When consumers become consumed, watched and traded

Does the above photo mean anything to you? What about the column on the right hand?

Oftentimes we communicate on the internet for free, consume videos, music, articles etc for free and most importantly give our information for free. But in spite of this entire not-tricky-puzzle, have you figured out why Google is the richest browser if not one of the most profit making companies in the world and yet they give “free services”?

BBC’s Dr Aleks Krotoski and her video The Virtual Revolution: The cost of free is certainly a good exposure.

Believe it or not we give up for free our all for convenient online space but this has enriched browsers like Google and numerous companies (advertisers) just at our mere click on any key word on the browsers. A mere search to a word or topic on say Google makes a massive business between the browser and numerous companies and hence every time we “google” we help them make money.

The funny thing is that about Google’s business is that it sells something that doesn’t really exit as opposed to others who sell tangible products. In simple terms, Google gets massively paid for simply sending traffic to other websites.

Ads by Google. That catchy phrase you often see on Google page and that’s how the browser is making its money. You should have noticed that every time you do a search on Google, there is a section called “Sponsored Links”. Every time you click on one of those links, Google charges a certain amount of money to the website for the click. And when you go on a website you’ll notice advertising from Google too. Virtually every word. So when you click a word say football, several websites of football advertisers pop up on the sides and Google charge a certain amount of money to the website you clicked on and part of that money is given to the webmaster publishing the ads. And I can hardly talk of the power adverts have on our lives. A mere look at it increases our impulse to go for it. Eventually, the product online is not content but your eyeballs looking at the content. This is called AdSense and is an enormous source of income for Google.

As of how advertisers feel the pinch, albeit temporarily because they still make profits from such adverts, a bidding system is used. Yes, bidding because lot’s of companies realises the gold in this business hence the scramble for space. So when you want to advertise with Google, you select keywords you are targeting. Let’s say I do parcel deliveries as above and I want to bring potential customers to my website. I’m going to bid on the keywords “parcels” and “deliver parcels” for example. The price I’m going to pay will depend if there is other companies bidding for that keyword. The more companies are fighting for a keyword, the more I’m going to pay for a single click to my website. So the mathematics involved is Product/Space=Bidder x Quality. So you can envisage that for highly competitive keywords like finance and health it can cost quite a lot of money for a company to advertise with Google.

It therefore does not come as a surprise that Google seems to be everywhere now: They have to show substantial growth to their stakeholders and to do that they have to drive more and more traffic to provide more and more advertisement.

The main cause of concern however, is that this all happens at the expense of our privacy. As we give in almost our every detail on line with the coming of social media as the driver, Google looks at contents of our mails, wishes and likes and links some keywords to some ads that appear on the sides. In other words, every time we read something, a cookie tracking device which gives out information about our range of interests is planted on our computer, allowing Google to customise the adverts it gives us. So our privacy is at stake, and more so when we spend a lot of time online.

So, much as it is hard to dispute the view that the internet is the next Industrial revolution, the main issue is that the product online is not content but your eyeballs looking at the content. Here you can find more information about the Google philosophy and how Google makes money.

A peep into social marketing

To begin with, I cannot claim to be very familiar with social marketing in its broadest sense. But a presentation by Shaun Kidney about a fortnight ago on “Winning Cause Campaigns” gave me even a clearer and more precise idea.

For those who believe in starting from the basics, social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors. The duo defines social marketing as "differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization.

So social marketing can be said to be the systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good and hence seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society."

This technique, according to Kotler and Zaltman, has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for contraceptives and oral rehydration therapy (ORT), and is being used with more frequency in the United States for such diverse topics as drug abuse, heart disease and organ donation.

This means that marketing itself can influence above and beyond the marketing department, into people’s lives. For example to bolster its social marketing activity, Drinkaware sought the services of a PR/advertising agency to “help provide strategic counsel in addition to creative implementation” to help it move from general awareness campaigns to driving behavioural change among binge-drinkers. As a result, alcohol consumption was recorded to continue to fall, with 2009 the sharpest year-on-year decline since 1948, according to figures from the British Beer & Pub Association.

This is in tandem with the fact that social marketing calls for behaviour change, and not just attitude change. Consequently, persuasion approach is promoted and this props up change by creating opportunities for self-persuasion; and makes the audience feel good about change.

So just like PR practitioners, marketers have the opportunity to use their skills to influence throughout and beyond business. This can help them be seen as more than the department that spends money and it can encourage CEOs to use their skills more broadly. Additionally, marketers can be working for the benefit of society and not solely towards commercial gain.

Justin Basini: Make a fair return on your activities

For Justin Basini, who has held senior marketing roles at Capital One and Deutsche Bank, [social] marketing should focus on how business behaves in society, which he claims is a broader and more influential role than it currently is.

“Businesses need to make a fair return on their activities, but they also have a responsibility to drive positive social outcomes as a byproduct of their activities. Through this they can act for the common good,” said Basini in the Marketing Week of 10 September, 2010.

Examples to substantiate this are numerous. Marketing expertise helped oil company Shell reduce the accident rate of its drivers in Pakistan by using internal insight to create interventions to get its truck drivers to be more careful on the road; the NHS to reduce the number of women smoking when pregnant by focusing on their well-being and not just of the unborn baby, and Sainsbury’s to more than halve the number of plastic bags given out in its supermarkets. Significantly, none of these projects used paid-for media, rather the skills of marketers were enlisted to change behaviour.

So just like commercial marketing, the primary focus in social marketing is on the consumer--on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the "marketing mix." This refers to decisions about 1) the conception of a Product, 2) Price, 3) distribution (Place), and 4) Promotion. These are often called the "Four Ps" of marketing. Social marketing also adds a few more "P's" in the name of publics, partnership, policy and purse strings.

Talking of publics, we should always remember that there are many publics including Latent publics- low in problem recognition and involvement; Aware publics- high in problem recognition, varying involvement and constraint and Active publics- high in problem recognition and low in constraint, hence planning, understanding and then segmenting the audience will always remain of paramount importance.

With partnerships, we should always be aware that coalitions trump solo acts hence partnerships are inevitable if cause campaigns are to be won using social marketing.

The model below may also help understand social marketing.

Additional reading:

http://www.social-marketing.com/Whatis.html

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/

Transparency: the next PR industry pillar

In this blog this week, we will look at a webcast I produced as part of my assignment. The assignment asked us to assume that we are the planning director of a PR agency. The MD of the agency has suggested that we produce a short webcast to the agency’s current and prospective clients that introduces them to an issue/trend in public relations. I therefore chose transparency as an important trend in the PR industry in coming years that will change the industry for the better and hence improve its reputation. I hope you will enjoy it.


Thanks for watching. Feel free to leave comments and make sure to stay tune for more issues in PR