11/09/09 Editor's note: This is part four of the
Internet marketing series. The previous articles of the series covered behavior targeting, local searches, and persuasion architecture.
Recently, at an Web2.0 event in San Jose, I talked with Sushil
Jah, CEO of OuterJoin, an online marketing company with some very interesting products and services,
OuterJoin provides an Integrated Multichannel Online Marketing (IMON) platform and services that
enables companies to reach both the traditional online media channels as well as the social media channels effectively.
OuterJoin provides a unique buzz marketing service that includes buzz generation
and buzz tracking capability. It also handles conventional online marketing services such as SEO, SEM, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and Web analytics.
According to Jha, the conventional online
marketing focuses on driving traffic to your site. It does not build your brand awareness. For example, SEM is basically online line search advertisement. You pay for the click. When you stop paying, the traffic stops.
Moreover, SEM traffic will flatten out at some point because there are only so many searches for certain key phrases each month. But the PPC (Pay Per Click) cost could go up if other people are also bidding on the same
key phrases. As a result, over time, SEM generated traffic, hence the revenue, will plateau out while the cost could go up. The result is lower profit.
Buzz marketing however can solve both problems.
Buzz generation builds brand awareness in places where people who are interested in your type of product or service congregate. This results in two benefits:
a. It builds brand awareness and create electronic word of mouth (viral) effect which can continue to grow.
b. It drives free traffic to your site.
Consequently, growing brand awareness means more traffic and more revenue while free traffic means your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) goes down. The result is much improved bottom line.
An integral part
of the buzz marketing is buzz tracking. Buzz tracking can uncover users and uses that you may never thought of. This enables you to target those users and uses. Thus generating more brand awareness and more free traffic
and revenue.
Another unique aspect of the OuterJoin service is the ability to provide deeper insights to the users and usage. Web analytics tracks the traffic pattern to and inside your Web site. But it
can not tell you the profile of the visitors. For example, if the visitor is coming from a Google search, it will show a Google URL. Therefore, it does not reveal much about the visitor. However, when combined
with the buzz tracking and the proper landing pages, you can correlate the traffic source that Web analytics gathered with the buzz tracking report and pin point where the visitor is hanging out.
According to Jha, many Web2.0 companies are using OuterJoin's services because generating buzz and driving traffic to their sites are "mission critical" to their business model and existence.
You can check out their services at
