First, a little about the ‘The Second Floor’. The Second Floor now rechristened as the T2F 2.0 is the brainchild of Sabeen Mahmud, a sort of a social entrepreneur. The brand is positioned to be a haven for intellectual pursuits, from book-reading to Singing workshops to Entrepreneurial seminars, it aims to be in the thick of creative endeavors of the city.

This session was coordinated by Jehan Ara, the president of PASHA in the absence of Sabeen Mahmood.

Here are the highlights of what transpired at the event:

(Shahjehan kicked off his presentation with the famous social media video that has become the norm at all such events:

• How many users are there on Facebook in Pakistan?
• About 1 million and the numbers are increasing exponentially.

• That’s the paradigm shift in cyberspace. With the proliferation of social media platforms, news spread instantly, virally and exponentially.
• I can try any brand and then blog about it and hundreds of people would know about it right away.

• A product can make or break by a single post from the user because everyone is connected to everyone else.

• Social media has stirred changes in publication in the following way:
  • Publish:  Infinite as opposed to few
  • Comment: Feedback as opposed to Monologue
  • Share: Viral as opposed to limited distribution

• If HBL for instance provides unpleasant customer service to just one person like me, I can spread negative word of mouth in the online arena and within no time HBL will have a serious problem just because of one disgruntled customer.

• However, you just cannot write something about a brand or a person and get away with it. When you are writing for a publication in the real world, credibility is neither established nor wiped away instantly, but online the entire world can comment on your article and everyone else can see what the others have said about it. So credibility is quickly built up or destroyed virally solely by the commentators of the article who themselves may not be the experts.

• As an entrepreneur if you are thinking what am I going to say to my customers online, then you are asking the wrong question. What the customers are saying about you is a more pertinent question.
• How to create enormous value for your business at virtually zero cost is a real possibility and ought to be the ultimate aim of any business aiming to use social media.

• T-Shirt Wars (Showed the video on Youtube) is a video made by a couple of budding entrepreneurs on a shoe-string budget and yet it has been able to generate enormous interest, having 4 million views to date.

• In contrast brands like Mobilink and Telenor spend crores to generate the same level of interest.

• The new mantra is to create an experience around your brand to engage the consumer instead of just communicating the message which is a fundamental flaw of marketing of today’s era that communication wins customers.

• The fundamental mistake of advertising is that repetition works. Of media is that content is king.

• Offering a platform to the consumer to interact and engage in the brand, generating his own content along the way is the new age strategy.

• Facebook is most effective in spreading information because of the news feed feature. Anything one person updates or writes about gets permeated to all the connected people. But the new itself ought to be enticing enough so that people pass that down to their connections.
• Coke Studio was a culturally relevant product which appealed to this connected world, becoming a mega-hit in the social media sphere and not because it was produced by Coke.

• In networked markets where there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, e-zines and what not on every topic under the sun, the commodity which will be the most scarce is Attention. You get the attention of the consumer and you’ve made it in the new world. Hence this is the age of Attention Economy.

• The best way to get the attention of your target market is to engage them in something that excites them. Threadless, a small start-up was able to do just that by offering customers the opportunity to design their own shirts which threadless would then manufacture.

• Daily Fashionist is doing well on Facebook having made 70,861 fans.

• However, as a small start-up don’t expect to reach this number anytime soon and that also without spending money. If you want to be popular on Facebook having a large number of fans, you need to advertise on facebook.

• And without a huge number of fans, you cannot expect to create a viral campaign. Just don’t expect to create a facebook page, put all your friends on it as fans and expect to go viral any news you put in your network no matter how good it is.

• Until and unless you have at least thousands of fans for your brand, you cannot create a viral campaign on Facebook.

• The good news is that advertising on Facebook in Pakistan is extremely cheap. For just a $100 or so, you can generate a lot of fans provided you advertise the right way. Instead of directing your target market to your website, you should direct them to your facebook profile and urge them to become a fan. That way you can stay connected to them and entice them with good offers as opposed to making them visit your website where they’ll just visit once and forget about it.

• Also while creating the ad campaign on facebook, choose the CPC (Cost per click) instead of CPM (Cost per impressions) because by choosing the former you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. In the latter option you would have to pay for every impression generated which is a waste of money because if you bid too low, facebook won’t show the stats of the impressions that your ad got.

• Also while choosing the target audience, don’t choose the sex. For instance if you choose female, chances are you’ll end up with a very low turnout. It’s best to choose all options under Pakistan. That way you’ll have the maximum possible reach.

• On an average expect to pay Rs. 3 to 10 per fan. But that can wary enormously depending upon a number of variable. For instance a brand about fashion and style is going to generate a lot of fan following because these are the topics dear to the Pakistani heart especially women.

• Facebook advertising in Europe and USA is very expensive, and if the same rates are applied here as well, then you would be better off using the traditional modes of marketing.

• Remember that fans on facebook do not necessarily translate into sales. You have to engage the fans in a meaningful way for you to cajole the fans into buying your brand.

• Twitter although an effective viral tool in the world is not so in Pakistan because not many people here use it. You need to have a critical mass on a particular platform for it to be effective. Until more Pakistanis embrace, it won’t.

• The same goes for Youtube. Do a search for Pakistani videos on Youtube and you would be hard pressed to find a single meaningful one. That’s because Pakistanis are not that active on Youtube and most of the videos they themselves refer are foreign videos.

This was just a brief account of what Shahjahan presented at that talk.

Now, the brand valuation of the brand that is Shahjahan Chaudhary. Shahjahan is one of those budding entrepreneurs that are specialist in a field that didn’t even exist a few years ago. But he’s sensible enough to know that promoting yourself the traditional way in the real world is still the best possible strategy. Giving presentations and interacting with people face to face still reigns supreme, and he’s capitalizing on that to build his personal brand.

However, he does need to spruce up his presentation style. Nothing wrong with his delivery or confidence, it’s just that his presentation sounded more like a lecture in the university rather than an allusive speech on social media. Captivating the audience for two hours straight is no child’s play, and to capture their attention even for brief moments of time within that time frame is no mean task. He was able to do it for small bouts interspersed in dull passages of time, which was evident from the audience’s body language.

To be fair he did manage to engage the audience in the dying moments of the workshop and ended on a high note. Plus he was candid enough to state the ground reality about facebook instead of raising it to the altar of invincible success. He was forthright about the pitfalls and limitations of facebook and other social media tools which most other ‘social mediapreneurs’ won’t tell you about. He even explained about how to advertise on facebook on your own instead of seeking his help.

What he needs to do is instead of just explaining things like ‘being honest is going to be effective in the social media sphere’ or giving hypothetical examples, give concrete examples. The shirt wars and threadless were good examples. He needs to inundate his presentation with such examples, giving an example for each point he’s making, preferably even giving examples from his own experience. People warm up to you when they hear about your own success or failure story.

Shahjahan got off to a good start showing the famous social media video, but then he launched in a sort of monotonous lecture devoid of real-world cases. Even the slides were bland at most.  The slideshow is available on slideshare. Judge it yourself.

The thing is, if you lose your audience in the first five minutes, you’ve lost them forever.

To Shahjahan’s credit he managed to recapture his audience to an extent. And every time he piqued the interest of his audience, it was either due to a real example or a pragmatic way to boost up their business, and that’s exactly what he should be doing for majority of his presentation.

The most mindboggling thing about this whole event is its lack of coverage, let alone mainstream media, even online. The most amazing thing is that there’s no post-event review even on the organizers’ websites, t2f 2.0, PASHA or on Jehan Ara’s blog even though she seemed to be filming the whole event. There’s no video on Youtube.  Then there were quite a few people from the media side including Dawn and Synergizer yet no one bothered to cover the event online.Maybe there is some sort of mention of it in the dark recesses of the net, which is as good as non-existent.

Then Shahjehan has a blog of his own by the name of Billion Dollar Workshop which he seems to have abandoned after just a single post more than two years ago. If he’s not going to be using it anymore, he ought to completely delete it instead of letting it stay in a state of limbo because it’s showing in the search results. You don’t want any material floating around that doesn’t augment the brand image that you are trying to project, not if you can help it.

Bottom-line: You need to capitalize on every available opportunity to promote your brand even if it’s just a presentation in the real world or a blog in the virtual world.

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The fact it’s a strong brand can be proven in many ways. For starters, it follows the laws of branding more than any other FM channel. Most of them strive to be everything to everyone, one of the most common fallacies committed by any brand in any industry, whereas CityFM89 strictly adheres to the law of focus whereby it tries to cater to a  specific niche.

The second reason it can be deemed a full-fledged branded radio channel is its shrewd marketing strategies which woo the top brands to it in spite of the fact that it’s target base is nothing compared to channels like FM103 and FM100.

A.C Nielsen FM channel research

A.C Nielsen fm channel research

Not the most popular channel, huh? And yet it has been able to make brands want a piece of it. That’s the ultimate aim of any branding endeavor – to make your consumer crave for your brand. Whether the underlying reason for this change of fortune is its marketing manager Munizeh Sanai or someone else is not known.

But exactly how they are making it happen? By coming up with branding ventures that are cost-effective and yet appealing enough for the target market. For instance there was the ColdPlay Concert Tickets contest sponsored by the new Toyota Corolla, then there was the Valentine’s brand campaign ‘Have love, Will travel’.

The latest to hit the market is the ‘Spotlight’ : The Chance to become Pakistan’s next singing sensation sponsored by Nokia’s 5230.

But the event under scrutiny in this article is the ‘Win a Macbook’ Contest, the prize for which is a MacBook. Now they haven’t mentioned which one of Apple’s laptop they are referring to, whether it’s a high end product or just a low end one, but then a MacBook is a MacBook and of all the prizes offered by CityFM89 till now, this one looks to be the most lucrative of all.

Win a Macbook on CityFM89

Normally CityFM89 doesn’t advertise their contests much over the boob-tube or even the print media, confining themselves to just the radio medium and the website. This time however, they went one step ahead and made a small TVC which they placed on, guess where, Dawn News channel, their sister concern. It makes perfect sense, considering they probably didn’t have pay a single penny for this endeavor. The only problem is, there is a disparity between where the target market is likely to be found and the placement of the ad. The target market is primarily the teenagers and at most 20something. Now these segments are unlikely to be watching Dawn News. Even if they do, they do it for very brief interval of time, and considering the frequency of the Macbook ad, chances are they are going to miss it altogether. A far better option would have been to target channels like Aag, Play TV, Oye TV, The Musik and the likes. That would have cost money, but then there’s a cost for everything.

The reason we are emphasizing so much on the penetration of the ad is that the contest hasn’t caught on in spite of the allure of the Macbook. The biggest indicator of this lack of response is the fact that the management of CityFm89 has extended the deadline for the submission of entries to more than 1 month, from 5^th February to 15^th March. Now that is something very strange. Even stranger is the fact that even now CityFm89 hasn’t increased the frequency of the TVC on Dawn News.

The reason CityFm89 didn’t really pour money into the contest popularity was the fact that they were banking on word of mouth online to spread the news around. And they pretty much covered most bases online to make it happen. Just Google the phrase and you’ll get an idea of how much interest the contest has generated in cyberspace. The epicenter of this interest online is Facebook.

And yet, something has not gone right. Either that or  CityFm89 was expecting an overwhelming response to this campaign and the result, although good enough, is not enough for the management of CityFm89. After all, they are dishing out a MacBook as a prize. They probably want more bang for their buck.

It could be, the response hasn’t been dazzling not because the marketing strategy was flawed but because the contest itself hasn’t tickled the fancy of the target market. So what exactly is the contest?

Basically, the participant has to unleash his creativity and submit a unique story that could fit into one A4 size paper. It could be anything – story, article, poetry, illustration – anything at all, provided it is not plagiarized. 20 top entries will be included in a publication while the winner amongst this lot would get the Macbook. This contest was to coincide with the International Storytelling Week starting from 26^th January.

On the face of it, it does appear attractive enough, but maybe the consumers who are being targeted are too lethargic to probe their brain for even a single page of creative expression. Or maybe people have responded alright, it’s just the responses have been either below par, crude or plain obscene  to be published. There could be a myriad reasons why the CityFm89 people had to go to the extreme of extending the deadline by more than a month.

Yes, the marketing strategy is good but it’s not great. If you take just the online tactics, CityFm89 could have done a whole lot more. With most of the social media tools virtually free, they should have created accounts specifically geared for this branded contest on most of them instead of just confining themselves to Facebook. Even on Facebook there was no dedicated page for it.

A Twitter presence is a must these days. Then there’s the now old-fashioned but still popular blogging platform. Ideally, the management of CityFm89 should get hold of a popular blogger to carry this out so that he reaches the maximum possible number of people in the blogosphere.

But what would be posted on this blog. How about the entries itself? Make it interactive. Get people to vote for the entries and pass judgment on them. Right now the participants have no way of knowing what their competition is like. By looking at what other people are contributing will not only help them get an idea of where do they stand, but also galvanize them into action.

Then all those bookmarking services Stumbleupon and Digg and what not will also come into play big time. There have been a little bit coverage in the blogosphere but the top bloggers have chosen to either ignore it or they don’t even know about it.

One more thing the CityFm89 people could have done was offer some sort of consolation prizes for the top 20 contributors instead of just confining the prize for the number 1 spot. They could still do it. Just approach a couple of brands to sponsor these prizes and the contest’s attractiveness will increase exponentially. Nothing big or expensive.

Ask Pizza Hut/Domino’s/Papa John’s to dish out a couple of pizzas to 2-3 winners, ask swatch to give a couple of watches, ask Audionic to give a couple of MP3 players, ask Jafferjees to dish out a couple of leather wallets, ask OPTP to give away a couple of deals and voila, you have the prizes for the winners at no extra cost, other than mentioning the sponsors in the communication material.

And a youtube presence of the TVC is a must.

All in all, the concept is a novel one and Pakistanis need these sort of platforms for their creative outlet. What’s amazing is that no major brand has come forward to sponsor and promote this contest.

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