Following is a guest post from Samuel Degremont, Manager in the Digital Practice in our Paris office. Samuel advises clients on corporate and marketing digital strategy, blogs and social media actions, online buzz creation and crisis management as well as online community management. You can follow his up-to-the minute thoughts on Twitter or read his commentary on the Burson-Marsteller Paris Blog (in French). For other guest posts on the Digital Perspective blog, see here.
I’m back from Stream 2008, where I met WPP’s top digital minds as well as a lot of interesting people including Tim O’Reilly, Jason Calacanis and Yossi Vardi – a lot of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, tech and media participants.
Focusing on how our Digital industry would evolve in the coming years, the “unconference” allowed everyone to participate in discussions related, one way or another, to Digital. See below for a few examples.
Adaptation in Africa
Google’s Anil Hansjee explained the business development logic of the company within developing countries, particularly West Africa (see an introduction to the discussion here). Africa is viewed by Google as a “huge long-term market,” in other words, the infrastructure and usage does not allow Google to market their already successful advertising solutions and productivity tools (including GMail).
For instance, in Kenya, infrastructure in terms of Internet connectivity is rather poor, and equipment rate (computers, Internet access, Internet cafes) is relatively low and lack a presence. Internet business is split among a lot of small players (about 20 ISP with an average of 3000 users). Local content production (which would be searchable, indexable, and of value to local Internet users) is not produced in mass.
Kenyans, however, do connect together with low-end devices such as inexpensive cell phones. From what Anil mentioned, there are more SMS messages exchanged in Nairobi per day than in NYC.
In this difficult local market, Google sees a lot of potential and adapts its global strategy to more practical tasks than “organizing the local content”. Rather, Google empowers local users with tools that allow the development of local use and content.
Google therefore invests time and money with local partners to build a more robust technical infrastructure (for Internet access) and partners with local Telcos to work on mobile (SMS) based solutions: weather forecasts for agricultural needs, SMS banking systems, Classifieds etc.
It’s a sound strategy (relying on local partners and leveraging their local knowledge) which will probably benefit Google in the long term, both commercially and in terms of brand loyalty.
Adaptation in India
Back from Stream, I gave some thought to the SMS solutions available to developing countries, and I found the example of India of interest.
The situation in India (not discussed during Anil’s presentation) is slightly different than what happens in Africa. The subcontinent has a much better infrastructure in terms of mobile carriers, with an estimated 300 million mobile phone subscribers at the end of 2008. Internet use is not much developed, with an estimated 40 million users (2006).
Local players (see below) have adapted to this situation, and offer therefore services for SMS users that allow effective reach and advertising distribution.
- SMS Gushup: This Indian startup allows users to create groups to which they can send SMS updates. As compared to the web-based Twitter micro-messaging service with an estimated daily exchange of about 3 millions messages per day, SMS Gushup sends about 10+ million SMS per day to its groups of users. The “Rockstar” group on SMS Gushup has 99627 members, top groups appear to have 50k members on average…which is enormous. The business model is based on advertising, where every single SMS sent to the group contains a small ad link, which pays for the service. Premium groups are ad-free but require a monthly subscription.
- Google: Finding a more developed infrastructure in India than in Kenya, Google released an equivalent to SMS Gushup called Google SMS Channel, which you can access once logged into your Google Account. The service was just released earlier this month so the number of group members is still low (in the 2000 figure), but it shows how Google adapts to the local markets it operates into.
Adapt, or Perish?
In fact, global models distributed the same way across the world don’t work. It’s the case for cars, it’s the case for a lot of consumers goods. It’s also the case for web-based models, which definitely need adaptation to the technology and uses at work in each country. When there’s not much use, help build it. When usage is different from your primary target countries, adapt to it, or fail.
And its also the case for leading PR and Media companies around the globe.
First, companies have adapted to the growing, exponential Internet use by hiring Digital specialists and allowing resources to internal training (as we do regularly at Burson-Marsteller – see here) – and if they did not follow this adaptation path, they’ll probably be considered less and less pertinent by their clients.
Second, companies need to constantly adapt to their local markets. They’ve done this in in traditional PR and Advertising for decades, and they need to have the same approach towards Digital campaign conception and implementation.
Because every country looks about the same in terms of Internet use at a macro level, it’s tempting for companies to go for global Digital campaigns. However, on a micro level, usage and maturity of the audience are so different from one country to another that adaptation – at least – is mandatory, but it’s even better to have a co-creation with the local Digital specialists.
That’s what we’re trying to build at Burson-Marsteller, with Digital Strategists in charge of coordinating different market areas where our clients operate. The Strategists ensure that a global Digital vision is implemented with an adaptation to local Internet needs and usage.
