Last month, I discovered wanelo.com, a bookmarking social network which helps people find unique products and shows people where to buy it. Users can sign up for an account and create ‘wish-list’ folders, and users can follow each other just like on Twitter.

I’ve always seen awesome products here and there (a shark tea infuser and color changing mugs) but did not know where to find it. Many other people had this problem as well. However, many of these things can now be found at wanelo, which will direct you to the site where you can purchase the item.

Wanelo is much like the growing network, Pinterest, only wanelo is focusing on online shopping while Pinterest is much more vague.

However, I do wonder how wanelo expects to raise revenue, as so far it doesn’t seem like they’re generating ads from users. It also doesn’t seem like the vendors that are posted are paying wanelo as well, as users post these websites and not wanelo themselves. Pinterest was experiencing the same problem a couple weeks ago. Nevertheless, this is one of the first bookmarking social networks I’ve gotten into, and it’s a fun website to browse in my spare time. My wallet doesn’t seem to agree though.

By now, I’m pretty sure most internet-users have heard of the Kony 2012. The insanely successful viral campaign launched by Invisible Children has achieved over 82 million views in the matter of three weeks on YouTube alone.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

The campaign’s premise is the make Joseph Kony famous. Kony is a Ugandan war lord who is wanted by the International Court for crimes against humanity. This year, Invisible Children wants the world to know about Kony and to finally catch him. The execution and strategy is excellent. A well-produced video presenting facts and appealing to emotions (by featuring children who escaped Kony) captured people’s attention, while the strategy of getting normal people to tweet/contact ‘influencers’ such as Rihanna, Stephen Colbert and   various politicians.

Hours after it was launched, Kony hashtags dominated twitter, and #kony2012 trended worldwide for three entire days. Years ago, the mass public generally had no say in what the senior politicians and businessmen were deciding. Now, because of social media, the pyramid has turned around, and the general public is now influencing the government. Kony 2012 is harvesting this exact phenomenon by using the millions of everyday people to influence and put pressure on the ‘influencers’

Strategically, Kony 2012 is one of the best online marketing campaigns I’ve seen.

I recently found this infographic displaying the statistics of people who use search engines, and therefore why SEO is crucial for online businesses.

Statistics indicate that 90% and 91% of internet-using men and women, respectively, use search engines on a regular basis. That’s huge, considering how there are hundreds of millions of internet users in the world. This is a market that online businesses must take advantage of and market to through the internet.

Another important statistic shows that 80% of people have searched a product online and then purchased it offline. This seems counter intuitive as humans naturally search for the most convenient option, yet they’re taking an extra step here. Why? Most likely, it is because people feel uncomfortable with making purchases online. Now that the problem has been identified, online businesses must take this into account and create easy, fast and bug-free purchasing experiences for customers (See my earlier blog post, “Shut up and take my money”).

Google’s ‘Search Stories’ campaign is one of my favorite advertising campaigns. Google released a series of stories, but displayed them not through human actors, but through searches on Google’s variety of services with accompanying background music. The most successful is the Parisian Love video, which has garnered over 6 million views on YouTube and was run during the 2010 Superbowl. Another personal favorite is the Dog story.

These videos appeal to human emotion, making them highly enjoyed by all viewers while also displaying Google’s search, YouTube, Maps and other services.

The best part about this campaign is that Google invites you to respond and create your own Search Stories ad, so they are engaging people instead of just talking to them. Google launched a web application that allows you to select what you want to be displayed and provides a variety of background music choices. Then, you can immediately upload the video onto YouTube, one of Google’s services.

Throughout this whole campaign, Google informs and engages viewers while keeping them within the Google services circle. This is a great execution of user-generated marketing. I’ve tried making my own Search Story, you can too here: https://searchstories-intl.appspot.com/en-us/creator/

The internet has yielded many innovations in marketing and a personal favorite of mine is viral marketing, which is the use of pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awarenessor to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses (Source: Wikipedia).

Many companies have successfully completed viral campaigns. Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” holds the record for garnering the most views in 24 hours. The simplicity and wittiness of the commercial contributed to its success. Additionally, Old Spice had the actor in the commercial reply fan comments throughout three days, which generated even more hype and buzz. To this day, this campaign is arguably the most successful viral marketing campaign ever.

Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Guitar Hero also managed to generate much buzz when a seemingly home-made video was uploaded to YouTube under an ordinary name. Guitar Hero is normally played with a toy guitar, but this video showed a person playing the game by riding a bike. The video generated much buzz and curiosity, and ultimately Guitar Hero representatives stepped out and confirmed that this was indeed a viral marketing campaign they created.

Bike Hero

Become a direct advertiser

When a twitter user has a large amount of followers, that user is extremely valuable to companies looking to advertise themselves and reach a large amount of people. MyLikes was developed by some ex-Google employees and was officially launched in January, 2010. Advertisers ranging from companies to individual people looking to increase awareness create a short advertisement and provide MyLikes with information on their target audience. Then, anybody become an “influencer” and tweet customized ads on behalf of the advertiser, while MyLikes pays a certain amount of money per click on the ad. The more followers and influential one is, the more each click is worth. According to MyLikes, some of their social publishers make over $40,000 per month!  

Sponsored Actions

Instead of going through a system like MyLikes, Sponsored Actions eliminates the need of an intermediary. An advertiser will directly contact an influencer and ask them to tweet a message promoting their contest. People will be entered into the contest if they follow the advertiser, re-tweet the tweet, comment on the contest webpage, or a combination of the above. This way, the influencer receives a healthy reward for letting the advertiser use their followers, while the advertiser’s message reaches many people.

Increase sales on website through direct linking

Got an e-business website selling products or services? Tweet links to individual products, interact with followers and increase sales through awareness. Peter Payne runs an online business called J-List, which sells Japanese products from food to clothing. To direct traffic to his website, he accesses Twitter’s user base through using hashtags targeted towards his target market. This way, he uses Twitter as a medium to direct traffic to his actual store, resulting in increased sales.

In January 2012, the internet fought one of its largest battles since its conception decades ago. Headed by Lamar Smith, the US House of Commons almost accepted the Stop Online Piracy Act (or ‘SOPA’). This act would have rendered sharing copyrighted or even items created not by yourself but aren’t copyrighted a crime punishable by years in prison.

File-sharing giant Megaupload was shut down by the FBI and its administrators were detained. However, netizens would not surrender without a fight. The hacker group Anonymous began taking down the websites of the FBI, Department of Justice, Warner Music, RIAA and more. Petitions were circulated by average citizens and on January 18th, 2012, various websites including Wikipedia, Reddit and 9GAG ‘blacked-out’ their websites in protest. The internet won this time, as over a dozen supporters of the act turned against it, and Lamar Smith retracted the bill from the House of Commons.

This is the thing, Lamar Smith is backed mainly by Hollywood producers and executives, and it’s quite obvious that Lamar Smith was acting on behalf of the Hollywood executives. Yes, it is true that online pirating causes the creators of the show/music to lose large amounts of revenue, but realistically speaking online pirating can not and will probably never be blocked entirely. Instead of trying to achieve the impossible and angering the people even more (many urged others to pirate more media in retaliation), Hollywood could have simply changed their strategy a bit to recover their lost funds.

People pirate due to various reasons, but here are the popular ones

• Buying the media is too expensive
• The media is not yet available (ex: the DVDs are released after each season is over with and people don’t want to wait)
• People are unable to watch a TV show due to time conflicts and do not have a TiVo-like system to record it
• Pirating is convenient

When faced with these problems, it seems that being able to get a show when and where you want it through pirating is a god-send. In this day and age, consumers are spoiled people. We want convenience, and we want to do things our way.

Instead of stupidly butting against an impossible-to-solve ‘problem’, Hollywood executives could have turned to the digital space in order to recoup loses and discourage pirating by making access to the various media even easier than pirating (which usually involves having to torrent download and waiting).

Hollywood executives could create a website (either collectively or by individual production companies)  and put their media content up for streaming on that site. To generate revenue, the sites can run ads before/during the video, much like how YouTube is running them. They can also create the option of letting people pay for ‘premium accounts’ which will be ad-free. This easy access to streaming would be even more catered to the consumer wishes and at the same time, can generate revenue. Even more so, the Hollywood executives will be satisfying consumer needs and wants (much like how TESCO satisfied the Korean market full of busy working people) instead of ‘declaring war’ on their very consumers.

Hollywood, it’s time to wake up and embrace the net. Stopbeing stubborn and think outside the box, it’s for your own good.

One of my hobbies for the last few years has been Korean pop music, colloquially known as K-pop. Modern Korean pop music originated in the 1990s and has grown to become one of Korea’s largest ‘exports’ after the ‘Korean Wave’ spread all around the world thanks to online sharing outlets such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter.

K-pop has many selling points that differentiate it from other genres of music, but explaining it would take too long and isn’t the purpose of this post. K-pop in short:

• Catchy, upbeat songs
• Songs are complimented by a memorable and repetitive dance
• Artists are young and good-looking (some are as young as 14 at the time of debut)
• Here is an example: watch?v=HtJS32n6LNQ

I admit, sometimes I shop online…a bit…okay, quite a bit.

Shopping with the click of a button is convenient and fast, and allows you to purchase things from far away such as electronics from Hong Kong or jewelry from France, but some websites make their checkout process so complicated that I just want to say:

This is the rule: The more steps that a consumer needs to take = the less chance of them ever completing the process, especially if the process itself is already confusing and glitchy.

There have been many times when I filled in an order form and after clicking ‘Continue’, the site asks me to create an account with them as it is ‘mandatory’. However, there was no mention of it previously. The second most annoying thing is the various ‘captcha’ boxes that are intended to verify that you are a human, not a spam bot. Problem with these are, most are barely legible, like this one:

Additionally, your site should not be glitchy, people are trusting you with their credit card numbers and personal information, and you should respect that trust by creating a glitch-free and safe/encoded checkout. I recently had the misfortune of having to deal with a glitchy website while helping a relative book a plane ticket online with Hainan Airlines. It was good up until the payment stage, which I inputted the credit card information and secure pin and submitted it. However, it directed me back to the previous page and told me to re-try, which I did four times. It ended up charging my credit card four times despite saying it did not go through. What should have taken 15 minutes to book an air ticket ended up becoming 6 hours of phone calls and anger. Needless to say, I will never ever fly with Hainan Airlines after the glitch and their poor service following that.

I can only say one thing to online vendors, ‘Shut up, make it work, and take my money’

If you’re from the United States or an Asian/European country, you probably have heard of Tesco, a multinational supermarket corporation from Britain. In 1999, Tesco decided to break into the South Korean market with the help of Korea’s largest conglomerate, the Samsung Group. Together, they made ‘Home Plus’ as they call it, into the second-largest supermarket chain in terms of the number of stores. However, it was still lagging behind the native Korean chain, e-Mart. Instead of hoping to catch up to e-Mart’s number of brick-and-mortar stores, Tesco approached their conflict in a creative way by ‘bringing the store to the consumer’.

Tesco Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea

Tesco’s video states ‘South Korea is a unique market’, but how? Korea is a highly technologically-advanced country and consumers are flooded with advertisements, both offline and online, every day. Additionally, most people work and commute for much longer times than in North America, which gives marketers a very small time span to engage with consumers. This is how Tesco worked around it:

Tesco aced adapting to a unique culture with their “Change Waiting Time into Shopping Time” concept. They recognized the dissatisfaction of the Korean people and made grocery shopping effortless, fast, and efficient through the use of QR codes and the digital space. Now, the normally frustrating wait for the subway can be used productively to run a mandatory errand (everyone needs groceries!).

On top of this, Tesco released a smartphone app for an even more inclusive shopping experience. The app is simplistically designed and user-friendly (‘홈플러스’ on the iPhone) yet is powerful enough to allow users to browse through an entire ‘digital supermarket’. Now, consumers can shop not just at subway stations but wherever they are.

This ingenious campaign has successfully made the originally British corporation into the second largest retailer in Korea.