Ibibo, the MIH owned blog portal in India, announced the first list of top bloggers vying for the 1.5 crore payout as part of their ‘Great Indian Blogger Hunt’. Amit Ranjan (www.webyantra.net) and Rashmi Bansal (www.youthcurry.blogspot.com) openly criticize this marketing move and deride the quality of top rated blogs on ibibio.
In some respects, I whole-heartedly agree with what they say. In some respects, I beg to differ.
First and foremost — I’m surprised that the promotion has been running for at least a month now and nothing was said earlier until the first list of top bloggers was published.
Anyways, here’s my two cents on the ‘Great Indian blogger Hunt’.
User generated content is the prime driver for Web 2.0 sites. Attracting and building a user community is no easy task – unless your product is viral in itself. It is a universal phenomena that techies/geeks are the earliest adopters of a site / product. Several times, a site fails to attract a broad base of users outside the elitist, early adopter crowd. This has been my biggest gripe against some of the companies featured on TechCrunch. TechCrunch can be viewed as a platform for showcasing products — however, keep in mind that the TechCrunch audience is technically savvy and a mere fraction of the actual intended audience. The feedback, User experience and perception can vary drastically between these two user groups.
Attracting and driving the user community to a site like iBibo is similar to the classic chicken and egg problem. Until you have some good content, it will be hard to attract users and until you attract users and have a vibrant community, content creation is going to be a problem. So, if iBibo decides to pay users to generate the content, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. They want to attract users and build a community and generate unique content – what better way than provide monetary incentives to users ? Whether this promotion will generate quality content is a completely different story. Whether this promotion will motivate me or other serious bloggers to switch to ibibo – NO. I dont think this promotion is targeted to attract regular, serious bloggers at all. They want to broaden the blogging appeal to a more wider, generic audience.
I definitely agree with Amit’s take on the rules of the promotion. I am circumspect of these rules and seem to be very open ended (read: easy to tweak). I’ve always detested the fine print that goes with such promos. The concept of the ibQ scores also seemed a bit fuzzy to me.
The couple of points where I think Amit has got it wrong:
1)
To me, the contest is reminiscent of the controversial startup Payperpost, that pays bloggers to write about advertisers products (Payperpost comes up for discussion frequently on TechCrunch).
I fail to see any similarities between the models of PayPerPost and iBibo’s promotion at all. What was unethical about PayPerPost is that they wanted to pay bloggers to write favorable reviews without any disclosure statement. That is equivalent to paying / bribing a journalist to write a favorable review in the newspaper. There is a huge distinction between that and paying the users to generate content for the site. There is no issue of disclosure and ethics in this case. I think Ibibo is clear in its intention that it wants to provide monetory incentives to its user community for generating content. It is as simple as any other contest or competition.
2)
It relates to the erosion in the long term equity of ibibo, which appears to be MIH’s flagship brand. One of the lessons you learn within the first few months of a product manger’s stint is that, for marketing promotions, cash incentives (while being effective) don’t add anything to the brand’s long term equity. In fact, they decidedly lower the perception of the brand in the consumers’ mind.
Note that ibibo is not yet an established brand. Yes, I know about it, you know about it and the 5% tech & startup fanatics in India know about it. We, as a community, are very miniscule, to be considered the general, average consumer. As I said earlier, the promo may not generate great quality content. But none the less, it generates a buzz and drives the user registrations and participation. The traffic rankings from Alexa definitely show a huge surge for Ibibo since January (around the time it started the promo):
I think this is a great marketing move by iBibo. If you have the resources (cash), why not put it to good use ? And this marketing move is proving to be effective – not only are users being lured to the site, the promotion is attracting enough attention from reputed and well respected Indian bloggers to warrant a post about the same. Good publicity or bad publicity — publicity is publicity. I guess the ibibo team is sitting on their desk in Noida, sipping some tea and enjoying all the buzz they have generated.
This promo will definitely help them to attract the user community, although maybe not necessarily great quality content. It remains to be seen how they leverage this user community going forward.
