Major firms in online advertising battle

       Social networking leads switch from conventional advertising
       Major technology firms are jumping into the social networking arena and are joining an online battle to take a marketing lead in the coming year, hoping to boost brand awareness and perception, thereby driving business growth in Thailand.
       Overall spending by major IT companies for online marketing is very small - about Bt1.5 billion - when compared with their total marketing expenditure of about Bt90 billion per year. However, it seems they will channel much more money into online advertising because Microsoft (Thailand), Intel (Thailand) and HTC (Thailand) are all moving to compete in this area.
       Microsoft (Thailand)'s marketing director Lisa Lim said Microsoft's spending on online advertising would rise from 30 per cent to between 40 and 45 per cent of its total marketing budget.
       It will focus on four main online channels: its main website, Microsoft.com/Thailand; a microsite developed for the purpose of marketing a specific product, Windows7Thailand.com; social-network sites, especially Facebook and Twitter; and viral video, scheduled for launching next month.
       At Microsoft's main website, there are currently 300,000 unique visitors and 1 million page-views per month. Its microsite, which was launched just a month ago, is getting 11,000 unique visitors and 120,000 page-views per month. On the social-network sites, it has 700 fans at Facebook.com community and 500 followers in Twitter.com.
       Lim said Microsoft expects both Facebook.com and Twitter.com to be more active in achieving two objectives: getting feedback from customers and delivering information about the company's marketing activities, products and services.
       "We started it with our new product - Windows 7 - that is scheduled to be officially launched on October 26," Lim said. "This year is an outstanding year for us to focus more on online marketing than ever before, because this is the year in which we will launch the entire Windows-product family, including Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010."
       She said the basis for returns on investment from online advertising included how many people it could reach and what kind of impact it made.
       Microsoft's main purposes in using online advertising were to reach the right target customers, to get a quick response, to provide the right product information and promotion to the right potential customers and to keep them in touch with the company directly.
       HTC (Thailand)'s country manager Nattawat Woranopkul said his company had been spending more on online advertising, especially on social-network sites Facebook (Facebook.com/htcthailand) and Twitter (Twitter.com/htcthailand).
       The company plans to double its spending on online marketing this year from 20 per cent to 40 per cent of its above-the-line marketing budget.
       The company's strategy is to "blend" online and offline marketing. The objective of its online-marketing tactic is to build brand awareness, maintain customer loyalty and create more sales.
       "We aim to build a huge online community and use online marketing as a fundamental marketing tool to lead these people to offline activities. We aim to blend all of them into a seamless and efficient marketing exercise," Nattawat said.
       Moreover, HTC will also use its main website - HTCThailand.com - as a major online-marketing channel, and will create microsites for specific purposes, such as www.whoisyourhero.net, which was created for marketing HTC Hero.
       Intel Microelectronics (Thailand)'s marketing programme manager Dudchaneeporn Pruckwattananon said that her company had jumped into online marketing last year through several channels, including Intel's main website (Intel.com/th), microsites at its partners such as Sanook (www.gamesanook.com/intel), and online banner ads and rich media ads such as rich banner and page takeover ads.
       It moved into social-network sites in July, beginning at Facebook with Facebook.com/intel and this month at Twitter, with Twitter.com/intelthailand.
       She said about 80 per cent of Intel's total marketing budget this year would be spent on online marketing.
       "Our pages at Facebook.com and Twitter.com are to update our customers about the movements of Intel in Thailand. Some information comes from our main website and microsites," Dudchaneeporn said.