With a career in advertising, marketing and branding building in the era where digital content/technology plays an import role. I believe that at the end of the its efficient use to technologies to communicate. A lot of clients discuss with me on SEO, Website with Google Ranking etc. All the technological jargon fed by technically sound people who are unaware of the art of marketing. Its communication, the effectiveness to respond to your customers queries, is what makes a brand. Over the years it was verbal and inter-personal. Today it is non-verbal with virtual presence. Like wise I came across an Article By Rob LoCascio who is a founder of LivePerson. What he says is exactly what i Practiced and Perfected with my approach for building Customer Relationship and Brand for Lenovo Nepal, Megatech, Asian Batteries, Western Digital, even Family Planning Campaing – Smart Jeevan (USAID Project by HC3) When we had the task to establish these brands in Nepal, we did not have advertising budget like our competitors Dell (Golcha/Neoteric) had. All we had was Facebook. We did not even have paid/sponsored ads. With constant communications using twitter and facebook we built these brands. Customers trusted us against the lower priced products which were unauthorized/refurbished. Even if it was sold at/by the Golcha Organisation/Neoteric Nepal. While doing the Smart Jeeva, we had people make consultation via our social media handles. (Read about it) With Western Digital, we fought refurbished hard drives, created market for industry/task specific hard drives. (CCTV/Green Drives/Server Drives and even Partner Motivations) In Asian Batteries we had constant communication with our customers when they asked for information on their Power Backup requirements. We even created a mobile phone app to address their concerns. Constant communication to solve there curiosity,doubts, inquires resulted in fostering a good relationship. A good relationship became good synergistic partnership and that resulted in good business and eventually a strong brand presence. (Quietly but strongly) Here is the article that says the sudden death of the website. True because everyone is obsessed in following the rule instead of wanting to stand different, risk being different. Because then there is no one to compare the cost and return of investment. Here is the article:::: You may not know me or even my company, LivePerson, but you’ve certainly used my invention. In 1995, I came up with the technology for those chat windows that pop up on websites. Today, more than 18,000 companies around the world, including big-name brands like T-Mobile, American Express, Citibank and Nike, use our software to communicate with their millions of customers. Unlike most startup founders who saw the birth of the internet in the mid-1990s, I am still CEO of my company. My longevity in this position gives me a unique perspective on the changes that have happened over the past two decades, and I see one happening right now that will radically transform the internet as we know it. When we started building websites in the mid-’90s, we had great dreams for e-commerce. We fundamentally thought all brick-and-mortar stores would disappear and everything dot-com would dominate. But e-commerce has failed us miserably. Today, less than 15 percent of commerce occurs through a website or app, and only a handful of brands (think: Amazon, eBay and Netflix) have found success with e-commerce at any real scale. There are two giant structural issues that make websites not work: HTML and Google. The web was intended to bring humanity’s vast trove of content, previously cataloged in our libraries, to mass audiences through a digital user experience — i.e. the website. In the early years, we were speaking in library terms about “browsing” and “indexing,” and in many ways the core technology of a website, called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), was designed to display static content — much like library books. But retail stores aren’t libraries, and the library format can’t be applied to online stores either. Consumers need a way to dynamically answer the questions that enable them to make purchases. In the current model, we’re forced to find and read a series of static pages to get answers — when we tend to buy more if we can build trust over a series of questions and answers instead. The second problem with the web is Google. When we started to build websites in the ’90s, everyone was trying to design their virtual stores differently. On one hand, this made them interesting and unique; on the other, the lack of industry standards made them hard to navigate — and really hard to “index” into a universal card catalog. Then Google stepped in around 1998. As Google made it easier to find the world’s information, it also started to dictate the rules through the PageRank algorithm, which forced companies to design their websites in a certain way to be indexed at the top of Google’s search results. But its one-size-fits-all structure ultimately makes it flawed for e-commerce. Now, almost every website looks the same — and performs poorly. Offline, brands try to make their store experiences unique to differentiate themselves. Online, every website — from Gucci to the Gap — offers the same experience: a top nav, descriptive text, some pictures and a handful of other elements arranged similarly. Google’s rules have sucked the life out of unique online experiences. Of course, as e-commerce has suffered, Google has become more powerful, and it continues to disintermediate the consumer from the brand by imposing a terrible e-commerce experience. I am going to make a bold prediction: In 2018, we will see the first major brand shut down its website. There also is a hidden knock-on effect of bad website design. As much as 90 percent of calls placed to a company’s contact center originate from its website. The journey looks like this: Consumers visit a website to get answers, become confused and have to call. This has become an epidemic, as contact centers field 268 billion calls per year at a cost of
