This is the month where Twitter has witnessed a negative growth of 9.4% on its September number which was 28.3 million. If we see year-on-year growth of other two social networking giants LinkedIn and MySpace than we will see a similar decline in the number of unique visitors. MySpace has recorded a negative growth of 20.5%, and it has fallen from 73 million unique visitors to 58 million, and LinkedIn has recorded a 4.7% negative growth, taking its tally from 14.6 million unique visitors to 13.8 million uniques.

Why I think Facebook is killing others?

We all have a finite 24 hours in a day, which we distribute (unevenly) on the works we do, and we have only so much time for social sites or Internet surfing. Seeing the average time spent by users on Facebook, which is in excess of 40 minutes a day, I think, people hardly get time left for other social networks.

Not only that, our habit of unevenly spreading time, also leaves us wanting for more time, which for many could mean cutting back on time spent on the Internet. And as people are more or less addicted to Facebook, time spent on other social sites drops down, which in the long term means, pulling out of these websites.

How they can survive?

For social networks like LinkedIn and twitter, which are not direct competitors of Facebook, developing a Facebook application could be a way, or may be not.

Even the brands loyal have claimed to have stayed away from purchasing their favorite brands. In March 2010, more than 50% said that due to the recession, they did not buy the brand they wanted to.

The categories that were already on the fall, before recession, did not see much of a change, but categories in which brand loyalty was paramount got hit by the recession. Apparels, OTC, and Health and beauty products saw the major decline. These are the categories that had most brand loyalty. See image above for detail.

Shifted to cheaper brands

While answering a question about what the consumers buy if not their preferred brand then they revealed their trading down behavior as well. Coupons, discounts, and freebies were said to be on the decisive factors in preference setting. See image for detail.

Better Business Bureau (BBB) has recently revealed that in 2009, the industry that drew most consumer complaints was cell phone industry. In the year in question, BBB received 1 million consumer complains, which is a 9.7% increase over the complaint volume of 2008.

BBB is a symbol of trust for business on the Internet, and many consumers use this service to research business in 2009. In total, users used the service of BBB 65 million times in 2009 to ensure that the business they are dealing with is trustworthy.

Leading the number of complaints against, the cell phone industry received 37, 477 complaints in 2009, which is an increase of 2.1% over the volume of complaints received in 2008 against this industry. At number two was cable and satellite TV industry with 32,616 complaints and number 3 slot was taken by banks with 29,920 complaints.

In terms of percentage change in number of complaints banking industry rule the roost with 42.3% more complaints over the last year.

There are industries like collection agencies, auto dealers- new cars, and furniture-retail that saw decline in the number of complaints. See the picture for more detail.

]]> http://itlist.com/which-industry-has-the-most-disgruntled-customers/feed/ 0 http://itlist.com/is-online-social-news-killing-newspaper-industry/ http://itlist.com/is-online-social-news-killing-newspaper-industry/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:39:14 +0000 bikram http://itlist.com/?p=2199 The newspaper readership is going down. Perhaps, the readership is at time low. I was wondering, could it be that Google alert, twitter, and other online breaking news services are killing the newspaper? Well, it could be the reason for decline in the newspaper readership. The graying readership is an indication of the trend.

In a poll conducted in December 2009 by Adweek Media and Harris interactive it was found that only people above 55 (64 percent) reads the news paper almost daily, whereas, only 23 percent young people (aged between 18 and 34) reads the news paper daily either online or in print. 17% youth in the same bracket said they never read the newspaper. See the image below for the complete result of the online poll conducted between December 14 and 16, 2009. It has a sample size of 2,136 U.S. adults.

The research will be a major blow to already declining newspaper industry as the major spenders do not read newspaper. The industry should gear up to move into related category before the revenue source dries out, or it should find a way to reinvent itself, if the industry wants to survive the digital blow.

Now internet advertising consists of making a social networking presence.  You need to have a blog, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter account, to really make your company known.  So first things first, set up a company blog.  This will be a resource to write about the goings on with your corporation, and provide insightful social commentary on culturally relevant news.  So you want a decent writer who can write regular, engaging content.

Now you need Myspace and Facebook accounts.  Both are essentially the same, just with minor differences.  Keep the page professional, and a resource to sell products and ideas as well as provide news.  Myspace has been in decline, so that doesn’t have to be as big of a priority.  But at the moment Facebook has been holding strong, and could end up being a great interface with your customers.  Listen to them, and communicate with them.  This way you can learn what selling tactics will work, and what your customers expect from you.

Finally, the Twitter account.  This will probably be the most important, because here is where the most people are going to turn for news and information regarding your company.  Linking a blog with your Twitter and Facebook accounts will create a wealth of resources to contact your customer base, and do your own free research into what they expect.  You grow name recognition, and also get a great customer data tool, all rolled into a few easy to use websites.

SWOT

SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and threat. Strength and weakness is internal to the product, whereas, opportunity and threats are external to the product. We use this matrix to find out strengths and weaknesses of our product, see what opportunity (matching our ability) the market is presenting, and gauge the threats presented by the market.

PLC

PLC stands for Product Life Cycle. A PLC study of your product gives you an idea about what stage your product is in, and what marketing channel and strategy to use. We divide PLC in following parts: introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

Introduction is the phase when the product is introduced to the market, and the organization is striving to create awareness about the product. Profit in this phase is either negative or low.

Growth is the phase in which the product gets acceptance, which results in increase in sales. Profits are high in this phase, and to cash in on the momentum the product has got, organization tends to invest some advertising dollars.

Maturity is the phase when sales start slowing down because most of the buyers have your product. Sales and profit has already passed its peak. Sales and profit may not be increasing but they are steady.

Some marketers divide this phase into early maturity and late maturity to figure out how close the product is to decline phase.

Decline is the phase when sales and profit both starts falling. It could be because the need of the market has changed and some better product is fulfilling that need, or because some other product is meeting the same need at lower cost.

From this phase either the product dies out in oblivion, or get reinvented, reintroduced and pushed on the growth track.

PESTEL

Some call it PEST while other calls it PESTEL. I have taken PESTEL because it is more complete a matrix then PEST. PESTEL is a macro-environment scanning matrix that helps a business find out how the various external factors going to affect it. PESTEL Stands for:

P: Political factors (Policy changes and how it is going to affect you)

E: Economic factors (economic growth, exchange rates, inflation, interest rates, and taxation changes are going to affect your business)

S: Social factors (How does social changes like, education, demographic, occupational, etc., going to affect you)

T: Technological factors (How advent of new technology will affect your business)

E: Environmental factors (How change in climate or rising temperature can affect your business)

L: Legal Factors (how change in legal environment going to affect your low. How much will your business suffer if the carbon emission level is set lower, and government pension plan is made mandatory for every organization, regardless of size?)

PEST matrix analyzes all the factors we discussed above except for the last two.