Wanted to share the news that there’s going to be a Google Analytics Conference under Google’s “Conversion University” in Gurgaon next month.

The speakers for the conference include

You can checkout the complete list here.

The event is completely FREE of charge. You can Register on the website and your attendance will be confirmed by email a week before the event. The invite is non-transferable and there will be no spot registration.

Here’s the agenda for the conference

Date: 8th August

Place: Gurgaon

Venue:  Google India Pvt Ltd, 8th and 9th Floors, Tower C Building No.8, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon, India.

Map: http://www.getgaready.in/venue.html

Checkout  http://www.getgaready.in/ for more details

• Ghajini
• Dev D
• Tata Nano
• The President is coming

and it just occurred to me to make the pdfs of all these case studies available as a compressed version, hence this post

Click Here to download the rar file containing pdfs of all the four case studies.

While browsing the web today I found out that Free’s e-book is also available for free. Excited, I clicked the URL to get my hands on the free e-book.

But to my unpleasant surprise, I ran into this

Frustrated by this(hypocrisy?) I searched around to realize that the not only is the e-book restricted to just US, it’s just free to read and not download. There you go again.

When I got to know about the free audio book I decided to buy a paperback copy for myself soon but given the weird policies regarding book’s availability in other formats I am not sure if I’ll be doing that anymore.

While Chris Anderson & Co figure out what’s the right way to market the book without screwing their economics you can either listen to it’s audiobook or read the book on Scribd(using a DNS proxy like hidemyass.com in case you aren’t in the US) or read it here.

Want to get visibility on Twitter ? Get trending, and the way to be trending is by having enough mentions in tweets.

Add this desire to be mentioned in as many tweets(interesting or boring, happy or sad, sensible or nonsense, related /unrelated to the product or company) to the fact that most people will do just about anything to win something for free (especially if it doesn’t ask them to get up from their chairs) and you get a viral campaign like moonfruit‘s.

Apparently there was a similar campaign by SquareSpace a month back but it failed to make it big because it wasn’t offering the phone but a $199 worth gift certificate but I am not complaining as atleast with SquareSpace’s campaign I got saved from the heavy spam attack that Moonfruit campaign led to.  For me the moonfruit campaign is no different from one of those spam attacks in which people randomly started adding some keyword in every tweet, which eventually led to those topics/keywords being in the trending list.

It’s not that I hate all twitter campaigns, for ex: I appreciate Tweetboard’s campaign, asking people to request for Alpha accounts for their service by tweeting(just once) in a given format instead of submiting their email id’s

TweetBoard

Now that’s a creative and non spammy way to market using Twitter.

Getting back to #SquareSpace and #MoonFruit campaigns, I’d say this isn’t a particularly good way to market because

1) It’s spammy and so all over the place. More than liking I’d hate if everyone in my stream started putting a random keyword in their tweets. There chances of winning something are a lot less than chances of loosing a few followers/friends. I certainly wouldn’t appreciate my company name in tweets like this

2) It’s not a scalable model:  While SqureSpace, MoonFruit and a few more might be able to get some eyeballs because of these campaigns I strongly believe this won’t be a scalable/easily followable model as if more companies start doing this then we’ll  have  a spoiled twittering experince and almost all the trending topics would be full of these promotional keywords which certainly won’t be liked by Twitter and it’s users and would invite some fixes to avoid such things, which’ll in effect led to a reduction in such campaigns.

3) I doubt if there’ll be significant value addition due to such campaigns: Though some of the statistics could look great after such a campaign I doubt if there’ll be a real value add for most companies that do such campaigns. For ex: I doubt if there’ll be a significant increase in moonfruit’s business or more people will start interacting with @moonfruit etc. Most probably the gift hungry crowd that gathered at their doorsteps  would move to a new free gift location in no time, shattering their false hopes.

That’s how I feel about various marketing campaigns on Twitter, what do you think about them ?