The 4 E's of Digital Marketing

While going through a power point presentation, I came across a very interesting perspective on Digital Marketing. By virtue of being a two-way medium and the advent of Web 2.0, the way we approach traditional marketing doesn't find place in the realm of digital consumer engagement process. It is important to see Philip Kotler's 4P's of marketing through the digital lens and see whether they pass through the digital filter.

The 4P's need to be replaced by 4E's in the basic digital marketing framework.

Product vs Experience: Unfortunately, digital is often used as a lead generating medium without any focus on brand building. Digital, if used judiciously, can be used to create an unforgettable brand experience that entices and encourages the consumers to not just consume the product but develop a long lasting relationship with the brand. A delightful brand experience can convince a consumer about the role of the brand in its life.

Price vs Exchange: The internet works on the basic principles of 'community living'. You share, I share. Its similar to the age-old barter system. You can't put a price to the content. Its available abundantly. More you share, more you would move up in the social hierarchy in the digital space.

Place vs Everywhere: Once your content/communication is out, it's everywhere. You don't select the touchpoints, the commmunity does it for you.

Promotion vs Evangalism: That's a dream of every marketing professional. You don't promote a brand on the digital space, you search for the brand champions.

Digital News Lifecycle

Read an interesting post about the Digital news lifecycle. It talks about how breaking of the 'breaking news' on the social media platforms is no longer a news. In fact, these days, if a news appears in mass media before it is twittered, then definitely its a matter of surprise.

Few excerpts:

The Digital News Lifecycle -

1. Twitter Alert: A bystander (accidental citizen journalist) will break the story via Twitter.

2. Blog Post: News organizations and bloggers will pick up the story and write a quick blog post about it, often with a link to the tweet or the photo.

3. Article/ Package: News organizations will convert the story into a 300 word newspaper article or a 3 minute TV story.

4. Context: Bloggers, news organizations and Wikipedia contributors will quickly start compiling background material on the story.

5. Analysis: Bloggers and news organizations will offer in-depth analysis on the story, and news organizations will often interview the bloggers who have broken the story or provided the most context on it, as part of their analysis.

6. Conversation: The conversation will continue in the comments sections of blogs and news websites, on Twitter and on social networking, social voting, and social bookmarking websites.

7. Customization: The entire story, across multiple formats and sources, will be available as an archive that can be searched by tags, accessed in various formats, including RSS feeds, and recombined to provide context for future stories.

As the news story will move through its lifecycle, both the depth of the story and its reach will increase, hit the peak in the context or analysis stage, and then decrease thereafter, as the interest in the story decreases. The story will move from alert to analysis in an hour, a day, or a week, depending on the nature of the news. The conversation and customization stages will in the domain of the long tail and go on almost indefinitely, driven by search.

Click here to read the entire post.

The 'Bindaas' Search!!!

I 'm loving it... The coming days in the digital space would be full of action and most importantly take digital innovation to a completely new level. Imagine a search engine that combines Yahoo and Google search together, displays alexa ranking and categorizes it based on Tech Cruch posts, Web screeshot views, simple text views, Timeline views, site information view, video x3 view, 3 D photo cloud view and so on. Yes.... the new search engine viewzi does it all.

Viewzi offers a very interactive, innovative way of exploring internet which takes the entire search experience to the next level. The insight behind this new offering is simple - one size can't fit all. The vast information on the internet can't be presented in a boring text format, the way google and Yahoo do.

Try this new search engine, you need to see it to believe it.