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.

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave.  He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!