The 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing Blog

Apple worth more then Google, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook combined!? August 28, 2012 – 11:58 am				Damjan Dano

Up until recently, the most valuable company in the history of modern business was Microsoft, with market valuation at $620.58 billion back in the 1999 – when they were doing things the right way… but since the evolution of the iPhone, the iPad and now possibly the Apple TV, the “most valuable company in history” throne has been taken by Apple, valued at approximately $623 billion.

Valued at this amount, Apple is worth more than Google, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook combined! Below are their market evaluations taken from Yahoo! Finance and visualized by the statistics portal Statista:

Even if the numbers are not the exact match to the real world situation and might not be properly adjusted for inflation, they are pretty close to the real value of the companies…

Why is Apple so different and what is the company doing right?

Here are few things out of many that I think Apple is doing JUST right:

1) They do a great market research and know what customers really want – and they know how to present it!
- When Bill Gates introduced the tablet PC, the world didn’t really care, but when Jobs re-introduced the improved “tablet PC” iPad the world went crazy…

2) Understanding marketing and NOT cutting-out of marketing budgets when market goes in downturn
-  Apple understands the marketing industry very good, from guerrilla marketing to social media, they are staying on top of things. They are even controlling brand exposure and marketing efforts internationally – every campaign that goes must follow strict brand standards (like for example> No Flash banners) and must be approved by the corresponding marketing department.

3) Investing into R&D
- Apple set the standards for many things, they created modern products that people adore… in order to do this, a lot of hrs need to go into research and product development and Apple makes sure of that.

4)  Pushing the limits and don’t applying the “regular rules”
- Like Steve Jobs, many people in Apple are visionaries that don’t believe in the regular set of rules and are prepared to shift the market and consumer’s perceptions.

5) Believing in quality over quantity
- Apple believes in quality over quantity, even though they do have huge factories in China and all around the world, they would rather make people wait for their desired Apple product then to go with higher supply.

Ofc, no need to say that many other things make Apple such a great company – from trade operations to  what not… but I outlined my personal favs above.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Business News, eCommerce, Marketing, Mobile (Pillar 7), Online PR, Public Relations, World | No Comments »
Tags: apple, best companies, best IT companies, ebay, facebook, google, Ipad, iphone, Microsoft, most valuable company, Yahoo

Facebook is rolling out new features and marketers are rolling their eyes August 22, 2012 – 5:52 pm				Damjan Dano

Today the largest social network made few updates to their Open Graph platform… it allowed users to tag their friends in 3rd party apps like social games (ex: FarmVille) and geo-location apps (ex: FourSquare)… it also announced that sponsored links will be shown in user’s searches on Facebook.com.

Now your friends can tag you on 3rd party apps and you will receieve the notifications about the tag – via a Mention or Action method.

The difference between these two is outlined below:

This feature will not be added by default, users will give permissions for tagging to the apps, the same way they do now when they want to interact with some app. (tip: If you currently have some active apps on your profile, in order to use this you’ll need to renew the permissions, you can do that with  going to Account settings > Apps).

The second update marks a direct poke from Facebook to Google (maybe because of this Google is running around crazy), and will allow businesses to bid for user’s query in the search box and results page like shown in the image below:

While the tagging feature update is clearly a long awaited and requested from the 3rd party app providers and many users, the second feature update is clearly a shot to make the shareholders happy and to bump the price of current low-performing stock on the market.

Most likely the first feature will be accepted very well by the users, and the second one will likely be highly ignored with very low click-throughs as most of the current sidebar ads on Facebook. I have trouble figuring out why Facebook – platform that has tons of data and behavior patterns for all of us, still can’t figure out how to make money and how to properly integrate semantic marketing and targeting, but are copying some old-school concepts.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Business News, Content Marketing (Pillar 1), Digital Media (Pillar 4), eCommerce, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Online PR, Pay Per Click (PPC), Public Relations, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: Digital Media (Pillar 4), facebook, Facebook marketing, foursquare, google, Internet Marketing, search marketing, semantics marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), social networks, tagging, tags

Project Re:Brief – Redefining online marketing March 19, 2012 – 11:21 am				Damjan Dano

Project Re:Brief is Google’s latest initiative to expand the reach and awareness of digital marketing through re-adapting couple of the most epic marketing campaigns in the history of advertising for the new, modern audience that spends enormous amounts of time online and is constantly connected thanks to the latest gadgets and technology.

As Google states on the project’s website, internet advertising turns 18 years-old this year, but even after two decades of existence and constant innovation, digital ads are used simply to inform more than they’re being used to connect, engage and entertain.

Taking Coca Cola’s “Hilltop“, Volvo’s “Drive it like you hate it“, Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and Avis’ “We try harder” campaigns, Google’s team of experts will try to re-imagine these iconic campaigns for the digital age.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Business News, Interactive Marketing, Public Relations, SEO / Search Engine Optimization (Pillar 3), Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: Advertising, brief, digital ads, digital advertising, digital marketing, digital media, google, Internet Marketing, Marketing, online ads, re:brief

Drowning in e-mail? You’re not alone. February 14, 2012 – 7:41 pm				Damjan Dano

Another awesome infographic on the topic of e-mail communication, developed by the Boomerang for Gmail tool that helps you schedule an email to be sent later.

The infographic shares insights from 5 million analyzed e-mails and explains that the average e-mail user received 147 messages every day, and spends around 2 hours on e-mail daily. Which is a lot of time!

Many other interesting details worth reading are included in this graphic:

Couple months ago I’ve read an interesting and controversial article in the news about a former French finance minister, now CEO of Atos Origin, one of the largest IT companies in France, who gave it’s employees 18 months to adapt a practice of not communicating via e-mail.

After the deadline, the company will only communicate via phone, IM chat and in person communication.

The decision by the executive Tiery Breton was made after analyzing over 200 company e-mails and concluding that only 10% of the e-mails are valid and useful, while the rest are distraction. They also concluded that employees are spending from 5-20 hrs a week only on e-mails,

What’s your opinion on this topic? It’s certainly an interesting discussion. How do you handle e-mail?

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Blog Marketing, Business News, eCommerce, Email Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Online PR | No Comments »
Tags: best time to e-mail, drowning in e-mail, e-mail, e-mail response rate, marketing comm, marketing communication, sending e-mails, when to send e-mail

Daily Deals will Die by 2016, says Forrester’s report November 21, 2011 – 7:47 pm				Damjan Dano

By 2016, advertisers will be spending $77 billion on interactive marketing, as much as they do on TV nowadays, the interactive marketing components (SEM, display ads, mobile, e-mail marketing and social media) will grow to 35% of all advertising spend as they get highly involved in the marketing mix, and the daily deals will switch from winners to losers… these are some of the interesting predictions in the latest US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016 published by the Forrester Research Group.

The forecast, free to download, explains that in the upcoming years, advertisers will spend more money on interactive marketing because of the excitement about emerging media, the effectiveness of the interactive marketing and the overall customer obsession with online media and mobile devices.

The report contains many interesting predictions, some of them a bit controversial and very doubtful, but still worth taking them in consideration when working on your next strategies and business spending.

Beside concentrating on the mobile and social media expansions, one part of the report that I really was surprised to see was the prediction that the daily deals would die.

The reason for this statement, Forrester is putting in these words:

“Standing out above the clutter becomes harder for marketers as ad exposures grow. So some marketers unable to differentiate will rely on spontaneous coupons through more and more urgent Groupon-like “daily deals” as one way to drive notice. Consumers will grow so conditioned to micro-impulse offers that they’ll lose practice at considered decisions — in all walks of life, not just when buying spa treatments. Facing a cultural descent into maladroit judgment, employers (and spouses) will blacklist impulse deals to keep people intentional.”

Controversal, but yet very interesting forecast. What do you think?

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Business News, Digital Media (Pillar 4), Interactive Marketing, Marketing, web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
Tags: daily deals, forrester, forrester research, Interactive Marketing, marketers, marketing agency, marketing company, moble marketing

R.I.P. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011 October 6, 2011 – 4:57 am				Damjan Dano

Last night, the former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, died. Not only that Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, but also the world has lost an amazing human being.

In moments like these there is no much to say… so I’ll just quote one of the old Apple ads:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Business News | No Comments »
Tags: apple, apple ceo, jobs, rip steve jobs, steve jobs, steve jobs death, steve jobs rip

Welcome back Delicious! September 27, 2011 – 4:53 pm				Damjan Dano

The two YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen through their mutual company Avos, are now restarting the famous Delicious, web service for bookmarking and sharing that they recently bought from Yahoo.

The refreshed version of this service keeps a lot of the same characteristics that in the past attracted millions of users, but it also features a lot of new additional settings and options, making this good-old website even more attractive to active web users.

The YouTube co-founders consider this website a new one, completely redesigned with new homepage and interface. They add that the idea behind Delicious is to keep it’s original purpose, but they seriously plan to fix the way users find out new links and web destinations.

Through settings and features such as “Stack”, users will be able to group their favorite links, which later they can share with other friends and Delicious users. The collection can be public and other users can subscribe to it and get notifications every time new website is added to the stack. Each of the stacks can feature their own profile images and description.

The new Delicious also introduced improved tags and keeps all the past API calls the same.

As an active Delicious user, I’m very happy to see this refreshed version and even happier to know that this website is no longer in the hands of Yahoo, which is really surviving some tough times… but that’s really a discussion for some other times.

Check out this video with on the new Delicious.com:

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Business News, Interactive Marketing, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), UX & Website Design (Pillar 2), web 2.0 | No Comments »
Tags: avos, bookmarking, chad hurley, delicious, delicious welcome back, delicious.com, new design, web, web 2.0, web designw, web service, YouTube, youtube co-founders, youtube cofounders

Microsoft’s New Operating System Windows-8 Developer Preview in both x86 and x64 September 15, 2011 – 2:54 pm				Mohsin Sharief

Microsoft starts to promote its next Windows operating system at the Developer-focused, ‘BUILD’ conference in Los Angeles, CA. The Company is guiding and encouraging software developers to create new applications for the next generation operating system.

Steven Sinofsky, President of Windows says that a device with an old Atom processor and 1GB RAM would be enough to run Windows-8, even Windows-7 can run well on that configuration. Windows-8 has improved on system performance and speed on more powerful devices – tablet computers, Mobile Devices, desktop and laptop PC’s. The operating system which is due to released in 2012, works with ARM low power processors. The company will soon reveal details on the chips that will be integrated into desktop and laptop machines.

Microsoft Corp. is also planning to launch its own marketplace; “Windows Store” for Tablet PC’s as well mobile devices. It is being introduced with number of Metro-style apps. The company is ahead of its growing competition in the mobile device and Tablet sectors.

Microsoft President Steven Sinofsky showcased some of the new changes at BUILD. Internet Explorer’s new version-10 will be able to switch between the standard desktop view and Metro style UI. The design language applications of Windows-7 are now easily compatible to run through Windows-8 devices. Sky-Drive storage supports integrated cloud based applications like Mail, Calendar and apps with the user’s Windows Live ID, which will have the new Metro UI process.

Windows has been controlling its growth due to market competition. The global market for Desktop Systems and laptops are slower than in the past, whereas for tablets – they are expected to reach over 70 million at the end of this year and grow up to 300 million in 2015.

For more discussions and conversations about Windows-8, please head over to the forums: http://win8.ms/forums

Posted by Mohsin Sharief
Posted in Business News, Digital Media (Pillar 4), In The News, Mobile (Pillar 7), Mobile Applications, News | No Comments »
Tags: Build 2011, build2011, developer conference, IE10, Microsoft Windows 8, operating system, OS, Steven Sinofsky, Win 8, Windows 8 Developer Preview

LinkedIn Stats & Demographics, July 2011 August 8, 2011 – 9:57 am				Damjan Dano

After the recent IPO, LinkedIn decided to post their financial results and stats for the second quarter of 2011. During Q2, LinkedIn managed to get record amount of users, unique visits and pageviews.

With more than 115,8 million users and counting, about 61% increase compared to same period last year, and revenue of $121 million in Q2/11, compared to $54,9 million in 2010,  this professional social network is really onto something….

Check out the following First Earnings Announcement PPT by Jeff Weiner and Steve Sordello for more details on how this social network is becoming a key player in the online business world:

Furthermore, take a look at the following PPT by Amodiovalerio Verde, in which he outlines some very interesting stats about LinkedIn, such as:

• 58,5% of the 116 million users are male
• The users from the following 10 countries represent 80% of all LinkedIn members: US, India, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, France, Australia, Italy and Spain
• About 68% of users come from Europe and North America
• Almost 50% of the users have titles such as managers, principals, owners, CEOs or vice presidents
• About 40% of the users work in companies with more than 10,000 employees

For more LinkedIn facts, check out:

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in blog, Business News, Digital Media (Pillar 4), Interactive Marketing, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), web 2.0 | No Comments »
Tags: LinkedIn, linkedin business network, linkedin demographics, linkedin first earnings, linkedin ipo, linkedin marketing, linkedin statistics, linkedin stats, linkedin users, linkedin.com, social networks, statistics

Proper Marketing Research July 18, 2011 – 2:38 pm				Sivaiah

Carrying out market research should always include competitor activity. Before making any major business decision, it would be a mistake not to have complete marketing information.  Information is made available by either demographics or in a statistical manner. Taking customer’s feedback and conducting surveys and questionnaires help a great deal in proper market research. In today’s market it is very important to know how to reach your customer in a cost effective manner. The following points help in carrying out a perfect market research and can help small businesses to achieve success and growth.

• Customer profile and mix
• Product mix
• Demographic issues and trends
• Future regulatory and legal effects
• Prices and values, and customer perceptions in these areas
• Competitor activities
• Competitor strengths and weaknesses
• Customer service perceptions, priorities and needs
• Communication
• Network
• Public Relations

When exploring the above, include primary research on local and niche areas, as it can help in providing a more thorough assessment. It is also important to adopt social media marketing plans and other digital strategies that are vital in competing and succeeding in today’s market. Understanding the competitors market helps industry growth as well as the growth for the demand of your products and services.

Posted by Sivaiah
Posted in Business News, Marketing | No Comments »
Tags: Marketing, marketing strategies, Marketing Techniques, Techniques