be ignored. While the rules for sending SMS are very different than for other communication channels, SMS and other phone application notification methods are an increasingly important communication channel. While these statistics focus on SMS messages, other application-specific notifications are equally as effective at delivering messages and updates to mobile phone users.

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Do Great Consumer Products Market Themselves?

18 Jul

Spotify. Dropbox. Foursquare. Instagram. Facebook. Flipboard. Pinterest. Twitter.

Everyone knows these insanely popular companies even though they’ve invested almost nothing in advertising. In each case, they built a strong brand by building a great product or service and letting their customers spread the word.

With their success, a new generation of entrepreneurs are rethinking their approach to marketing. It’s increasingly common to hear luminaries talk about marketing as a weakness: the notion that only weak products require marketing.

So, is it true? Do great consumer products market themselves?

Here are a few thoughts:

  • Marketing isn’t advertising: Too often, I hear smart people talk about marketing as if it is only advertising. Advertising is just one way to build a business. There is so much more to marketing: product management, design of referral programs, visual identity, messaging, competitive analysis, collection of customer feedback and ideas, choosing new markets and segments to target, picking company / product / service names, building awareness through savvy PR and promotion, etc. While companies with great products may not need advertising, marketing often plays an important role in the rapid growth of product awareness and usage.
  • Very few products sell themselves: What almost all of the companies featured at the beginning of this post have in common is that they are free Internet services that appeal to a mass market population. While it takes real work to get people to try a free site, application, or service, the barriers to broad adoption are much lower. Products that almost never sell themselves include things that cost money, enterprise products of all types, and niche products that require more work to find first-time buyers and where it is harder to build the powerful cyclone of hype that benefitted almost all of the companies listed above.
  • Media attention matters: There are many companies that have built great products and still remained obscure. What makes the companies featured here special is that they have benefitted enormously from media attention. They all drove frenzied levels of media hype before they even had revenue. While some of this stems from great products and strong growth, much of it comes from thoughtful media strategy, direct press engagement, and charismatic founders who are trained to tell a powerful story.

 

So, if you have the right kind of great free product, what can marketing do to drive such insane levels of adoption?

Here are a few general principles for marketing a great consumer product:

  • Make sure the consumer experience is awesome: Create mechanisms to understand the user experience, to get constant feedback, and to solicit ideas so that the product keeps getting better and better.
  • Make sure your message is clear: Make sure that the messages about your company, your product or service, the problems that you solve, and the experience of being a customer are clear, consistent, and compelling. Make sure that everyone in your company can tell the same great story.
  • Keep customers coming back for more: Create the right experience for every customer to drive engagement, up sell to paid versions (if that is your model), and minimize churn and abandonment. Measure all of these things and look at the impact of every change on the metrics that matter.

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