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The MSN ad Center is quite interesting which gives online marketers the necessary tools to research keywords, develop their knowledge on various aspects concerning promoting their websites on MSN. No marketers can ignore the power that search engines have in driving visitors to their sites, and MSN should not be ignored, as the usual online marketing strategy , most often, prioritise either Google and/or Yahoo. According to stats, MSN reaches nearly 2 out of 3 web users, and MSN Search reaches over 40 million a month (Nielsen/NetRatings, quoted on adCenter).

The Uses of MSN AdCenter Tools

Marketers have a wide choice to plan their campaigns by using the various tools for:

• Paid Search
• Contextual advertising
• Behavior Targeting
• Analysing emerging markets

For example, the search results clustering tools (among many others) is of sheer importance for advertisers as it provides them with term suggestions by clustering names of a certain set of documents. Advertisers have a better grasp at the different group of results allowing them to easily make up their mind on the current trend of search results based on clustered results.

Try the Adcenter to see its importance for the online marketing field.

The only dark side of it is that it does not work in Firefox browser…

Yahoo launched its video platform on Thursday, thus approaching itself to YouTube and Google Video. According to the Financial Times, Yahoo will compete directly with Google, but it will earn revenues from advertising placed on its video pages, while Google charges users a fee to access certain videos provided by other mdeia.

The Yahoo! Video page is nicely designed and very sober. What also attracts is the design of Yahoo! Studio which offers the possibility of uploading and sharing of contents among users. Also interesting is the way Yahoo thought of promoting its video service as a social media: Users can export and share videos with friends, whether by email or by sending links through Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Besides, it’s really simple for a user to add or save a video or a group of videos. This allows users to easily access previously watched or saved clips rather than to go over searching again. In Three words, it’s : Smart, Simple and Accessible

Written on 2006-06-01

According to a study carried out by WebSideStory, Google dominates the web search in the UK by holding 75% of the search market,thus garnering three of every four online searches during the month of February. Google’s Europe dominance is higher than in the US where the Mountain View Calif-based firm has recorded more than 50% grasp of the market share. Following far behind Google, are Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.

Source: Information Week

Written on  2006-03-26

Amazon, the largest online retailer is planning to launch its own music channel in order to compete with Apple iTunes. In an article in WSJ, one could read :

Now Amazon, the world’s No 1 online retailer, is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service with a range of features designed to set it apart. Among them: Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs, not unlike mobile phones that are included with subscription plans as part of the deal.

source: WSJ

The first question that hits our mind is whether Apple will lose its sovereignty in the Digital Music market? Can Amazon overtake Apple’s iTunes by launching its aPod? There are many reasons to believe that the number one online retailer can overtake its main competitor if its business model differs from Apple. For now, many analysts believe that the business model will differ, as Amazon plans to base its digital music on a subscription model unlike Apple’s iTunes which charge 0.99 cents per download. This may be the main reason to convince fans of music to change to Amazon as a subscription-based model will allow users to recuperate their downloaded music if they, accidentally, delete it contrary to apple which does not recognise the previous purchase, thus demanding its users to rebuy the music.

We all know that the Internet has revolutionised the information and communication world like nothing before and at the same time it has become a tool of information dissemination, and a medium for marketing as well as for sales and purchases. Since its launch in 1995, Amazon.com has seized the opportunity to implement innovation brought by Internet. Remember its personalisation service or its recommendation algorithm which amazed and still is amazing the world. These aspects were big case-studies and still are when it comes to tackle relationship marketing topics at university. Amazon wanted to be the first customer-centric online retailer and it won this bet. Millions around the world place trust in it for buying books, DVDs and audio music. The statistics speak of themselves. With more than 60 million users, Amazon is in pole position to overtake Apple, as its digital music business model will be more appealing to its regular users – those who buy audio Cds will see in aPod a more convenient means to build their music collection.

Its getting interesting out there in the digital music world!

Written on 2006-05-10

With the proliferation of competitors online, products and services like yours easily availabled from thousands of websites online, brand management becomes important on internet if you want to create customer loyalty and differentiation from your competitors, and to promote your company’s culture among your employees.

Think about it! Have you, in the past months, become a brand loyalist of X company just because you’ve liked the logo? We are in the folksonomy era. Only a logo and an attractive website will not propulse your brand ahead of your competitors.

Think of the social technologies such as blogs and vlogs or forums! How can you use them for your internal and external branding? Think of your verbal identity! How can you create trust and relationship with your customers? Think of your online identity! How is your brand presented on the world wide web?

Written on 2006-10-04

There resides an identity, a brand, a character that differentiate one from the masses, which is easy to denote and connote.

Apparently, the Open BC has decided to rename itself from Open BC to XING. It is a new step for this young professional networking company as far as its brand management is concerned. Why choosing XING? XING according to the video found on www.xing.com denotes easiness of use, multilingualism, pluriculturalism, ease of contact.…it’s a name that crosses borders, easy to use, easy to remember. It’s hybrid and not rooted.

XING starts with the alphabet X. X is the twenty-fourth letter of the English alphabet, and can also refer to an unknown person (I skip the film code here).The sign of making an X with our fingers can also refer to two human beings coming into contact.

XING is also used as a metaphor, and in the open BC context, it’s a metaphor to find any unknown contact, to create relationshp and develop network with X, and to give meaning to your imagination of any lost contact since your school days. It’s about empowering relationship with the “other”. The sound of “XING” is distinctive and it can enhance memory in many ways such as encoding or retrieving it, easier than the Open BC.

By changing its name, Open BC is on its path to developing a powerful positioning strategy. By paying attention to the encoding and retrieval factors, it is overcoming the root factor, it’s crossing borders and it’s trying to enter semantically and phonetically into the mind of its network. It shows that virtually it’s possible to develop relationship with the “other”, as the video itself ends with a cartesian reference: I XING therefore I am connected.

Written on 2006-10-10

“Mouret was spending three hundred thousand francs yearly on catalogues, advertisements and posters. For the launch of the sale of his new summer items, he had sent out two hundred thousand catalogues, including fifty thousand abroad, translated into all languages. Now he was having them illustrated with engravings and even accompanying them with sample swatches, glued to the pages. The displays of his goods poured from those pages; Au Bonheur des Dames sprang forth before the eyes of the entire world, and was seen everywhere: on walls, on the pages of newspapers, even on the curtains of theater stages. He believed that women are helpless in the face of publicity, and that they must go and see what is being talked about.”

Zola, Emile. Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight), Translated and edited by Robin Buss. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

True that Zola denounces the capitalist progression, the modern consumer culture and the bourgeois life of his time, but in the quote above one can read a portrait of branding and positioning strategy at the end of the 19th century and how Mouret uses the technology of his time to promote his products!

Time Magazine will raise its price by a dollar and cut the number of copies sold that it guarantees to advertisers. The copy will now be $4.95. Furthermore, Time will adopt an audience selling model to advertisers (a model mostly used by TV networks) rather than its actual “rate base” offer. The change will come into effect on January 2007.

It’s a fact: disruptive technologies have reshaped the social aspect of information, and the way end customers access the information. With the rise of blog, news reader and wikis, traditional newspaper has to adapt itself to the new mediasphere and meet the challenges of a digital market more and more fragmented.

Written on: 2006 - 11 - 10

(imported from old blog)

Did you know that search is the most widely used method of attracting qualified visitors to business online? Did you also know that by not having a prominent place in the organic ranking, you are losing out on many business opportunities.

Search engine is also the easiest and most logical when it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness. It is effective given the fact that advertisers can target specific traffic. Through search, visitors actively discover websites, products and services and they actively click on the necessary links to access information. Thus, having a decent ranking on search engines is the first step in building your brand online.

With information overloaded online, customers’ bargaining power increasing daily, and search engines becoming the gateway to information and marketing, a brand needs to be visible among the ranking. Therefore a company needs to make sure that its website is highly optimised with proper keywords which customers and other stakeholders are using. By crafting its copy with highly branded as well as generic keywords, a company will manage to stand out of the crowd and get an identity of its own.

Remember that searchers often refine their search activity to find the right information. According to a research by DoubleClick, «many searchers perform generic search all the way up until the final brand search.» Which means that marketers need to know how to use generic keywords, in addition to specific ones, in order to build brand awareness and convert searchers into buyers.

In the modern “webecology”, any business wanting to compete in the marketspace needs to consider search optimization as an important marketing strategy to achieve sales, profit and above all brand loyalty goals.

According to an Ipsos MORI poll, blogs are becoming an important source of information with 24 percent, overtaking television advertising (with 17 percent) and email marketing (with 14 percent). However, they are still behind newspapers (30 percent). The article also mentions that blogs have the power to influence buyers’ perception of a brand and either encourage or discourage them from buying a product. Via Reuters

Blogs can increase business and advertising value to any company or product. Thus an entry on blogs has the power to drive exposure and influence perception of its readers or buyers who are using search engines to find reviews and assessment of any information. It is more persuasive and unlike email or TV ads, it has more of a personal (dialogic) communication aspect and searchers identify themselves to blogging easily, as what is read on blogs can be interpreted as an open and honest discussion.