Oh brother where are thou?

Yes, I know. I haven’t updated this blog in ages. I won’t blame it on lack of time, or anything else, lets face it, I’ve been too lazy to update it.

Previous posts on this blog were quite lengthy, and they took some time and research to write. That’s probably why I just stopped posting after some time.

I am going to change the structure a bit now however, and post more frequent about more everyday things that are related to my work at CPerspective, and the online industry in general.

Let’s see if I can keep the tempo up this time..

Social Media Marketing is not always about Client Acquisition

Because of the fact that online marketing is one of the most precise and measurable ways to market products and services, many companies have resorted to only going online to acquire new customers or clients. What these companies are forgetting is that being online gives a chance to dialogue and to do some Brand Monitoring.

A great example of how many companies today are misusing a great marketing tool, due to too much focus on generating customers, is the latest buzz word in online marketing, Social Media Marketing. What many companies see here is a chance to communicate directly with their prospects and clients, and what they do is to push out their offers and promotions. The problem with this is that many people view the Internet and being online as a part of their private life, as private as their own homes if not more. If a company then comes in there and pushes in promotions and offers, it is very likely that they will have next to no success in generating new clients. No one wants to get their private space flooded with promotions and advertisement, that’s something we always need to have in mind when planning campaigns. This is especially true for Social Media Marketing, as many of the websites and forums are very private in the sense that only friends can view profiles etc.; very much in the same way you only let your friends in your house.

Now you might be thinking “if I cannot promote my products to prospects and potential customers through social media, then what good is it for?”. No worries here, there are still many areas where this tool comes in handy. One of the best ways to use social media is to reach out in an honest fashion to prospective customers and see what they think of you and your services. One great example of how this has been done in the past is when chocolate manufacturer Cadbury brought back the Wispa bar after seeing demand from social networks. Their move proved to be a success and is a great lesson in how to use social media.

Another way to use social media sites and networks is to search your own brand name and do some brand monitoring. Many times when customers are disappointed with a product or service, they might not complain to the manufacturer or company, instead they send out their complaints on the web.  Someone might be unhappy with their hotel while some other person is angry that their new phone has broken down. This is a great chance to search such critics and try to convert them into happy customers.

Let’s use Twitter as an example. You can use the Twitter search to see what other people are saying about your brand. Let’s say you run a Hotel called ‘The Sleep & Eat’. Simply put in “The Sleep & Eat” and see what people are saying about you. If you find guests that are unhappy, then contact them directly and offer them some sort of compensation or at least let them know that you are aware of them being unhappy. This is an extremely powerful way of monitoring your brand and increasing customer happiness. You can also use the same concept when doing press releases or news releases of some sort. Just type in your company name and see what reactions you have gotten around the web.

As you might have figured out by now, this strategy is not about directly generating new customers and clients. The brand monitoring is to build a respectable brand and show that you care about your business and customers. By establishing that image in a genuine fashion, the customers and clients will come by themselves.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

CPerspective Sponsors Racing Driver Julien Gerbi

Let me start off by saying I’m sorry for the inactivity throughout the last month. It’s been a hectic period with a lot different things going on in CPerspective. The most interesting happening is probably our new partnership with the very talented racing driver Julien Gerbi. I cannot reveal all details yet but it is a very exciting partnership that has great potential.

The main task for CPerspective will be to help Julien with his online exposure by using our expertise in the field. I personally think it’s really exciting to work with someone that is in a seemingly unrealted industry but sees the enormous potential that online marketing has.

Hopefully we can help Julien to get some more exposure as he kicks ass on the racing tracks around the globe.

Check us out on the front ving:

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

How is CPerspective Ltd Coping With the Economical Downturn?

During the last few months, one reoccurring question has been whether or not I – as the CEO of a smaller web company – have been affected by the economical downturn.  My spontaneous answer to this question is no, not a great deal (at least not yet). I have however seen trends in our clients spending routines and taken some security measures on behalf of CPerspective Ltd.

Since we work globally and represent three larger areas of online marketing (SEO, Web design and Online advertising) we have a pretty broad field of services as well as clients. This makes us very adaptive and dynamic to the clients need and the general ‘health’ of our industry.  If we see negative trends in one market, we can move our focus to another one temporarily. The same goes for our services. Because of the great deal of expertise we have in-house, we have never had any problems with working in a dynamic market; actually, I would say the online industry is always under such a rapid change that if you cannot adapt to it you would not be able to survive no matter what the economical situation is.

During the last 12 months CPerspective Ltd has undergone several changes and modifications. We have added and removed services and partners to our portfolio, changed our in-house routines and also our company profile to name a few. Our philosophy is, and has always been pretty simple; if we provide the clients with great solutions that help them grow their business, they will come back and keep making money from a partnership with us. This ideal has helped us to withstand even in economic hardship, because our clients know that their budgets are safe with us. It might sound big headed or boastful, but I would be lying if I said anything else.
Sure, the last few months we have seen that some client’s have been a bit more reluctant to spend as much as they did before on the same services. This has however been because other companies have lowered their prices, probably as a last desperate measure before collapsing. I would say most our client’s are pretty solid, and they know we are too. This has made our business go on pretty much as usual.

It’s nothing strange that most companies see a larger value in each dollar now, we do too. It’s better to be a bit cautious than to overspend and burn out the budget on bad and risky moves. For example a couple of measures we have taken in CPerspective are to not subscribe to any new services with monthly fees attached, to keep down spend on company electronics such as laptops, phones etc. and also skip a couple of conferences that we could live without attending this year.  We have also looked over our invoicing routines and decided to adjust them as well to put us as a company a bit more on the safe side.

Our measures have not been very extreme our unusual and our work goes on as it always has done (and I hope it will continue to do so). I am sure that most companies in our field will survive as long as they have a long term plan to start with, healthy company values and a dynamic team.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

Illness, Easter and.. CPerspectives New Website is Up!

As you might have noticed I have been somewhat inactive on this blog during the last couple of weeks. The reasons are mainly work overload, a really bad cold and Easter holidays. However, I’m back now and hopefully I can keep posting useful articles regularly again.

During the last couple of weeks the CPerspective Web design team has worked very hard with getting our new website finalized and launched. This has as usually been handled by my friend and colleague – our in-house web design wiz – Anwar. I think he and his team managed to get a very neat site up for us. Check it out: www.cperspective.com

If you have seen our previous websites you’ll see that we have switched our approach somewhat. Previously we we’re really content focused and wanted to provide as much information as possible through our website. We re-evaluated this view however, much based on what Anwar suggested, and chose to instead focus on essential info and actual work we have done. We don’t want our website to be like a miles long sales pitch; that wasn’t really our idea with the previous sites either, they just ended up looking like that due to a somewhat excessive information load. Instead we want our site to be brief but informative. This is why we have chosen to present more visual statistics and through animations.

I think that it in many ways is harder to create a website and logotype for yourselves than to do it for someone else. If you create a website for someone else you can take a rather unbiased point of view while trying to figure out what style might be most suitable. However, when you create a site for yourself you become the spider in the web; you will not be able to transcend your company identity since you will be biased and entangled in it. You will also have to deal with all your coworkers opinions if you are in a smaller sized company. This will make it very hard for the web design team to decide what ideas are good or not, and especially when the ideas come from executives. It’s not always ‘ordinary’ people understand why something is not doable, and this could very well be one of the biggest headaches for any web design team. However, I would honestly give full credit to the CPerspective web design team as they managed their task extremely well.

All in all I’m very happy with our new website, and I hope it will be useful for all our clients and visitors. Visit us at www.cperspective.com.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

Music Streaming Companies Cannot be Funded by Advertising

Came across this interesting article on Techcrunch about Music Startups. It might not be directly relevant to the gist of this blog, but in a way it is. Most of the music stream services such as Spotify, Deezer and Imeem claim that their aim is to provide a free service that is funded by advertising. But how realistic is it that they will be able to do this? Let’s take a look at some numbers and calculations.

Techcrunch writes that the music stream companies pay $0.4 – 1 cent each time a song is streamed. Myspace is probably the company that pays the lowest cost in the industry at $0.4 cents. If Myspace is paying around that amount, then it is very likely that most other streaming services – especially the startups – pay at least twice that. So let’s use the Swedish hype company Spotify as an example. Spotify are not commenting on the number of users they have, but it is likely to estimate the total number to around 1 000 000 users. If only 50% of these users use the service once a day, to listen to one song, and Spotify is paying $0.8 cent for each song then they’re paying $40 000 USD per day or a staggering $280 000 USD per week. Sure, they have their premium service, but since the free version is so good (or good enough) there is no real reason for users to upgrade to premium. The monthly streaming cost for Spotify – given the 50% usage out of 1 000 000 users – ends up being roughly $1,1 million USD.

The question is then; can this be funded by advertising? My answer to that would be no freaking way! You have to remember that there are a lot of other costs to have in mind on a monthly basis as well; the servers and employees just to name a few. Advertising and premium accounts will never be able to fund this. The larger they grow, the higher the costs; it doesn’t seem as the in stream from advertising can catch up with the costs of the company; in a way it’s a paradox because it is slowly bleeding to death as it grows.

Let me show you why it seems impossible for a company such as Spotify to generate their major in stream from advertising:

Spotify is doing some banner adverts directly in the music player, but the idea is to use audio adverts that the user cannot get away from unless they pay for the premium version. However, these two formats combined cannot fund the company. The reason is simple; the calculation above doesn’t even allow a radio jingle to take place, it is the mere cost for one single song. If Spotify charges reasonable radio prices in Sweden for example, they would get around $6 CPT (which is the same as CPM) for a 30 second jingle. So for each 1000 users they reach, the advertiser pay $6 dollar. In Sweden we have around 9 000 000 inhabitants. If Spotify would reach 1 000 000 Swedes they would get $6 000 USD for one campaign with 30 second jingles. But the cost for this reach would be $80 000 USD each time the users listen to one track (1 000 000 / 0.8). This in turn means that for one hour (60 minutes) where 1 000 000 users listen to music nonstop, where one track is 4 minutes in average, the cost ends up being: 60 / 4 = 15, 15 * $80 000  = $1.2 million USD. During this hour they might get in four advert jingles (2 minutes in total), so let’s say they make the most of it and get 4 * $6 000 = $24 000 USD. This is still nothing compared to what that hour has drained from them.

As you can see it is a dead end. If they increase their rates the advertisers will just go elsewhere with their budgets, especially in these days where each marketing penny is spent with the most possible caution. Unless they get some truly amazing deals with the record labels, there is no way they will be able to turn this around. In fact – just as TechCrunch mentions – the music stream companies probably don’t even want people to use their service, because they know each new user means a faster death. This is probably the explanation for why Spotify’s free service has been an invitation only-service for ages. No wonder those invitations were given out so sparsely.

To sum it up; music streaming startups are popping up quite rapidly, and they always seem to bring hype. The service is indeed interesting and you cannot blame entrepreneurs when they do what they’re best at. Sadly it almost seems that the aim of many of these stream service companies today is to just build the hype and then sell off to some major company and let them figure out how to turn things around. If not, then it is even sadder because most of these companies will probably bleed out in a very near future.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency