Viral Marketing with Widgets
- 1. Viral Marketing with Widgets Nizar Jamal CTO Impelsys Inc 1
- 2. Agenda Case Studies Trends & Challenges Formulating your Strategy Questions?
- 3. Who is Impelsys? • From inception till 2008, Impelsys has powered more than 2000 projects for large and small publishers. • We have invested in our core products: iPlatform, VirtualPages and iDAMS and built them over the past 4 years. These products are serving millions of readers worldwide. • We launched iPublishCentral (ipublishcentral.com) as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model leveraging our years of experience. The goal is to bring down costs of delivery so that any publisher can build an online strategy.
- 4. We serve 200+ publishers across geographies & segments.
- 5. Key takeaways from this presentation Experiment Discoverability Control Relationship
- 6. Trends
- 7. Trends in Reading Reading and buying trends of books not encouraging Less than 6 Italians out of 10 read 1 book a month Strong readers, who read one or more books a month, read (possibly buy) more Not including “soft reading” and other types of reading (Source: Elaboration AIE Research Department based on Istat data. doi: 10.1390/gdl1008UK_Reading)
- 8. Trends in Reading Availability of different types of media - vying for reader's attention and wallet-share
- 9. Trends in Reading How do you get to understand your customers? The web is changing consumption and your future markets will change.
- 10. Web is changing reader behavior Trend is towards searching and foraging for information Increased use of Google and Wikipedia for reading and research Bits and pieces of information are weaved together from multiple sources like scent trails (Source: Xerox PARC, http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Eechi/papers/chi2000/scent.pdf)
- 11. Web is changing reader behavior Is making content visible the first step in the solution? Will it provide a strong enough “scent” for people to browse and ultimately buy? Google Book Search
- 12. Web is changing reader behavior You must give the consumers what they need/require Provide content and not “books” From „Merchants of Venice‟ to the „Fashion industry of Milan‟ ?
- 13. Search Trends The number of people searching to know more about ebooks has doubled in the last 4 years according to google trends. Source: Google Trends
- 14. Source: Google Trends (June 22, 2009) http://www.google.com/trends?q=ebook%2C+ebooks%2C+e+book&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=all&sort=1
- 15. Source: Google Trends (June 22, 2009) http://www.google.com/trends?q=ebook%2C+ebooks%2C+e+book&ctab=0&geo=it&geor=all&date=all&sort=1
- 16. Reference Reader Trends Do you prefer using online resources or print for your research, class presentation and instruction? No. of respondents 831 1 in 2 people or around 50% prefer doing research reading online. (Source: Global Faculty eBook Survey, 2007, February (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wS8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)
- 17. Market trends US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales Source: IDPF Industry Statistics (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)
- 18. Consumer Expectation Interactive: Participative: audio, video, animations “I matter and so does my opinion” Cost: Available: Anywhere, Anytime micro-payments (source: www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankfurt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )
- 20. Source: Compete.com http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com+blogger.com/ Source: Compete.com http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/
- 23. Italy Social Technographics Profile Source: Forrester.com http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
- 25. Challenges of going digital Multiple formats, hardware devices, software Which one will win? What formats? How to reach customers and provide content „Anytime‟/‟Anywhere‟?
- 26. Challenges of going digital Production Marketing Tagging/Metadata (how deep?) From Broadcast Time to Market To Conversations
- 27. Challenges of going digital Cost and Risk Cost of experimenting and risk of competition
- 28. Challenges of going digital Challenges in depending on others Who controls it? Who is gaining insights into user behavior? Who understands the market needs? Who can develop products that meet these needs?
- 29. Case Studies
- 30. Anatomy of a Widget Source: Alex Iskold http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/random_house_widgets_and_web_services.php
- 31. Case Study: Harper Collins Browse Inside
- 32. Harper Collins It brings powerful features Amazon, who pioneered offering launched their Browse that retail aggregators, like samples on a large scale in Inside program in 2006, Amazon, offer on their site 2003, reported about 9% becoming one of the increase of print sales across first publisher to do so 120,000 titles in 5 days after the Search Inside capability was available on their site (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ ai_109467316) Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales They were also able to gain valuable insights into Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% what the market wants for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality (http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)
- 33. Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside Browse Inside PDF Free Download Visitors 83,102 20,000 Visits 85,867 30,000 Downloads 0 15,000 Page Views 3,827,306 Avg Page Views per Visit 46 Avg. Visit Duration 15:55 Clicks on Buy Link 1,177 Emailed to a Friend 16,236 (Source: Experiments with free digital content, presented at IDPF Digital Book 2008 by Leslie Hulse, VP Digital Business Development, Harper Collins, http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)
- 34. Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside Source: Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/harpercollins.com+randomhouse.com+eharlequin.com)
- 36. Random House Insight widget 2,824,527 184,444 254, 383 Book Pages Viewed People who have viewed a widget Number of widgets viewed Random House has effectively increased page views and in turn the popularity of their content by being visible (Source: Matt Shatz, IDPF Digital Book2007, http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook07/Matt%20Shatz%20-%20Random%20House.pdf)
- 38. Experiments: Harlequin Source: Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eharlequin.com)
- 39. Experiments: Harper Collins Case Study: Browse Inside MIT Press
- 40. MIT Press, started on iPublishCentral as a beta customer. They helped us refine the system and have been partners in trying out what works and what does not.
- 41. They went live in March 2009 and offer 400 titles for sale in the electronic form through iPublishCentral.
- 42. All that MIT Press needed to launch was their title PDF, ONIX metadata and book covers.
- 43. They now have an electronic book store through which they can sell to institutions and individual subscribers. They also offer free content samples that can travel as widgets.
- 44. Since launch... Nearly 18000+ pages have been previewed
- 45. Since launch, towards the end of March... Visitors from about 180 countries have viewed widgets
- 46. Since launch... Visitors from nearly half these countries have clicked on the widgets to see book preview pages
- 47. Since launch... Total time spent on the book preview pages is 462:34:59 hours
- 48. Since launch... Average time spent per visit is about 4.5 mins
- 49. Since launch... Google alone has crawled through the sample pages more than 3500 times, apart from other search engines
- 50. Since launch… Nearly 2% of unique visitors who saw the preview pages have ended up buying a title
- 51. Formulating your strategy 51
- 52. Why should you experiment? • Others are doing it, so should you • Run your own program, along with other existing strategies – it does not hurt • It helps in gaining visibility and establishing a relationship with your readers • The world is changing and you can leverage this change • Your networks are your future currency
- 53. Increase Visibility • Increase visibility by being available where your readers are • Be relevant and useful • Introduce your books and create brand awareness • Increase page views to gain SEO and SEM • Get insight into what your readers are doing • Offer value to potentially increase sales
- 54. Establish Relationships • Relationships matter • Listen, understand and respond • Own your readers and their mind share • Reach out to readers with news and updates • Word-of-Mouth works and social media is the easiest way to get it started • Targeted marketing is better than broadcast advertising
- 55. Control • Who controls these relationships? • Is it sufficient to have retailers like Amazon and search engines like Google manage them? • How do you build your infrastructure for the future - the investment does not have to be great
- 56. Key takeaways from this presentation Experiment Discoverability Control Relationship
- 57. Thank You Nizar Jamal Email: [email protected]