Polina's notes on Internet Marketing class

Top Internet Marketing Tactics for this year

And as a closing post, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to leave you with some tips on what tactics internet marketers are planning to use this year.

According to the TopRankBlog survey they are:
1. Blogging (thanks Dan for forcing us to practice, hehe)
2. Microblogging (twitter)
3. Search engine optimisation
4. Participation in social networks
5. E-mail marketing (I hope it is not spam…)
6. Social media monitoring & outreach
7. Pay per click
8. Blogger relations
9. Video marketing (aha, sounds interesting)
10. Social media advertising

Good luck on the exam to us all!

Twitter for Dummies

There have been a lot of discussion in our blogs on Twitter recently and when Shankar asked for a ‘Twitter for dummies’ post, I decided to write one.

Why use it?

It gave me about a year from the time I first heard about it before I created an account to give it a try in Jan 09. And here are the four reasons I still use it:

1. Get up to speed with the world - if you are subscribed to interesting people, you will find out what is going on: news, articles, trends, blogs. It is posted in a very concise (140 words) form. The key is to find people who are of interest to you. Good place to start is perhaps Top 100 Twitter users - and then you follow people that interesting people follow :)

2. Use wisdom of crowds - For London Technology Summit in February we created a hashtag #londontechsummit, so everyone could read in the real time what was happening at the Summit. The history is still there, recorded. Everyone who posted updates could see everybody else and I am now following some people on Twitter. If you are a marketer, this can tell you what your audience is like, what they are doing, where they are going.

I also tweet things I find interesting from IM class. If everyone did, we could have had quite an interesting collection in the end.

3. Ask for help - if you have a good base of followers yourself, then - in case you need help and you don’t have your own expert, you can ask - and get an answer quickly. You don’t need to be Mike Butcher with 8000 followers, though it helps to get a very quick response. From experience, 40 followers is enough to get a response within a day on a pretty obscure question like ‘Does anyone recall the name of that wireless device which can display simple gadget apps?’ (in case you’re wondering - it’s Chumby)

4. Follow friends - there are always a number of friends - whatever they blog I will read them, be it going to a sports match or taking a kid home from a nursery.

If you want more reasons, check out this blog.

Is it a bubble?

VC that invested in Twitter says that Twitter has a business model (by the way, the link caught via Twitter). He hasn’t actually disclosed it, only gave a couple of hints and said that most likely changes will come this year already.

I personally think this network has a huge potential (unless of course the founders somehow break it).

My twitter account is @polinkin :)

4 Golden Rules of Blogging in IM Class

Observing all of us blogging for several weeks now, I was asking myself a question: why some blog posts receive loads of attention and comments, while others, similarly interesting and well written, don’t.

And here are my 4 Golden Rules based on those observations.

Rule 1. Write about Google
…or something as interesting, well-known and buzzy: Apple, Amazon are good too; eBay and Twitter are close but not quite there yet.

Rule 2. Snappy headline
People click on the link to your blog post because they like the title. They have other 65 blogpost to choose from to leave their 5 compulsory comments, so the competition is fierce ;) Good examples are (Titles which fall into Rule 1 category are excluded):

• Converging on the dinner table
• The future of online shopping?
• Innovative Marketing Ideas

Rule 3. Timing is King
The best time to post is Saturday night or Sunday morning. Most of us remember about our compulsory post and comments on Sunday afternoon and rush to the FriendFeed to comments away and be done with it. Obviously, Monday midday is the worst timing you can choose to reach for the audience.

Rule 4. Content: short, relevant, interesting
The best length of a blog post is 3-4 paragraphs. Click-thru links should be banned (‘I took an effort of clicking on your blog - and now you want me to go away and read some article on NY Times?’). Your research and insights - unique content - is valued the most. Of course, reference the sources and provide links for your readers to explore more on the topic you’ve written.

Any other rules you guys found helpful?

Happy blogging!

G1 Android phone: first hand experience

It has been 47 days now that I have had my G1 Android phone. And, answering your question, I can say: ‘It is very good, I like it!’.
It is fast, reliable, and perfect for heavy Google-products user like me, with Gmail, Gtalk, Google maps, YouTube and Google contacts available when you first load the phone. I like the keyboard. Android apps I use: Twitroid, iTube, Skype, Last.fm, a couple of games, Translator, aCurrency converter. If I were to complain, the only thing would be the battery life: it dies in less than a day if I use it a lot. However, rumours say the battery life will be better with the next OS update - Android “Cupcake” 1.5. Now I want the cupcake too!
You can get it for free with a T-Mobile 18 month contract paying £30/month (with unlimited 3G “fair use” internet).

How is it doing worldwide?
T-Mobile launched it in the US mid-October 2008 and in Q4 according to different numbers had sold from 300K handsets in US (according to Morgan Stanley) to 1M worldwide. According to some optimists it is selling at a faster rate in its first few months than the original iPhone did at launch. But we shouldn’t forget that the price of the iPhone was 3 times higher then than the price of G1 now.
There are ~800 apps on the Android Marketplace, compared to more than 15,000 in the iPhone AppStore. Well, yes, but iPhone has a first mover advantage there. It took Skype 2 months to do an app for Android, and nearly 18 months to get to iPhone - I wonder why?
At the World Mobile Congress last week one new Android phone was announced: HTC Magic. Check it out, it looks cool! It will soon be available in UK with Vodafone. At the same time, 8 Symbian phones were announced, and at least 5 WinMobile ones. I say - give it a year, it’s too early to make the conclusions now. But I’m really interested in how the story will unfold.

More on Twitter - how Twitter search may kill Google

Eze just posted a great article on E-Ship club discussion board ‘Creative destruction… Google slayed by Notificator?’.

In sum the article says that on search.twitter.com allows you to find out what is going on in the world right now (earthquake, snow, plane landing on Hudson, etc) while Google search is the historical search, because obviously the page has to be indexed, get it’s ranking, have some links directing to it - and all this takes time.

I don’t think that live search will kill Google, but I thought it would be an interesting article to share and discuss - following up on our class discussion of live vs recorded TV shows today.
Thoughts?

Twitter - new marketing channel

If you are a company - how can you use Twitter? Well, do it like Dell and offer exclusive discounts to your Twitter followers. Result? $1M in revenue during the holiday season.
As our professor said, most of display adverts are waisted because people are ‘not on the market’. But when you subscribe to the Twitter channel @DellOutlet it means you are on the market and looking for a Dell computer.

Brilliant idea. Maybe Twitter has a future (i.e. will make money) after all. My channel is @polinkin :)

Looking for a job? Use LinkedIn

Very useful post buy Guy Kawasaki on how to use LinkedIn to find a job. Tips that I liked most:

4. Find out where people at a company came from. LinkedIn “Company Profiles” show the career path of people before they began work there. This is very useful data to figure out what a company is looking for in new hires.
5. Find out where people from a company go next.
6. Check if a company is still hiring. Company pages on LinkedIn include a section called “New Hires” that lists people who have recently joined the company. If you have real chutzpah, you can ask these new hires how they got their new job. At the very least you can examine their backgrounds to surmise what made them attractive to the new employer.
10. Find startups to join.

Do you use LinkedIn? Any other tips that Guy didn’t mention?

Market capitalization of eBay vs Amazon

Our textbook says: ‘eBay’s market capitalization… is more than three times of that of Amazon. While both eBay and Amazon have built a healthy ecosystem of sellers and affiliates, eBay has a more profitable business model and faces fewer logistics, inventory, and competitive challenges than Amazon’.
This phrase made me uneasy, so I actually went online and checked marcap for both companies.
Marcap (Amazon) = $21.71B
Marcap (eBay) = $15.45B
So long with healthier ecosystem.
Amazon is, of course, an online business, but what they really excel is their distribution. And it looks like having a tangible business rather than just being a platform and using (well-earned) reputation gives you an advantage in the long term.

Another example of online retailer who is quite successful due to distribution is American shoe website: zappos.com (who could have thought you can successfully sell shoes on the internet? Well, if you offer free delivery both way and encourage people to buy and try more - you can).