To have a website or a Facebook page?

An interesting development is taking place when your brand is reviewing its online presence – whether to have a website only or have a website and a Facebook page or only a Facebook page or may be none?

Keeping in view the time consumers are spending online and especially in social networks many brands have started preferring their pages on Facebook as an invite to potential customers to go online and know more. So for example even if Nokia has its global websites, for certain promotions and targeted activities – they may ask customers to go visit www.facebook.com/nokiarocks . While it all sounds very much in vogue to do something like that but make sure you take care of the following four points before jumping into the band wagon.

Kozmo gets social with social media

We recently arranged yet another phone interview with an early adopter of social media for business. Mr. Arif Hafiz is the founder of Kozmo, 'the legendary Bengali culture renaissance institution that arrived on the Dhaka outing/nightlife scene in 2005...a cafe chain that pioneered the lounging culture in the city with live gigs, recitation, readings and off course cosmopolitan cuisine!' as the way it puts it on its Facebook page. A couple of issues became clearer from the conversation with Mr. Arif Hafiz which could be summarised as below.

Communication cost

Social media has dramatically decreased the cost of communication for Kozmo to reach out to its customers - existing and new. Your marketing mix can allow a combination of communication channels such as TV, print, radio etc. but its increasingly getting more appealing that the cost for conveying your marketing messages is the cheapest if done through social media. Companies as big as Coca Cola recently included social media in their ad plans for the Super Bowl. Moreover, communication can be very interactive and personalised which is otherwise not possible in traditional communications channels.

Relevance

It perhaps made more sense for Kozmo to opt for Facebook as its main mode of communication platform because the kind of business it is in, it attracts a crowd predominantly urban, young to middle age and who are techno-savvy. Kozmo is a place for dining out, enjoying gigs and most importantly for socialising. So a strong social media presence to engage its visitors is a natural component in its marketing strategy. Imagine companies like RahimAfrooz, the energy sector pioneer company of Bangladesh. Should companies such as them also jump into the social media bandwagon just because Mr. Arif Hafiz of Kozmo uses it and is seeing returns? May be not. The role of social media may become a bit murky when it comes to purely business to business industries who can be better off by sticking to their websites and extranets. However companies which are more consumer facing and allows consumer interaction within its premises (restaurants, retail shops, banks, mobile customer service centers etc.) are good candidates for extending their service through the social media channels.

Resource

Its clear that Kozmo's social media activities are solely dependent on the founder himself. Its possible that its more because of his natural love for his entity which he founded which makes him the natural spokesperson for his brand through Facebook. What would happen if Kozmo grows so large in all divisional headquarters of Bangladesh in 10 years? Will the business complexity allow Mr. Arif to continue his conversations through social media? Or he will need to appoint someone to carry on the conversation while he can focus on money matters? Its extremely important to atleast to attempt to define some roles and resources within the organisation as to who or which group would take care of the social media communications. It could be a cross-department, it even can be someone external to the company who has turned out to be an accidental spokesperson (like a good brand ambassador) by virtue of his/her love and loyalty towards the brand.

Exclusivity

Fans and followers of Kozmo on Facebook need to enjoy the exclusivity they might receive for opting in this channel over any other. Say if Kozmo promotes daily discount codes to its 'fans'by posting a note like this, 'rush to Kozmo today and write this discount code ILOVEKOZMO24APR at the reception to have 50% discount on everything you eat! Spread the word. The offer is for its Facebook fans and their friends and their friends only, so spread the word and hurry, as this offer ends today!'. This has the potential to create some sort of urgency to loyal Kozmo goers to redeem the short-lived discount. It also has the potential to make the 'fans' feel special as the discount was offered to them only and was not published in a newspaper or aired on TV, radio.

Relocation of marketing efforts

It will be an increasing trend in coming years that consumers will spend more time on social media on a daily basis than they would be reading newspapers, sit in front of TV or be glued to radio stations. As internet will start permeating consumer's daily lives, a lot social interaction, entertainment, education, news breaks, even social commerce and group buying will take place in a social media setting. It doesn't imply that your business should abandon established means of consumer communications, it just implies that your business should start taking social media as the best way to get social with your customers, pretty much the way Kozmo has done it.

Status Renting, Status Bites and a range of status categories

Many status conscious Dhakaiyas think that if you manage to reside in the Bermuda triangle of Dhaka city i.e. Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara, you possess a 'higher' status than the rest who live outside, or even on the periphery. However Facebook, the most popular social networking site in Bangladesh too, is poised to make this status vanity blurred, as apparently, everybody and anybody has a ‘status’, as long they are registered with Facebook, or with Twitter as a matter of fact. This certainly implies that these status-savvy digital netizens of Bangladesh have acquired the power of being micro-publishers for free, to start influencing their smaller sphere of acquaintances, through their frequent updates about own situation, feelings, news, etc. From my observation, I could categorize the status-mongers in Facebook according to the following categories. See if you want to add some more and think how each of these could be mobilized to spread the word-of-mouth regarding you, your business, brand. (read more)


1. Stato-holics
This group of people are status addicts, they prefer to update their status as frequently as possible. Most interestingly, even if they are ‘busy’, they somehow manage to get the time out of their busy schedule to update their status as ‘Abdul is busy’ or ‘Abdul is buzzzeeeee’ etc. making others wonder whether that person is busy with work or busy Facebooking!

Tip:
This category of users may be good brand mouth-pieces for your product/service. Riding on their urge to frequent status updates, they need to be equipped with enough information and right incentives to help spread the word-of-mouse for your brand.

2. Status-stalkers
You might be having 500+ friends in your friend list but in reality you might be interacting actually with not more than 50 through personal messages, wall posts and seeing each other’s status updates. Then what happened to the rest of your colourful and long friend list? Have they suddenly turned their face off Facebook? I reckon not. This category of people prefer not to update their own status but prefer to have sneak peaks on what others are doing. Partially it could be because they don’t want their ‘friends’ to know what their own secrets plans are for job, holidays etc. lest their friends exploit this information and race ahead. So they prefer to keep a check on everybody else’s status regularly and remain themselves in a hidden mode. That’s what friends are for huh? In many case’s some stalk a handful of people genuinely to acquire more knowledge, contacts etc. They are Facebook introverts.

Tip:
Good type for market research may be, who keep a check on what other people are upto, or may be saying about your brand, business or even you…and then reports back to you.

3. Stat-vertizers
My favourite type. Those who can happily rent out their status space as a micro-bill board to advertise about your business, either for free or for fee for a certain duration of time may be. I have been investigating with this lately and am keen to get in touch with Facebook to figure out if the idea of ‘Status Renting’ could be made a reality. So if I could convince say 10 of my target Facebook friends to update their status about my custom-made-status ready information on my business/product, then it would be made visible to their own friends, with whom I might not be connected. The audience of your audience is my audience that I am trying to reach here through status messages. Its short, crispy, share-able and more importantly you would be more influenced about anything if you read it in your friends’ status updates rather than hearing it from any unsocilited ad campaign, or from me. In exchange, if its possible to track the clicks from each ‘rented status space’, it would be used to may be pay the interested stat-vertizers for their favour.

Tip:
--Friends and family might be bullied for a while to behave like stat-vertizers for a while but not for long, as there are no binding agreements. But if contextual status renting becomes a reality, it would be interesting to see how this works for businesses in a social media environment.

--Don’t let money ruin friendship.

4. Stat-wasters or Stat-blankers
This type of users are not always sure why they should use their status updates for. So sometimes they publish statuses such as ‘Abdul is …’. I really never understand the meaning of this ‘…’. To me, it’s a complete waste of space. Rather stay quiet and stalk other people than saying three dots. Also, some ignore the basic principle of brevity in status messages and opt for writing long epics in their status messages which certainly gets ignored for a skim-through status surfer.

Tip:
Wish them happiness and wish them well.

5. True socialite
They are bit of a mixed bag. They actually share nearly each of their conceivable feeling/emotion i.e. ‘Abdul is happy, sad, sick, tired, sleeping, eating, walking, thinking etc.’. They talk about food, movies, politics, life, love, pretty much everything being social requires and enjoys status messages just because they themselves are genuinely like that. They also send each other virtual gifts, play games etc.

Tip:
If a true socialite could be converted to a part time stat-vertizer, then it would be bthe est combination for your business/brand word spread. As people tend to rely more on the candid opinion of a True socialite than on the dry and monotonous updates from a stat-vertizer.

Other than ‘status-renting’ I am also researching with a concept I coined as ‘status-bites’. Inspired by what soundbites do, I think status-bites are the next best thing to educate your audience on your business/product on a slow and scheduled status release format. I am applying this specifically for reports that other teams produce for public consumption at my present workplace. It is argued that in times of information economy, attention is the currency, which no one wants to spend too much. So not many people have the time or interest or the access to go through a full report of 30-40 pages. But they would not mind to have a surface level idea, gist of the actual content in small chewable chunks, right through their status feeds so that they can be informed about the key aspects of the issue at hand through the screens of their smart phones or desktop screen. Think about it, is there anything about your business/brand, which can be released through status messages in a planned way over a period of time? May be a week or so?

Lastly, something I call ‘status-serials’. Can you tell a story about your brand/business in 10 status messages in a serial fashion? So that I have the urge to see what your next update is? Can it keep me interested in your sticky status for a week or so? However, none of these terms are in Google yet.

That it, time to update my status about this post now.

Do an identity check for your brand online

There was a time in mid 90s that me and some of my techno-guru friends got excited about starting a domain name business. Plain and simple... you keep on buying domain names of prospective big companies of Bangladesh with the hope of selling it to them in future in higher prices, provided if they would ever wake up from sleep to get a website for their brand name, business etc.

Certainly unethical and a bit risky venture it was, but we did realise that not only company domains but also city domains were still up for grabs. For example, in 1995, domains like dhaka.com, dhaka2000.com, sylhet2000.com, rajshahi.com etc. (major divisional headquarters) were available. We could sense money in the making and started all out efforts to start this 'business' at any cost. We started making lengthy lists of potential 'target' companies, establishments who had no clue then what even websites were and why would they need one. We were excited to experience the desktop based reach of this 'business' and the chance of getting rich overnight.

However, it was no question of ethics or legality that constrained us from launching our venture in the long run. We experienced 'entrepreneurial hiccups' due to three major setbacks. Firstly, none of us had any foreign credit cards with which to buy the domain names online. Secondly, there were not many among our network of relatives or 'boro bhais' who used to possess a prized international credit card. Lastly, some uncles and contacts who happened to possess credit cards did not have any idea what this 'domain business' was all about, so they were extremely reluctant to leak their sensitive credit card information to a bunch of part time neighbourhood troublemakers (us) and they were petrified to learn that the transaction would take place over the internet. So end of our business venture. We got back to discussing higher education, Bangladeshi politics, band music and girls.

Recently with the advent of Twitter, many similar ID or name hijackers seem to have 'booked' Twitter user names for some Bangladesh brands. Check out the Twitter accounts for Grameenphone, Banglalink, Grameen (with Yunus' photo), Aktel, Citycell, bdjobs etc. 'Ke ba kahara' seem to have very cleverly reserved the unique user names perhaps hoping that they can reach to a deal with those companies to bargain for those Twitter accounts. The use of Twitter among businesses is increasing in leaps and bounds in the west and its a matter of time when Bangladeshi brands, and celebrities will catch the Twitter fever. Its also possible that some of these 'reserved' but dead Twitter accounts might be owned by genuine employees from the company, they just haven't figured out what to do with it yet.

However, to spoil the party of the 'name kidnappers', Twitter has recently made some changes in its policies. Read them here. This means that the party is over for those who might want to reserve the brand names or operate them with fake tweets. On the other hand, I am not aware of many companies actively pursuing any social media strategy to engage the Bangladeshi consumers, both at home and abroad. So perhaps they are either not aware or don't bother if their brand identities are being hijacked online. Every one out of five internet users of Bangladesh has an account in Facebook for example, and I am not sure if any traditional market research, media research company have taken up any survey on the use of social media among various age groups in Bangladesh and how the businesses can make use of new media to connect their brand with the netsumers. The opportunities are vast how social media blended with mobile phones can change business dynamics in Bangladesh. Please don't wait for foreign think-tanks to come to Radisson and tell you that.

Are you in Facebook?

It seems the world has suddenly booked itself a date at Faceboook! A few years ago the buzz word for the buzzing people trying to gather a few networks and love interests in Dhaka was "whats your asl?" Now, its "Are you in Facebook?".

For all the ignorant people on this side of Brahmaputra, social networking sites like Facebook is here in Bangladesh and its here to stay.

Your long lost friends, relations living abroad, common interest group members from african nations - all available in one place called facebook. Its where you show your face and get booked for popularity! If you think facebook is a global phenomenon with limited or no influence in Bangladesh, think again. With millions Bangladeshi members - Facebook in Bangladesh is the biggest tech lifestyle trend to emerge for a long time.

And like all smart trend watchers, Brand Managers should lick their fingers with this new found gold mine of an opportunity. The smartest brand decision of the year for them might be to use “Facebook” as a media to reach to 12-35 target group. After all, an average youth is more likely to spend more time in Facebook than in front of a local TV channel. If so, which one makes sense as a media - TV or Facebook?

The tricky part is how to use it. After all, direct advertisements are not allowed (yet) in facebook nor can local business afford it. So an effective way can be to form a forum or group around your product / brand and invite people to join. For example - the Brand Manager of Nescafe can form a forum called “Getting Jazzy in Dhaka” and it can be a forum for all young executives who are jazz music lovers. The Brand Manager can be the admin and all the members can be the target recipient. Through carefully crafted messages, forum postings, games, applications etc. the essence and message of Nescafe brand can be delivered to very loyal group of people. Thus this can be a brand experience extended.

This is just a raw example, but i am sure the brand managers will be smart enough to recognize the opportunity.

Shahriar Amin is a full time brand enthusiast who is the creator of the first brand blog in Bangladesh (http://shammograffity.wordpress.com/) where he disburses brand related knowledge for Bangladeshi students and businesses