Pranav Bhasin

One thing I have always marveled at is the ability of watch companies to market their products. Imagine the odds in front of them:

1) The product was invented in 1800s and has reached a stage beyond innovation ( except for the ones in James Bond movies ) – can’t sell watches based on differentiators anymore.

2) Everyone already owns at least one watch – market is already saturated.

3)  New breed of devices and cellphones make it redundant – who needs a watch when you have a cellphone and are on twitter 24×7.

How much harder can it get? And yet they manage to sell watches by the dozen.

But how? Well, look at the rolex ad on the left for instance. It talks about piano, seduction, soul and what not – none of these have anything to do with a watch. But all of these are words that have been carefully chosen to connect with prospective buyer of this watch.

As I looked at a few more of these ads, one mistake that we internet marketers do often became very clear. As internet marketers, we are often too focussed on selling our product by highlighting how the features our product offers are better than the competition. While this approach works for some companies that grab the attention of sufficient early adopters, most other companies struggle and keep adding on feature after feature in hope of selling their wares.

Its time internet marketers start looking at customers and thinking about what would grab their attention about your product. This will not only make them better marketers, but may also give some brilliant insights about the target segment that would have otherwise been elusive.

Last week, we launched a couple of new features related to photo discovery on lifeblob and I decided to run a campaign on facebook to drive some traffic and see how people are responding to the new stuff.

Today, I looked at the reports and I was shocked to see the rampant click-fraud going on in facebook. And based on what I hear from others who have run similar campaigns, facebook seems to be least bothered about putting any checks on it.

Here is a report from the facebook dashboard for the campaign between 6th Nov to 14th Nov. As you can see, the total number of clicks that we got charged for are 4469.

However, my google analytics dashboard for the same campaign only accounts for 2372 visits from this campaign. Where did the rest of them go? And it is not an abberation on one of the days – the graph below will tell you that actual visits are consistently off by almost 50%.

Have you noticed similar abberations in facebook ads? Leave a note in the comments and lets come together and get facebook to do something about this.

Also, pass this link around so that if any of your friends are running campaigns on facebook, they also become aware that facebook is charging them double for what they offer.

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?