Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

The Problem With Comparing Yourself To The Competition Is….

At best, you’ll be as good as them.

Today the BLUE blog is finally going live after about two months of planning and preparation. It was literally handed to me on my first day of work and I was told to make it a reality. I gotta say, it has got to be the hardest blog I’ve ever set up, compared to signing up with Wordpress with a click.

But one thing I really enjoyed about working on the blog was that I was never told to look at company X or firm Y. It was really built on the belief that we’d get it started and it’ll evolve organically as time goes by. And when you aren’t thinking within the “box” that competitors or other firms have set, then you have much more room to grow.

Maybe you notice one competitor is on Facebook and another is on Twitter so you decide to go on both just to “keep up”, when that money could have been spent on paid search or SEO and doubled your conversion rate, but you didn’t because your “competitor wasn’t doing it”.

Where would the iPhone be if Apple looked at the existing competitors in the market at the time? How about the Wii if all Nintendo did was look at what was in existence in the form of the Playstation and the Xbox? How much money would then-presidential candidate Obama have raised if he chose to do it the same, “tried and tested” way every presidential candidate had before him, through fund raising parties intead of going straight to the voters via new media? Where will your company end up if all you’re doing is looking over your shoulder?

I’m not saying scoping out the competition is a waste of time, definitely not. But you’ll have strengths that they won’t have and they’ll have weaknesses that you don’t. So whatever they’re doing may not work for you and vice versa.

Take my limited real world “experience” with a bucket of salt, but give me the choice and I’d choose to cut my own blazing path than be a follower. Innovation is key.

Tags: apple, blog, blue, competitive analysis, facebook, iphone, nintendo, obama, playstation, social media, twitter, wii, wordpress, xbox

Posted in social media, social media business | 4 Comments »

How Much Is That Banner Ad In The Window?

I chanced upon the banner ad rates offered by one Singaporean company awhile back, and saw that a prominently placed banner ad goes for S$4,000 a week, with the promise of “reaching” millions of “eyeballs”.

In Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”, there’s a chapter called “law of large numbers” where he bought 300 million banner ads for US$600. That’s more than one banner impression for one person in the United States. The result? He made a loss. Selling $500 of merchandise in total. He doesn’t specify what merchandise, but does it matter?

To break even on S$4,000 a week, you need to sell:

• 8 16gig iPhone 3Gs (about one a day)
• 10 Amazon Kindles (about 1.5 a day)
• 50 Xbox games (about seven a day)
• 400 movie tickets (just over 50 a day)

and that’s on revenue, not profit.

The flipside of this is of course, there’s no guarantee that some people of the 300 million saw the ad, and bought the merchandise some time later, thus making it untrackable. But isn’t it the same as any TV, radio or print ad you buy anyway?

Do you think you’re going to do better than Seth Godin’s case study? I’m going to leave the parallel of “reach” and “eyeballs” to traditional media to you.

If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard of the old adage “I know half of my marketing doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”. The good news is if you’re employing banner ads in your marketing “arsenal”, they automatically fall into the half that isn’t working.

But that’s just one case study, if you’re buying banner ads, I’d like to ask you: How have they worked for you?

Tags: amazon kindles, banner ad, eyeballs, iphone 3G, law of large numbers, millions, movie tickets, online marketing, print, profit, purple cow, radio, reach, revenue, seth godin, tv, xbox

Posted in Marketing, Poor Practices | 3 Comments »