Consumer Generated Media

Consumer Generated Media describes a variety of new and emerging sources of online information that are created, initiated, circulated and used by consumers intent on educating each other on products, services, brands, personalities and issues.

-- Neilson Buzz matrices.

Pete Blackshaw, CMO for Nielsen Buzzmetrics, coined the term "consumer generated media" (CGM) to describe the evolving consumer-created space on the internet. CGM refers to posts made by consumers within online venues such as internet forums, blogs, wikis, and discussion lists, on products that they have purchased, questions they have or problems they are trying to solve. CGM is constantly evolving in terms of form and content. A few prominent websites used for CGM include: Brickfish, Dailymotion, Digg, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, Revver, Second Life, TripAdvisor, TypePad, Wikipedia, WordPress, YouTube, bigadda



The most common consumer hangouts in the CGM spaces are: Discussion boards, Blogs, Wikis, Social networking sites, News Sites, Trip planners, Mobile Photos sharing sites, Videos sharing sites, Customer review sites, Experience or photo sharing sites. The CGM supporting sites can be divided into five different categories for better understanding. They are,

Blogs: A Blog is the collection of web log where publisher shares his stories, fantasies or experiences. The wordpress, blogger, bigadda are the famus platforms which offer blogging experience.

Message Boards or Discussion Forums: Interest-focused message forums and discussion boards like citehr, are the most prominent content sharing tool. This concept was evolved from the Tech World where techies discuss their problems and experts offer advice to the fellow techies. Now this concept has become common across verticals.

Review Sites: This is a popular place where an excited customer spread positive word and an irate customer vents his frustration. Mouthshut is one of the famous review site.

Groups: These are highly focused and specialized groups or communities where the members exchange ideas in the virtual world. These clubs are an offshoot of the Mail groups where one can connect with their friends through group mails like Yahoo, Google offers platform to create groups.

Communities: Communities like Orkut, facebook, you tube, Flicker, linkedin offer networking and socializing opportunities to the Internet savvy individuals. Started as a socializing tool, these communities grew as an influential media for marketers.

The idea of CGM has evolved from its early roots of consumer feedback via online letters and email to encompass new media such as video, pictures and social networking sites. The phenomenon, CGM is a nightmare as well as an opportunity for marketers. It is a nightmare since the marketer has no control over the media or the message, an opportunity because if used wisely, it can turn out to be a new medium and an invaluable source of customer information.

Mobile Advertising – Fair & Lovely

Reliance Communications mobile ad campaign - Fair & Lovely Scholarship programme 2007 has been adjudged winner by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Annual Global Awards jury at a glittering ceremony held in Los Angeles in November 2007.

Fair & Lovely is a leading and one of the best-selling skin care brands of Hindustan Unilever Limited, had launched an ad campaign of ‘Fair and Lovely scholarships for women,’ using short code (51234) and instant voice from mid-August to mid- September, 2007. Reliance Communication executed a pan-India ad campaign on Reliance mobile phone network. Fair & Lovely Scholarship programme 2007 mobile advertisement was powered by clickable banner ads in various languages. These banners were linked to a micro-site where interested candidates were asked to provide their choice of course, annual family income, etc.

Reliance Communication also created a special Fair & Lovely Scholarship Zone on ‘R World’ to promote the campaign and generated around 50,000 leads in which 60% came from tier II and III cities and 40% from urban cities. The Fair & Lovely Scholarship programme 2007 campaign got great response from the semi urban and rural India, which also break the myth that the mobile advertising can only be targeted to the urbane India.

The innovative mobile ad campaign has been voted as the Best Use of Mobile Marketing in the Direct Response Category of the awards. This is also the first time in the world that a scholarship programme has been advertised on a mobile platform. The other nominations were, Affle Limited & Aviva (India) Pvt. Ltd. for Aviva - Cost of Postponement; MindShare Interaction India for Mobile Test Saves Time and Lives in India; Mobile Dreams Factory for Renault Twingo; SendMe Inc., MobiTV, Fathom Online for Discovery Channel Discovery Channel's Shark Week and Vibes Media for Dumped were nominated for the

Mobile Advertising Case - Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare

Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare (IAPA)

Successful messaging doesn’t always need a big media budget. What it really needs is a media channel that compliments a powerful creative idea. Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare to launch a campaign on child adoption used a MMS campaign. The campaign uses the viral nature of MMS (video message on mobile) to spread awareness about abandoned infants who need a caring home.

The Indian Association of Adoption and Child Welfare campaign was titled “The hottest MMS ever – If you don’t like it, pass it on.”

In the 25-second video Indian Association of Adoption and Child Welfare tried to create awareness about abandoned infants and convince people for their adoption. This campaign was a huge success. The promoters were reconnected in three days from all parts of the nation with the same message. The discussion forums also generated a very good response. In fact, the first week witnessed all of 1,210 downloads and clips were traced to eight other servers.

Mobile Advertisement to touch INR 500 crore in 5 years

Reliance Communications, is pioneer of mobile advertising in the country, has effectively offered mobile advertising solutions for more than 20 clients over the past four years. In my understanding, the mobile advertising, started with LG during World Cup Cricket in 2003. Reliance Communications has also handled Cadbury’s, Coke, Maruti, Hyundai, ICICI, Kotak and HDFC. The mobile advertising in India is at nascent stage it is roughly INR 40 crore industry but advertisers in India are looking to cash in on the mobile advertising as potential tool of advertising. Experts predicts that advertising spend on this medium is expected to jump more than ten to twelve-folds to touch a size of INR 500 crore in next five years.

Mobile advertising can attract advertising spends from integration with below-the-line budgets, retail budgets and the digital budget. The bottleneck, however, is the unreasonable cost of Internet on mobile and also disproportionate sharing of revenue between telecom service providers and advertisers. The mobile advertising is demanding even playing field from internet and mobile providers. The operators, at present, are acting as a gatekeeper and commands control over the revenue distribution. Currently mobile advertising revenue is split at 70:30 ratio between operators and the companies, which gives very little scope for the growth of the mobile advertisers. Moreover, the operators have to stop acting as gatekeepers to the Internet and allow consumers to access content and services on the Internet easily and cheaply, using their mobile devices.

The mobile advertising market which is currently valued at INR 40 crore can grow more than nearly twelve times provided the telecom companies offer open Internet access at low rates along with standardization of regulations.


Reference: http://www.business-standard.com, Mobile ads to touch Rs 500 cr in 5 yrs: Experts, June 22, 2008.

Mobile Advertising

The business of encouraging people to buy products and services using the mobile channel as the medium to deliver the advertisement message
                                                                                               --- Internet Message Access Protocol

Mobile advertising is an innovative and a customer-centric approach to reach promising customers. It includes advertising in the form of Short Message Service (SMS), mobile alerts, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), mobile games and videos. Mobile advertising can be divided into two main categories: Mobile Push Advertising and Mobile Pull Advertising. Mobile Push Advertising, can be in form of solicited or unsolicited advertising News alerts, job alerts and cricket score alerts are a few examples in this category. Mobile Pull Advertising, on the other hand, is defined as advertising when users request for the services from the service-provider for instance daily horoscope.

Mobile advertising is the latest buzz in the field of advertising, since it is a cost-effective way to promote and inform the target customers. With the advent of new media, mobile advertising has become one of the most demanding and integral part of marketing mix.

Benefits of Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising is cost-effective and offers flexibility to inform target group as and when required. In the case of mobile advertising the advertising message can be personalized with respect to Target Audience. The mobile advertising is interactive in nature and advertiser gets feedback immediately. Though mobile advertising offers flexibility to contact target group as and when required. It also gives option of permission-based advertising, which is also governed by telecom rules and regulations. The mobile advertising is still not brand creator but it is more helpful in brand recall and brand interactivity. The benefits of mobile advertising include: flexibility of content, speed of reach.

Limitations of Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising has limited message content. It is mostly driven by key words and target audiences in most of the cases take mobile advertisements casually. Moreover it still has very limited reach as compared to other conventional tools of advertising. The visual display is not as impressive as TV advertising. Though the advertiser has more control on the mobile advertising but still cant calculate ROI of advertising more accurately. Most importantly, mobile advertising is often criticized for intrusion of target audience privacy.

Guidelines for Mobile Advertising
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has published guidelines for mobile advertising. These guidelines are designed specifically for the Asia-Pacific region to encourage the use of mobiles for advertising-related purposes as well as its acceptance by marketers and consumers.

As of now it is not in practice. There are companies, and advertisers violating the defined guidelines but we are moving in the direction where the advertising world will take it seriously.

Conclusion
Mobile Advertising is at infant stage of the life cycle. The share of advertising spend on mobile advertising is minimal but when advertising spend is seen from the lenses of life cycle it is a good start.

Amazon: Earth’s Biggest Selection TM

Early 1994, Internet usage was growing at a phenomenal rate of 2300 percent per month. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, recalls that he felt need of doing something immediately. When something is growing that fast, every second counts.
Bezos quit his lucrative job at DE Shaw to start an online venture. His initial plan was to sell a low priced product, which customer would not hesitate to purchase online. After weighting several factors, he decided to concentrate on books.
“unless you could create something with huge value proposition for customer, it would be easier for the customer to do it old way.” Books, with low price and more than three million titles worldwide, seems to be an ideal product for selling online. Mail order book catalogs were not feasible, as they would have to carry thousands of titles, making them very bulky and expensive to mail. On the other hand, the Internet could provide such information economically and efficiently.
In June 1995, Amazon.com Books Inc. commenced its operations. The name Amazon drew inspiration from largest river in the world, signals Bezos’ clear intention to develop the biggest bookstore in the world. The name Amazon is short to remember, it captures the spirit of the site, and conveys its vast size and offering. Infact, Bezos had chosen the name Amazon also because it short, simple and easy to remember. Moreover it also captures the spirit of the site. He also wanted the same to start with letter A so that it appear at top of the search engine list.
Brand building initiatives
Online, the balance of power shifts away from company and goes towards the customer. Our strength is that we have not been competitor obsessed.
–Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com
Bezos identified it very early that customer is the king. He proposed customer value proposition for the Amazon which is evident from the initiatives at Amazon. Amazon provide value added features to increase the ease of shopping viz. product search, gift click, wish lists, gift reminders, and ‘Amazon.com Anywhere’ which support access from wireless device. Amazon has successfully created one-to-one relationships with its customers by customizing features and service based on customer purchase history. It has also added community feeling among customers by soliciting and posting readers’ comments on book displays. Amazon also introduced Amazon.com discussion board to further enhance the community feeling. It allows customer to share information on their topic of interest. Amazon Associate program is help develop better customer interaction. The customer interaction is reinforced with the personalized communication model. Customer centricity is evident from all online and offline activities of the Amazon.
Amazon’s promotion program can be divided into three distinct phase. It started with word-of-mouth publicity among online communities. Second phase was beginning of advertising in online, print media and outdoors. Third phase of promotional program started with inauguration of Associates Program in 1996. The associate program offers other website to display the Amazon.com hot-link and offer specific books of interest to their visitors. Amazon has developed alliance and partnerships with high traffic web portals and sites viz. America Online, Yahoo!, Geocity, Alta Vista, Excite, Prodigy etc. The associates program has been phenomenally successful, attracting member sites of all size. Amazon has also used viral marketing technique through customer reviews, free e-Cards, and gift certificates.
Changing Focus
Amazon is an early mover on the internet and the first mover on the online bookselling. This has helped it build a strong brand at relatively low cost. Thanks to extensive hype and coverage across media.
The online book company received strong criticism when it started expanding its product line. Marketers and academicians across geography said that Amazon is diluting the value of its association with books. A report in time magazine mentioned: “it’s incredibly risky. How elastic is the Amazon brand name? how much can you stretch it until it simply explodes and become meaningless to consumer? And how long can the money hold out? Bezos has alreadt burned through a bank’s worth of ash with no sign of slowing down. If any thing he is upping the ante – according to estimate, the company’s net loss could be $350 million in this year (2000) alone.” Bezos, however felt otherwise: “No, see we are not book company. We are not Music Company. We are not Vedio Company. We are not Auction Company. We are customer company.” He started line extension with some other valid logic – brand to certain degree is quick-drying cement. When they are young, they’re stretchable and plaint, but over time they become more and more associated with a particular thing and hart to stretch. His views were absolutely right which was evident from Amazon music store initiative. June 1998, Amazon unveiled a music store, which within six month propelled Amazon to one of the leading online music retailer.
Conclusion
Amazon has successfully built a strong brand and loyal customer base.

CDNOW (Amazon.com - buy an old story)

Jason Olin Knew there had to be better way to buy music– phill Carpenter

Leading music store CDNOW was one of the most popular shopping store sites since 1994. It had mammoth selection of music-related products. It boosted of excellent coverage of music reviews, cover art, daily music news, features, guide to music genres, and exclusive interviews. It also involved in digital distribution of music. CDNOW was the first site to offer the sale of music downloads. Armed with successful implementation of innovative ideas, CDNOW aims to make every visit to the site a valuable and rewarding experience.The CDNOW was very easy to navigate and quick to load. Strong content alliances, music reviews, cover art, daily music news etc. had made the content of the site attractive and useful. It had made the process easier for customers to explore new music and make informed purchase decision. It also offered customer to customize site as well as music CD as per user performance. At CDNOW, customer had option to maintain and Address book online making it easier to send music to friends and family this innovative technique of viral marketing helped strengthen loyalty and deepen customers’ commitment with brand. It developed strong community feeling among the users through Jazz club or classic club. It reaches out to its customers with personalized e-mails from Jason Olim and e-mail newsletters informing customers of news and releases relevant to the preference.
CDNOW was able to maintain its first mover advantage. It constantly added new functionality to the site and was very innovative in its offering. It ensured that its activity reinforces customer commitment and promises offered to customers. it was one of the first website to develop multifaceted, integrated communication strategy. It used online advertising, word-of-mouth communication and public relation to attract customers. Founders of CDNOW strongly believed that word-of-mouth powerfully influence online purchase decision.
The company began its marketing effort focusing on the web admirers in the early days of the business. It did not use any traditional marketing tools in the beginning of the venture but viewed online advertising as the way of both generating sales and building awareness it also appoint i-traffic as its online ad agency. On the one hand it had banner ads on the major internet content and service providers including, CNN interactive, AOL and on the other hand it had banners place on the more specific music-related sites like Billboard. It also stuck exclusive alliance with high traffic companies like AOL Yahoo!, Excite. It helped CDNOW generate both traffic and visibility.
CDNOW since inception had made public relation one of the highest priority tool in the brand building exercise. Mario Zoda, the public relation manager designed most of the public relation programs at CDNOW. They also realized very early that in the high-tech business, word-of-mouth is in particular is very important tool as it influences the purchase decision. Public relation helped generate word-of-mouth communication and influenced sales. They banked on the story how CDNOW was founded in the basement by two twin brothers with little money reflected the ‘American Dream’. The story helped them as Americans started associated themselves with the CDNOW venture which helped increase business.
CDNOW with development of the internet venture and competition realized that to build brand and grab share, it has to invest substantially on the traditional tools of marketing. It first turned to tool such as TV and radio. It also examined with print advertising in publication like Rolling Stone, spin, and variety.
Conclusion
CDNOW exploited its early-mover advantage and keeps ahead of competition. They developed a detailed understanding of its customers’ need that has enabled the company to create better product and effective market campaigns. CDNOW had personalized its product offering which was managed by the capable service team. The team was instrumental in building a reputation of excellence that is core factor of a successful Internet brand. CDNOW was one of the first website which understood the economics of online business. it reflected in its business model and media communication strategy.
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Once a leading music store, CDNOW was one of the most popular shopping stores since 1994. It was founded in February 1994 by twin brothers Jason Olim and Matthew Olim of Ambler, Pennsylvania. In the early days CDNOW was a telnet (text-only) service which was re launched in September 1994. In 2000, CDNOW was bought by Bertelsmann. In late 2002 Amazon.com purchased the rights to CDNOW from Bertelsmann and began operating the CDNOW web site. Although the CDNOW brand is still visible by accessing the web site at www.cdnow.com, it immediately redirects to www.amazon.com.