Bomi Cha's Blog

Kakao Talk is a free mobile messaging application for smartphones. It used to provide text messaging service only but its parent corporation, Kakao Inc, added a free call service last July. Kakao Talk allows users to send and receive photos, videos, voice messages, and other types of contents on a on-to-one basis and also in groups.

Kakao Inc. has been expanded from a mere mobile messaging service into online games, advertising and other forms of electronic commerce. At a recent conference, it also introduced its three new platforms, which were ‘Kakao Page’, ‘Story Plus’, and ‘Chatting Plus’.

‘Kakao Page’ is a mobile contents platform where anyone can makes their own contents and sell. They can take advantage of their Kakao Talk friends. ‘Chatting Plus’ introduces applications and offers multimedia contents, including directions, games, and music to its users to share with other users while chatting.

Kakao Inc. has been losing money until 2 months ago when it had its first period of surplus since foundation. What has made me wonder is that although Kakao Talk has a large user base, the company used to be a mere messaging app and nothing seemed possible to be monetized from this service, then why did the employees stay at the company for such long time given the continuos periods of negative profit? Now I begin to understand why. The corporation understood the value of users and how to integrate that user base with mobile contents markets. Since it launched ‘Plus Friend’, which is one of Kakao Talk features that suggests brands, artists, and publications to its users and allows them to receive unique contents from them, it saw the monetization potential.

And now, the corporation is trying to change rules of the game. By charing for contents on its 3 new mobile platforms, Kakao Inc. attempts to change the consumer’s ‘contents-are-free’ perception and help contents be acknowledged for their values.

User-generated content (UGC) is, as the term suggests, media content that is made by user, as opposed to company. As all contemporary marketers know, the era of company’s monologue is dead. We live in a world where customers are not only the buyers, but also can become influential marketers for brands they associate. There is certainly a great risk in transferring the control to consumers but at the same time, the potential payoff is also big if done successfully.

A few brands have been aware of the great potential and have taken serious attempts to take advantage of it to advance themselves. The early form of UGC was review sites and blogs where customers put their own posts about their brand or product experiences. Now with the rise of the social media platforms, especially visual ones, such as Instagram and Pinterest, it is even easier for users to generate posts and share them. Brands have noticed this and tried to integrate these social media platforms with UGC to really allow their customers to engage with them and be part of the brands.

One article I found introduces stories about 5 brands that successfully utilized Instagram in their business. These 5 brands include fashion retailer, restaurant, jewelry, and consumer goods. They differ in industry but they all have one thing in common. They understood how social media and UGC worked and used them wisely. One particular case I want to highlight is Urban Outfitters’ ‘Free People Instagram campaign’. By attaching individualized hashtag cards to its jeans, Urban Outfitters encouraged its customers to post a photo of themselves in the jeans with a specific hashtag. The fashion brand facilitated them with an easy way to express themselves.

We have seen many great trends and companies striving to ride the waves. However, only a few companies put mind to doing what actually works. Joseph Jaffe, the author of “Flip the Funnel”, talks about changing the rules of the game by flipping the traditional marketing funnel. while the majority of businesses merely relies on traditional ways or making some corrections. The traditional model of AIDA (Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action) is flipped into ADIA (Acknowledgement/Dialogue/Incentivization/Activation). This new model focuses on retention of existing customers rather than attainment of new customers. When I come across an article about Amazon, I found the backward model was actually being used in a leader company.

Here is an overview of how Amazon operates:

Press release listing benefits of the new product -> Get feedback -> Focus on specific target customers -> Focus on problems they face in current products -> Fix its new offering -> Repeat the previous steps until it finalizes a list of benefits -> Build the product -> Describe how its new product is solution to current problems

Traditional way: Target a segment of which the company thinks will be the most profitable for itself -> Build a product -> Advertise the new product as if everyone needs it -> Fail -> Fix the existing product/Launch new one

Amazon manages to build a perfect product for its target customer by actually focusing on its customers by maintaing continuous dialogue with the market. As the traffic initiator for Amazon points out, this way is cheaper than fixing already-built products.

Social media is becoming more visual. The debut of Twitter Header is a great evidence of the growing trend of social media going visual. Although the Twitter Header can be critiqued as a copycat of Facebook’s Timeline, it shows that it is now inevitable to focus on visual contents, since even a popular text focused social media site, such as Twitter, is forced to make its site more visually appealing. There are many statistics numbers that support this trend. Even our posts on Facebook are becoming shorter and more focused on visual contents than texts. As we notice, photos tend to get more “likes” than text updates. Moreover, there have been a lot of conversations on emerging social media platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest, over the last few months.

Why is this happening? In the contemporary era, we are overloaded with information, while our time and the capacity of our brain to process information are limited. Images can help us get more information quicker.

What is the implication for businesses? It is now common business sense that success depends on customers, not a product itself. Businesses have to catch up with the constant change in consumers’ preferences. If customers are more willing to look at and share photos than texts, it would be in the best interest of business to follow the trend.

An useful article:

Five Steps To Integrate Visual Content Into Your Social Media Strategy

There are many search keyword services provided by a number of major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Here is one article that provides a list of such services and brief description for each one. These tools offer users insights into how and what people search for. This can be particularly useful for marketers in optimizing their websites and staying relevant to the fast changing market.

The ones I find to be the most useful are Google Insights for Search and Yahoo Clues. These two allow us to compare search volume patterns across regions, time frames, and categories while others just give us the top keywords. If I have to choose one between these two, it will be Yahoo Clues because it simply offers more of valuable features. Google Insights and Yahoo Clues provide pretty much the same services. However, Yahoo Clues gives us more details on searchers’ behaviours. Apart from time, geographical location, and category, Yahoo Clues also provides search patterns by demographics, such as age, gender and income level. Moreover, they both give us top searches and rising searches, but only Yahoo Clues shows us what the previous and next words the searchers type into the search box. In addition, while Google Insights allows us to look at the trends for only one keyword, Yahoo Clues enables us to compare trends for two search terms.

Some useful tips on utilizing these search keyword tools:

Google Insights for Search

Yahoo Clues

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