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graphing facebook demographics for your country

Posted by simon ashwin On Tuesday 30 Mar 10

Facebook’s ad data can not only tell you how Facebook-ish a country is, it can tell you its Facebook demographics.

But what’s the big deal?

Well, as a marketer, it is essential to understand your market’s Facebook demographics before using it as a promotion platform. Promoting a product to the wrong target group is the last thing you need.

With that said, below are steps on how you can use Facebook data and Excel to create a nice demographics chart. It’s no rocket science; you just need 2 steps.

1. Collect Data

What data do you need? Facebook doesn’t just classify its users via ‘country’ and ‘age’, it can also filter the population by ‘education’, ‘language’, ‘relationship’ and more. Collect only relevant data that can help you solve your marketing problem.

2. Create the graph

I trust that you know how to create a graph on your own. Below are the age composition of Facebook users in Singapore and U.S. I basically labeled the axes and plugged the numbers into an excel sheet. Repeat the steps for other age groups.

An example (View the excel sheet here):

x-axis: Age group

y-axis: No. of people

It looks pretty awesome but the data is as good as...

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why you should optimize your site for rss

Posted by simon ashwin On Tuesday 22 Jan 08

Like a newspaper or magazine gathers articles for readers, Internet denizens have taken to using programs that collect dynamic content of their favourite sites. This allows them to do create a single page that scans a list of websites to either previews fresh content or even provide entire articles.

It’s possible because of RSS feeds.  RSS is an acronym with several definitions: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation on one of those. The bottom line is that RSS is a text format pulled from a site’s XML.

In activating your website with a RSS feed, you’ve made the content in that feed available to syndication. Just like columns can appear in several newspapers, this makes the articles and blogs you publish available be viewed by any number of aggregators.

This is an easy and customer-friendly way to let customers know that there is fresh content on your site. While email-notification also does this, more and more readers have become overwhelmed by their email inboxes and look to their RSS aggregators for this information.

However, activating an RSS feed is not as simple as it seems. Many automated RSS feeds simply default to publishing the first sentences of new content, which may not give a good insight to the blog. And publishing entire articles leaves a website open for a tactic called ‘scraping’. This happens when competitors plagiarize articles to other blogs. It’s detrimental in many ways, perhaps the worst being...

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what is rss?

Posted by simon ashwin On Monday 05 Nov 07

You may recognize the universal feed icon or these “chicklets” from your favorite Web sites, blogs and podcasts.

These icons represent content in any format — text, audio or video — to which you can subscribe and read/ watch/ listen using a feed reader.

Why is This a Good Thing?

Technology evolution in online publishing has made it really easy to not only publish regular updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number of your favorite Web sites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually or clutter your email Inbox. You can now streamline your online experience by subscribing to specific content feeds and aggregating this information in one place to be read when you’re ready.

A) Consumer Bottom Line: Subscribing to feeds makes it possible to review a large amount of online content in a very short time.
B) Publisher Bottom Line: Feeds permit instant distribution of content and the ability to make it “subscribable.”
C) Advertiser Bottom Line: Advertising in feeds overcomes many of the shortcomings that traditional marketing channels encounter including spam filters, delayed distribution, search engine rankings and general “in-box” noise.

Who publishes feeds?

Most of the biggest names on the web offer content feeds including USATODAY.com, BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, Amazon.com (including a podcast!), and many more. In addition, hundreds of thousands of bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers publish feeds to keep themselves better connected to their readers/listeners/admirers/critics. Apple, through...

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link wisely for a better rank

Posted by simon ashwin On Wednesday 12 Sep 07

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques must change and grow in sophistication in proportion to the speed of change and advancement of search engines themselves.

Simon Ashwin, Director of Whiteduck points out that “Search engines are very sophisticated. Search engines like Google have got thousands of rules for determining the validity and integrity of your Website and its content. The algorithms employed are very clever and evolving all of the time.”

Google has a ranking measure that involves the number of sites that a Website links out to, and the number of topic relevant sites that link back to it. However, setting up a suite of linked sites with a virtual hosting service which have different emphasis in terms of content is potentially ineffectual because “Google knows if your sites are all hosted on the same server – at the same IP address [this is the numeric address which identifies the host computer on the internet] – and generally adjusts your site rankings down accordingly.”

If your Website is commercial in nature, then search engine rankings are usually essential to its success. To get positive results from linking to other sites, ensure that they are relevant, and look for sites that have higher ranks themselves. Outbound links should only go to relevant sites with good rankings.

The best link related ranking boost comes from having other popular sites with strong rankings lined inbound.
Relevancy, at the very least, is essential. A good strategy for retailers can be...

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tiger airways: market entrant online analysis

Posted by simon ashwin On Tuesday 17 Jul 07

Tiger Airways' recent announcement of its intention to establish a new domestic Australian airline resulted in an immediate spike in visits to the low-cost carrier's website by Australian Internet users. The market share of visits to Tiger Airways more than doubled between the weeks ending 3 February 2007 and 17 February 2007 to gain 2.81% of the Commercial Airlines industry.

The intense level of online competition between airline brands Virgin Blue, Qantas and Jetstar raises the question as to whether there is room in Australia for another domestic carrier. Hitwise Airlines industry data indicate that Virgin Blue and Qantas accounted for 28.53% and 27.68% respectively in market share in January 2007. Jetstar, the low-cost carrier brand of Qantas, followed in third position with 15.81% share. The three airlines accounted for 72.02% share in industry visits between them.

In the Singapore market, the collective share of the top 3 players was more diluted, with Singapore Airlines, Jetstar and Tiger Airways accounting for 60% of visits to the online Airlines industry in January 2007. The UK was even more competitive, where easyJet, British Airways and RyanAir accounted for 44.13% share. While there are different geographical and population considerations in the Singapore and UK markets, it does indicate the propensity of consumers to compare beyond the leading brands for their travel needs.

I'll provide a few summary notes here on strategy options (we'll be issuing a more detailed research note):

Search Terms to Inform a Domestic Route Strategy

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