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6. Manipulating Social: Power of Paid People
Digital campaigns are no longer about popularity in the middle class
It’s about huge manpower deployment
Gujarat VS
Elections 2012
LS 2004
Visa Rejected
LS 2009
Gujarat VS
Elections 2007
Sadbhavna
Mission
Self-driven
Propaganda
“Paid” Social Media unlike anywhere
33. HBOO7 – HBO India
HBOO7.com
Brief: Promote Bond festival on HBO
Idea: Bond girl is more popular in India
than Bond himself.
Solution: A 360 degree online solution
including a Microsite, Facebook Apps, TV
promotion and contests for promotion.
Result: 75K+ Fans increase in month, 2-X
engagement, huge traffic driven to
microsite
35. 24hrs in LeMans, France.
#AudiLeMans – 24 hours trending in India.
36. Travel portal Yatra.com plays cricket
Yatra Cricket Manager
Brief: Build Yatra.com’s association with
cricket
Solution: An online strategy game to
manage travel of Team India XI during the
World Cup. Interesting daily hurdles to
optimise morale & fitness of the team.
Simulated Yatra.com booking engine
interface for the campaign.
Result: Customer is at home with the
Yatra.com booking engine. Association of
James, who undertook a 70-day cycling trip through north, central and north western India… chanced upon an installation in Rajasthan near the Pakistan-India border. Here’s his post on Facebook: “I know there is a surplus of labour in India. STILL, I was surprised to notice that this exhibit in the fort museum is not a mannequin. YES, it’s a live guy sitting in this hookah exhibit”Okay so we are labour intensive. What’s the advantage?The advantage is more personalized responses to twitter, Facebook, Google+, or linked in group engagements. Over the span of a month, we tweet around 350 tweets, manually follow 12,000 people across 8 brand accounts on Twitter. And our personalized response or DM or manual RTs are 2400 per month across 8 brand accounts. I would like to hear the numbers of something like this in EU or US. I doubt that they will even come close. #Kewl!
Here is an example of a guerilla campaign on Twitter. 20K tweets went in a single day… not in a month, IN A SINGLE DAY! As a result this, the hashtag that we were promoting #FekuExpress was picked up by our target audience and it trended on Twitter in India for 3 FULL days. The Twitter expert in OMLogic asked for manual RTs… no autoRTs… all manual RTs… And India is THE place for manual everything. It worked like a charm.
What this means is that you can manipulate and influence by paid media.
This is the Barack Obama campaign equivalent in India. Here’s what low labour costs means in Indian social media:Mint Wall Street Journal, an Indian newspaper, has reported that a 2K people call centre or an outsourced centre has created a ‘guerilla popularity’ for a man who is running for Prime Minister in India. The elections in the state assemblies have started and countrywide general elections are expected to be around May 2014.Organic traffic or influence would mean that it is of it’s own making, by real people. In this case, it is made by real people, but it is synthesized because it is done by a paid army of people.
This man, NarendraModi, is the opposition party’s Prime Ministerial candidate for India. He is very popular on social media.
In fact, his candidacy for the Prime Minister’s post has come from Twitter / social media.
Let’s look at the kind of popularity he “enjoys :P”
No one understands long tail better than you guys sitting over here –
The fact that the labour costs in India are low, also means that the market is abundant; You have heard of “longtail SEO”, I say welcome to longtail economics!Not only is the labour cheap but a fortune is to be made at the bottom of the pyramid if you can tap that market!Eg but don’t say this - Take a look at this example of Yatra.com versus Hi-Tour.com. Yatra is a mass provider and targets keywords like ‘best travel deal’, ‘lowest fare to’ Hi Tours is a niche player providing premium holidays to the elite. They target keywords like ‘5 days in Scotland’ and ‘Vineyards of Nashik’.
It is predicted, that by 2016 that average digital ad spend per internet user, in Asia Pacific will be close to 35$ which is higher than what Eastern Europe and Latin America will be spending. A fortune ready to be made!
“As you, above all audiences well know, the web was not build by dot-gov's, dot-org's, or dot,edu's. The web was built by PPC, which in our world means: Porn, Pills and Casinos! Black hats show up first in every endeavor on the planet and they start by marketing the oldest professions and services in the world - sex and gambling.” Before I came to the conference, I was speaking to Jindrich and I realisedthatpeople in Europe see India as link buying, small SEO shops... Perhaps the Central European way of working is to not pay for services, but only for results-based marketing. So Affiliate Marketing and Performance Marketing is on people's minds. We have the same issues in selling services in India.Perhaps I could shed light on how they operate and why OML does not do that kind of stuff / black-hat stuff…. Here’s one example
Example 1 – HBO the TV channel.Soprano’s, the very 1st series on TV. Soprano’s and the arrival of the ‘TV series’ was a watershed moment in Television formats.And Game of Thrones is a watershed moment in TV series.
How would you do Performance Marketing for this? You can only do messaging, branding, and build a cult following.
HBO, broadcasted ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I’ as the Blockbuster of the Month on 28th July at 1pm and 9pm. Due to a technical glitch, the audio and video were not in sync. Since the movie had been heavily promoted before showcase, this glitch led the fans into a frenzy where they started posting angry comments on HBO’s Facebook page and Twitter handle. Can solidarity be measured? How would you do Performance Marketing for this?
Here’s the example of HBO, the TV channel that shows English movies in South Asia.We started with 1,998 fans three years ago in 2010 and a measly budget. They dictated to us, a pilot to do 25K fans. What did we give them? We gave them awesomeness. And a 1,00,000 fans to boot.Today, at 2.7Million fans, WE dictate the engagement & metrics.Interestingly, on last count by the Czech Statistical Office, the highest population of Prague has been 1.27 million.HBO fanbase is more than double the size of Prague’s population.
Here’s an example of an e-commerce travel portal. When we came onboard for Yatra.com, the main objective for being on social media was to create social buzz. Within a year, in a study by Brand Equity / The Economic Times, Yatra was declared the buzziest brand in it’s category.
Here’s what works in India
A colleague of mine voiced his opinion about a person that many people in India saw as a messiah. We are all entitled to opinions… it’s a free country… but turns out that it ain’t that free in India, really.Print screenshots and read them.So, yeah entry to India is another ballgame altogether.
And yet, the basics remain the same. We still follow the brand bible. Maintaining the same brand voice. Brand positioning. All the classic advertising principles remain the same.
Marshall McLuhan in his book in 1964, proposed that the ‘The medium is the message’. Sure, the message has to be changed according to the medium.
We have to change the message for a medium like Facebook.
And NOW we also have to change the message for Facebook
And NOW we also have to change the message for Facebook FOR INDIA.Social Media is, obviously, GLOCAL.
Similarly, today, the Indian digital marketing landscape looks a lot more like Prague, London and New York, than anything else.Here’s the James Bond festival in India, on HBO
Or a public service campaign… building a sustainable transport network in the capital city of India. Promoting public transport, cycling and walkability, and of course safety for women in public transport (a big concern over here in India).
The ‘24hours of LeMans’ endurance grand prix happened in France, but #AudiLeMans trended in India for full 24hours. 24 hours in LeMans in France; 24 hours trending on Twitter in India.
And… you can keep building from there… As I mentioned earlier… cricket is religion in India. A travel portal Yatra.com wanted to associate with cricket, with a really big digital idea. Here’s what we did. What do cricketers do, when they are playing? They are traveling.