As I blogged in the past, the fact that the website of Apple’s reps in Israel is not apple.co.il but iDigital.co.il is a big disadvantage for them, since they do not get free traffic from search queries such as “apple.co.il”, “apple in Israel” or “Apple Israel”. Instead, other sites, including this blog, which is ranked at the top of the result set on Google for these queries, are seeing an increase in traffic as the popularity of Apple products in Israel increases over time.
Well, it looks like something is cooking and soon a new home page will be launched. The question I asked myself is, by who: iDigital or Rami Prashove, the current owner of the domain? and what is going to happen to this blog’s traffic?
So, you have decided to present at a conference, spent thousands of dollars on the booth space, renting or shipping equipment, ordering schwags to give away to people, staffing the booth and more. How do you make sure you will get something back? Well, first you need people to talk to and present your product. So, how do you get those?
First, I will start with what you should not do. For that, I am going to use a photo I took last week at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. I have nothing personal against this guy but no wonder his booth is empty. So, never, never, never have a high chair, sit on it and wait for people to approach you.
Instead, stand up, face the people who walk the halls, be proactive and approach them with lines that would get their interest.
At Snap, our director of marketing came with a very simple line: “You need a pen!”. The typical answer is “ha?!” because this is the last thing people expect to hear. But then we pull the trick and show them that our pen also has a very cool flashlight that displays the Snap Shots icon. And once people see the flash light, they walk into the booth just like bees who get attracted to the light.
Which company uses this image as the primary home page image? hint – a web one…
Leave your guesses/answers in comments, I will post the answer tomorrow.
UPDATE: The correct answer is Skype and not IKEA – although it looks like a living room from one of their catalogs. Guy Malachi was the first to answer.
Last week, when I was at the TheMarker COM.Vention in Isreal, I noticed the presence of a very impressive Apple booth on the Expo floor. It was very nice and added to the feeling that this is a true international event (beyond the fact the program was in English and dozens of speakers and many attendees arrived from the US and Europe).
While I was at the Apple booth, I was looking for one of the iDigital mangers to provide some tips & feedback, but since I could not find any of the managers, I will use this post to do it.
Since I first blogged my thoughts about Apple’s web site in Israel, I have been receiving questions and comments from people who visited Israel, purchased an Apple product there, and later on had a need for customer support. Since iDigital’s web site is only in Hebrew they could not find their answer there, and so using the help of Google, these people searched and landed on my blog. I was glad to help as much as I could with basic questions & translations, but did not have answers to all of their questions. So, here’s tip #1 for the iDigital team – create an “English” page with at least “contact us” information. You’d be surprised how many people who do not read Hebrew are looking for a way to contact you.
Anyway, the last question I received was from a woman who was looking for the customer support phone number for iPod, so I visited iDigital’s website and saw that they have recently started offering group workshops and one-to-one training, similar to the training programs that are available at Apple stores across the US. These are great news for Mac users in Israel (but still not for iPhone users since it is not officially sold there yet and therefore not supported) but there is one difference that makes it look somewhat wrong in my point of view – the price.
- Workshops – In the US, group workshops are free and cover a wide range of topics (I sat on a few in the past and learned a lot), but in Israel they cost a small fee and they are limited only to “Introduction to Mac OS”
- One to One – In the US, one to one training personal training costs an annual fee of $99, but in Israel you pay 225 Shekels/hour – roughly $65/hour. I can understand why these private sessions who are done at the client’s house (since there are not Apple stores in Israel) would cost more, but still, the price difference between one to one training is ridiculous.
So here is tip #2 – if you really want to build a market share, look at how things are done where Apple is gaining market share, and then mimic. Only good things could happen if you would do that.
Categories: iPhone, Marketing Tags: Apple, Apple.co.il, COMVention, iDigital, iPhone, Israel, Mac, one-to-one, TheMarker, Training
While I am lying in bed with bronchitis, my colleagues at Snap released our new feature – HotShots.
It is a page that shows the hot, mild and cold links, in a week of activity around the network of 2MM web sites that use Snap Shots. Search engine’s zeitgeist page shows what people are searching for when they start their activity online, while HotShots shows where people link to in their recent posts and articles and how their readers interact with that content.
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch calls it “the linkgeist of the web”. I like that name.
Check it out (make sure you visit every Tuesday evening when an updated version goes live) and visit the Snap Blog to learn more about it.
Technorati Tags: Snap.com,HotShots,Linkgeist,Snap Shots,Zeitgeist
Just received this email from Apple who is using car dealers marketing tactics to get users to try the new MacBook Air. Very smart!
I was just wondering – are we going to see blue, yellow and red balloons rising above Apple stores…?
As Jon Burg said in his post – how powerful would it be if a marketer could get your attention by not screaming at all?
The challenge is to connect an event like this, which captures peoples’ attention, to an ongoing interaction and relationship between the brand and the consumer. Is it possible at all?
Check out this 60 second campaign.
The Israeli music industry has changed a lot in the last ten years. The leading radio station, GalGalatz (Israeli Army Radio #2), created in 1998 the playlist — a list with a limited number of popular songs, selected by powerful music editors, that is being played repeatedly and sets the public taste and opinion. Despite the criticism GalGalatz received, claiming (rightfully IMHO) that they became focused on ratings rather than quality, nothing changed.
These days, Galgalatz gets exclusive rights to play new singles before all other stations which makes them even powerful than ever. The result – small group of musicians, mainly mainstream, get the glory, while others are completely ignored.
But all of this does not matter if you are lucky enough to get discovered by Apple’s marketing folks. This is what happened to Yale Naim, a fairly unknown Israeli singer that made her career in France. One of her latest album’s songs, New Soul, is used as the soundtrack of the new MacBook Air TV ad.
The result is great – she is now on the world’s most popular playlists — iTunes Store (2nd most popular song!) and YouTube (with 1.5MM views as of Feb 1, 2008)!
Macbook Air is not the only creative thing Apple came out with this week.
Today Apple started running a new campaign for Leopard. I saw it on the home page of the New York Times. In this 30 seconds ad (which you will want to watch it again and again – trust me), the PC guy climbs the ladder and breaks out from the Half Page Ad unit to the Leaderboard, hangs the "NOT" sign while talking with Mac and then goes down the ladder. The synchronization between the two ad units is perfect and the experience is fun and engaging.
Can you imagine that? There are web products that are dying to get to the level of user engagement this ad has. Harry up and watch it yourself on NYTimes.com
