Recently, the New York Times interviewed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and when asked what his favourite non-wiki website was. His immediate response was “Dopplr….. I love it.”
Mr Wales has good reason to sing Dopplr’s praises; it really is an extremely innovative and original website, and one that is increasingly growing in presence and popularity online.
Aptly named after Christian Doppler, the hypothesiser of the Doppler Effect, the site translates the difficult physics theory into a simple, early-warning signal for regular business travellers, letting them “share future [their] travel plans” with others. Put even more simply, it’s a hybrid combination of Facebook with an online travel-schedule, allowing your online-business-travel-buddies to know where you are in the world. Ultimately, this means that the familiar faces you may regularly see at the airports, hotels, exhibitions and conventions of your travels, soon evolve into familiar friends. To quote from the Advertising Practitioner, “it’s not about online chat. It’s about meeting up in the real world.”
The increasing growing popularity of Dopplr and indeed, other network sites that focus upon specific demographics, stands as evidence that the internet is suddenly experiencing a shift away from mass-use platforms. Unquestionably, sites like Bebo, Myspace and Facebook are giants amongst online social media, and are likely to remain so, however, evidence exists that their once rapid growth is now slowing down. (Recently, Facebook saw a 5% drop in user volume.) In contrast, sites that are built with a specific user in mind are growing; from the business savvy LinkedIn, to the laid-back music community of Buzznet – these are the ones growing at an alarming rate, and will no doubt be of special interest to direct marketers.
It is no secret that the more user-targeted an advertisement is, then there is a greater chance it will lead to a conversion. Digital marketing is no exception, and this is of fundamental importance in a successful online advertising campaign.
Whilst search engines are critical to this, by targeting specific users who query keywords, other equally as powerful resources, such as “vertical advertising” is often overlooked. Unarguably, search more often than not sends users to the most popular sites, especially when natural search is taken into account, so advertisers need to target users on the sites that they land on through search. These niche “vertical” sites, (such as Dopplr, if you were to be targeting frequent business travellers), can place advertisers in extremely strong positions in gaining a unique foothold in a specific industry – even leading to domination of the competition.
Connect with Jamie on Dopplr. http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/jamieriddell
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