The FINANCIAL — “It’s become some kind of trend to accumulate likes on facebook and run various games and applications for it.
This is already insupportable because strategies of those companies are more often replicated by the parties; they’re not as creative as it would be if usual persons or even company staff tried to work out their own web-marketing strategies that best suit a typical company profile,” says Diana Velengurskaia, PR manager at NCIB, National Credit Information Bureau
“This is the reason why NCIB with the support of The FINANCIAL decided to carry out an unprecedented, innovative and the largest-scale competition vis-à-vis web-marketing where the winner will be awarded with GEL 5, 000,” said she.
Q. Who can participate in the competition and what are the criteria for selecting the contestants?
A. Participation is free and any individual can take part in it by visiting our web-site www.contest.ncib.ge and filling in the application form until June 10.
As for criteria, first of all participants should choose one company and write a strategy on how to promote it online and send us the written strategy for review.
Q. How about the second round, how many of them will move to the next stage?
A. Top five strategies selected by the competent jury will move to the next round of the competition. Even if the strategy is brilliantly put and refers to the company profile, participants still have to accumulate at least 50 votes in order to have their application/strategy discussed by the jury.
Thereafter each competitor (from top 5) will be given a special web server (wordpress blog) to conduct PR of the lobbyist company and implement their ideas/strategies for 6 weeks.
Q. Who will be the winner and according to what criterion?
A. A contestant whose page is the most rated and recognized will be named as the winner.
Evaluation will depend on the number of visitors, which will be daily controlled by contest administrator and accurately counted by the online counting system.
The favorite of the public will also be selected based on the number of votes given to him/her.
Q. What are the prizes for the winners and other participants?
A. The winner of the competition will be rewarded with GEL 5,000!
We will grant certificates to 5 selected candidates for participation in the competition. In addition, supporting companies will reward other winners with various prizes.
Sponsors of the competition are: "Tbilmicrocredit", "G-Mart", "Radio Commersant", "B Credit" and "Bowling Central”.
Competition will finish by the end of July. The awarding ceremony will take place in “Bowling Central,” where mini-tournament in bowling between the winners and the company representatives will be organized.
Q. How did you come up with the idea of such a competition?
A. To start with, we at NCIB are effectively using every major social network as a platform to keep in touch with company managers and its personnel. As long as the Internet has become a hub of company staff and for their customers en masse, they are now working hard to create web-marketing strategies on their own in order to attract new customers. Although as it turns out companies are getting more and more similar in their ideas to offer to its clients.
Thus, the main reason why we’re holding this competition is to let ordinary people as well as interested company staff to carry out effective web marketing and increase brand awareness in order to promote participating companies, the number of which is already 40 and this figure keeps growing.
Q. What will those companies gain in return?
A. This will be a great PR for participant/partner companies because the selected 5 candidates will be in charge of updating the information about the chosen company, putting logo on the given wordpress domain web-site and after all the company can use winning web-marketing strategy to attract more clients online.
Q. How active are company managers/staff?
A. As I have seen there are many company managers out of 200 contestants already registered on the web-site. There are even PR managers of some companies participating in the race.
We don’t restrict them from participating as the aim of the competition is to hunt for the most creative ideas to put in practice.
Q. Are there any prospects of employment for those candidates?
A. It’s highly likely that winners of the competition will be employed in the company he/she develops web-marketing strategy for.
During the competition contestants will be in close contact with the company. The latter will be providing the candidate with all the necessary information in order not to repeat already foregone marketing strategies by the company per se.
Q. What kind of information do you provide to Georgian companies and how costly is it?
A. We’ve a database of all the registered companies in Georgia as well as foreign partner companies thus we provide interested companies with market profiles (internal and external markets), staff turnover, their salaries, contact info of the companies, etc.
We sell this information to companies and it’s very cheap as a piece of information about the company does not usually cost more than GEL 1.00, depending on the type of information needed. Information is updated daily and even before giving it to our client we verify data validity.
Since the establishment of NCIB we have been primarily focused on foreign investors interested in the country potential whilst ever since 2009 we have become active in terms of creating Georgian database and providing all the necessary info to Georgian companies. In addition to having company databases, we’re going to develop a database of physical persons in the near future.
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