Who are your ADVOCATES?

Influencers or Advocates play an important role in any part of the organisation-whether its in Marketing,Sales,HR or other functions.These individuals command respect within a band of followers that they have. Their Followers turn to them for advice for various things-whether it is to buy a product, to take a mundane decision or for other matters which could be personal. In a social media campaign, its important to identify who are these influencers who could impact their followers and make your task of fulfilling your Social media objectives easier. For example, a Cruise Liner that introduced a new package invited key bloggers for an experience to try their services. After these bloggers returned from the Cruise, they shared their experience and blogged about the cruise liners' offerings.That resulted in a large number of enquiries for the shipping company and sales,eventually. There would be advocates/influencers in other department also-for example in HR, if you have social media policy in place and wish to introduce it in a way that does not seem like robbing employees' freedom and at the same time make a point, the best way to go about it is to first discuss it with the "advocates" and then roll it.

Social Media Marketing would need a REVAMP of your website

When you designed and developed content for your website, it was with the intention of showcasing the company, its products and services, contact details etc. This was more like a showroom and a virtual office of the company. With the use of social media as a part of marketing, the website would need some changes. To begin with, the landing page is important ( as in the case of SEM) but here the objective goes beyond generating traffic for the website. Its more about 'what happens next". So after the visitor visits your website, the important question is "what next"? Every prospect is important, so the first thing to do is to encash the visitor by providing a short sign up form so that you can establish a communication with him in the future. You could also have a video tour so that the visitor gets a dynamic experience about your company.This could be a simple power point presentation; an advanced version could be to have a video shoot along with client testimonials.Incorporating podcasts is also a good idea. Obviously, buttons leading to your Linkedin,Facebook,Twitter profiles should be installed. All these changes are needed so that your website is integrated with social media.

TITLE of community/group needs hard thinking during SOCIAL MEDIA campaign

Brand managers and agencies spend a lot of time in deciding the best punchline for a brand. Based on the "positioning gap" in the consumer's mind,competition, marketing objectives etc., one has to rack brains to come up with a 3-4 word tagline which would become the identity of the brand and what it stands for. Similarly, during a social media campaign,when you start a group/community on Facebook,Linkedin etc.it is important which title you designate to the group.

There are three aspects to this.The first one is that if one of the objective of your social media campaign is business development, do not use the company name in the title as this would limit members interest to join the group.Of course, one has to be a Starbucks or Pizza Hut for members to find an opportunity to join the group on a company/brand name.Secondly, the title should be catchy;if there is a cause associated with the title, members are excited to join. For example, the community on Facebook, "Have you seen Jade?" has more than 48,000 members. The opportunity for members was to share responsibility in finding Jade. The description of the group would in short, describe the intention of starting the group which is also important. The third aspect is that the title should be catchy and there must be uniformity across different platforms and blogs.Research should be done to find which "position" is vacant for you to pitch your group in the space available within your industry.This is very important as this would also determine the tone of your community and the direction in which it is moving in for discussions, forums etc.

Social Media as a Branding Tool

One of the key principles of branding is reinforcing the brand in the minds of target consumers. No matter how big brands become, they need to have a continuous media presence to reinforce the key attributes of the brand,its differentiators etc. This is an ongoing exercise and only those with deep pockets can afford this. Everybody is familiar with Coke,IBM,McDonald's etc.and what they stand for. However,to maintain "top of the mind awareness" they must be "seen" everywhere. Social media has emerged as a cost effective and potent medium to help build brands.Once it is identified which platforms your target consumers are on, a conversation can be done to first, establish a relationship with them in accordance with the marketing objectives and this can be pursued to reinforce by having a wide presence across various platforms.One of the advantages of using social media as compared to traditional media is that you reach out to your target customers better,once you post a link its always there ( anything that is posted on the wen stays on the web FOREVER)for your consumers to see and there is flexibility to see and respond to the conversation/comments. Although in a nascent stage, social media will emerge as a potent tool for branding.

How Social Media could be a storehouse for CONSUMER INSIGHTS

Normally, when a brand manager wants to find out consumer reactions towards his brand, how does he go about it? The conventional route is that he conducts research by interviewing consumers. When any consumer is posed with a question what are the chances of him speaking his mind or actually giving the right opinions? There are so many conditions to this aspect-Is it the right time to speak to him ? Is he saying what the interviewer wants to hear? How is interpreting the question? Does the interviewee reminds him of someone and whether that could shift his mood to the answer? There are so many combinations and possibilities. As a researcher, I have faced this, so the best way to overcome these limitations is to have a large sample size. This irons out some of the concerns mentioned above. However, this does not guarantee that the inputs that one gets would be useful to the brand manager. Social media has the potential to throw inputs which could be just perfect for the brand manager. When we say, SM is all about observing conversations, we are allowing the consumer to speak his mind at his convenience, the time he wants to speak and in the habitat he deems perfect. In an environment like this what are the chances of a consumer speaking his mind on a cell phone that he intends to buy? What is the likelihood that he would voice his concerns which could well be besides price so on and so forth. I think as a researcher these inputs would be very useful to a brand manager than a conventional research which can, at times be confrontational and put the respondent on the defensive.Social media is an excellent medium which has the potential to provide consumer insights which could really drill down on consumer needs.

Who owns the BRAND?

Really, its a matter of interest that who owns the brand? Is it the Institution that "created" it or is it the consumer? The institution obviously spends millions in shaping up a brand, conducts market research, creates advertisements, makes it available for the user, so on and so forth. But if the user does not buy all of that-more importantly its "proposition" which as most marketers know, is intangible, whats the point of it all? Lets take an example of an iconic brand, Nike which is synonymous with its famous tag line, "Just Do it". Would the institution be happy if its tag line was appreciated by everybody without anybody finding the need to "buy" it or is it happy today that when someone reads/recollects the punch line, he/she is empowered and kind of gets into action right away? I think thats in a sense ownership of the consumer who gets impacted and gets into action by the brand/tag line recall. Another example is that of people refusing to buy any other alternative beverage when another strong brand in the Indian market, Thums Up was pulled off by Coke for a brief period when it bought the brand.At this point of time, the consumer felt the need to have the brand that it rightfully owned. He resisted other brands and was demanding.Coke had to give in and get back Thums Up in the market again.Marketers may go miles and spend buckets but if they cannot create a brand ownership for the consumer, its no use. I also feel that when marketers really start giving ownership to their consumers, thats when they are successful and in away create world class brands. Otherwise, its just ego pampering and living in an Utopian world.

Integration and Aggregation is the KEY

With so many SNS,blogs,communities,wikis etc.the key for any marketer is to identify conversations relevant to his brand/products that are going on , how to track them and respond to them. Thats the whole essence of SM marketing and its growing importance. Since this industry is still in its nascent stage,its a long haul when one would see an army of Social Media Managers managing all of it,lets say, a Facebook or a Twitter community completely on his own. At the moment, you would have SM agencies set up accounts for their clients and ask them to manage them.So whats needed is to use tools which aggregate all relevant information on one single platform and integrates in a way that one would like to use. This would make things simpler and manageable. Presently, there are tools which are being introduced with some of them having useful features like generating statistics so that you can analyse this information.

Relevance of Social Media in INDIA

Application of Social media has been in India for quite some time and this community is quite large in terms of social networking, blogging, videos and wikis. Users of this media are quite active and the numbers are sizeable and still growing. If one compares usage of social media in India vis-à-vis the world, Indian market definitely has impressive numbers. While traditional media is effective, there are certain limitations associated with it. It is largely fragmented, costly and in effect shuns a small/startup company, fails to engage consumers and is un measurable. Unfortunately, for the marketer, there is not too much he can do if he wants to go mass and still have a “brand driven” marketing strategy. Social media overcomes all the above mentioned limitations and personally, I feel its key gains in the Indian context are that it is cost effective and measurable. It is an excellent olive branch to all those marketers who still believe in the power of building brands and yet do not wish to spend buckets in traditional media. Being a marketer myself I have quite often been stone walled by this dilemma and now, social media offers a way out. It may not completely replace traditional media but is an excellent alternative to marketers to shuffle their media budgets and apportion some for this new age media.

TOOLS for Social Media

Getting social on the web does not just mean having a Facebook or Linkedin page – it is far beyond that! Getting social on the web is really the defining difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. In the first generation of the web, it was all about providing information to your readers – the web was a one-way street. Web 2.0 is all about the user and giving the user a voice – thus making it a two-way street.

Defining the different ways to be social

There are different types of social on the web and each category has a different focus (with some overlap in functionality):

• Social Networking is probably the most widely known Web 2.0 term. From Orkut, MySpace to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other similar sites, the focus of social networking is to connect you with others – your friends, people with similar interests, potential employers, and then give you the opportunity to find more connections as your profile grows.
• Social Bookmarking (like del.icio.us, Furl, Ma.gnolia) sites allow you to organize your favorite sites, tag them for keywords, and keep them all in one place. Very handy. However, what makes these sites social, is the ability for you to share them with others.
• Social Recommendation sites combine the best of social networking and bookmarking to create user generated recommendation sites. Sites like Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon encourage users to submit items they like and then give others the opportunity to vote on them. There are also a large crop of smaller niche sites like BizzBites, Sk*rt, Babblz, BUMPzee and such that are evolving to cater to the specific needs of certain audiences.
• Social Content sites include Flickr, YouTube, and wikis to name a few. These are sites where users create and manage the content from photos to videos, information on a topic, and everything in between.
• Other sites such as MyBlogLog, Technorati, and Blog Catalog give users the ability to network, bookmark and recommend all under one handy roof.

MEASURING Social Media

Whether or not you are leveraging social media, there are some general ‘engagement’ metrics that you should be monitoring as part of your marketing initiatives:

• Unique visitors
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

You can track most of these metrics from well known web analytics tools like Omniture or even Google Analytics which is free.

And then of course, if you are using paid search you will want to examine the standard search metrics such as clicks, impressions, click through rate, conversion rates, revenue and possible ROAS (return on ad spend). I would also recommend SEM Director as an additional enterprise solution, if you can afford it. It basically allows you to assign values to particular actions on the website once they arrive from search (i.e. filling out a form, clicking on a particular link, an internal search, etc.)

Social Media Optimization Metrics

There are several things you can look at when measuring the success (or not) of your SMO marketing efforts; and of course it depends on what your overall marketing goals are. In addition to the above ‘engagement’ metrics; here are some others to consider:

Reading content – if you have a blog, a good way to measure engagement is to monitor who is reading your blog and where they are coming from. You can run web analytic reports that will show you what is the most popular content on your site (blog); how long they were on that page, where they came from, and also the bounce rate (percent of visitors who left your site after visiting a particular page).

Contributing content – assuming you have a blog and allow for comments; a quick and easy metric would be to monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting (posting comments) on your blog.

Who is bookmarking your site/blog posts – there are a couple of ways you can look at this metric. You can use your web analytic tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, you can simply create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your urls. This can be very time consuming and would only recommend spending time searching in digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and netscape.

Subscribing to a RSS feed – you can also measure how many web visitors are subscribing to your RSS feeds.

Emailing posts – assuming you allow for your blog postings to be emailed to others (see below); you can use your blog platform tool like wordpress to see how many emails are actually being sent through your web form.

Who is talking about you – another metric you can use is to see who is actually linking to your blog and talking about your blog postings. You can do this a couple of different ways; through technorati or searching in Google and Yahoo for the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com. Or, if you have budget, you can hire companies like Radian6 or Collective Intellect, that offer real-time social media monitoring and analysis.

Social networks are the new WATER COOLERS N COFFEE MAKERS

Social networks have always been an intrinsic part of our home and work life. Now the internet has taken the social network to a new level. Initially based on bulletin boards, new groups and email websites have evolved to enable this phenomenon. While standard websites rely on the "look and feel" and content to attract visitors, the draw of social networking sites is their sense of community and the ability for people to interact regardless of location. Websites that successfully provide these qualities have boomed. As workforce mobility has increased whether through home working or hot desking our social and professional needs and interactions are no longer met as they were. social networks sites are the new water coolers and coffee makers.

Social Media for Marketing

Social media is emerging as the next important tool for marketing with the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc. Its not only cost effective but creates does a lot of work in the area of brand building. Surely, this media is an excellent way to create a credit worthy brand if utilised properly. Its a great strategy for marketers to get hold of for a long lasting brand recipe.Advanced markets have hopped on to this new tool obviously with more netizens on the internet. Developing markets need to develop a net centric strategy.

Era of SCREENAGERS

All of us are moving in an era where we move from one screen to another. For example, while working, we are in front of our laptop screen and we are simultaneously looking at our mobile screen taking a call or texting messages. While we are travelling we are shuffling songs from our I Pod and looking at its screen. After we are finished with our work, we go home and watch the Television Screen. While cooking one has to look at the microvave screen or while washing at the digital screen of the Washing machine. Most professionals like Doctors for example, need to analyse data from screens to assess a patients health. This radical shift can also be termed as digital or from hardware to software. However, the presence of a "Screen" is a part of everybody's life now.

Using FEAR to SELL

Fear is an important emotion to sell products expecially those related to life, health, safety, reputation. An element of fear in any business proposition can also be a useful way to create urgency for people to buy. But first, some of the products that use fear to sell are insurance, anti virus software etc. Besides, the "real fear" there is also the fear of being 'left out". This platform is used for example by mobile phone and computer companies which may tell you to update your existing product or be considered "old", "unaware" , "not in the league" etc.
Then there is a fear of "not belonging" in a particular community. So you buy becauses of the "Joneses". Buying a car is an excellent example of why people buy one. They want to seek acceptance within their society, friends, peers etc. While fear is a subjective term, deep within, most of us buy because of fear in some form or the other. The Marketer makes good use of this emotion to sell.

Do trends move from the WEST to the EAST?

It is seen that new products and concepts are innovated and launched in the West and after a succesful proven business model are the introduced in the East. We have seen this happening in almost all products from technology oriented ones like mobiles, computers and cars to consumer products like soap, foods and beverages to service based businesses like retail, hotels and franchising. Clearly, after products are successful they are simply introduced with little or no changes. The questions that occur to me are, whether this phenomenon of "WEST to EAST" is true and whether products can be successfully with little or no adaptation of the original version?
A corollary to the former question is of Eastern concepts like Ayurvedic products and a Sushi bar which are highly accepable and popular in the West and the latter stems from the success of products like Washing Machines which in a country where labour is easily and cheaply available has still been successful.

Using CELEBRITIES as PACKAGING

Celebrities are known to be used for endorsing brands to get a rub off of their qualities on the brand. In a competitive market place where brands are aplenty, the challenge for a marketer is to make the consumer try their brand once, especially in a new product category. Repeat purchase would follow if it has acceptable quality, provides differentiation and is available at the right place/time. But lets say in a competitive category like snack foods, it is key that the consumer "tries" the brand the first time. The key to driving the impulse is to use a Celebrity who represents the brand values and produce an effective advertising campaign.While celebrities have been used for a long term objective like branding, they drive a different objective now and that is for PACKAGING. While the consumer may be driven by different a motivation when he goes till the shelf, a combination of using a celebrity and right distribution can do wonders.

Interactivity is the key

Almost all the gadgets that are being developed or for that matter, the campaigns that are seen/heard have an increasing element of INTERACTIVITY. For example : From a dull and boring device, a telephone is not merely used to speak and hear people's voices. Today, it is a camera cum music player cum PDA all rolled into one. With touch screens, one can enter this world with great excitement and move from one feature to another. Interactivity happens best when there is INTEGRATION of technology. We find that the TV screen is integrated with your cell phone or the internet. For example, you can vote for your favorite celebrity by watching a reality show on TV by texting your preference on your cell phone or doing the same by logging on to a website. All this makes technology "talk" to people and is no longer a one way process. This is all set to increase. We would see innovations and the marketer is in the process of getting the consumer closer and closer to the brand.

Time for consolidation

It is observed that businesses are consolidating themselves whether its in terms of their brand, services, skills, geography, strengths etc. For example, its common sight to see brands extending their name across products/services or business expansion across geographical boundaries. But now its beyond extension and the buzz word is "consolidation". The focus is clearly on inorganic growth and applying one's "skills" across related or unrelated areas. So you may find actors getting into businesses, a start up acquiring rights of mythology characters and developing animated content for a media company or a steel company getting into power generation. Clearly, its time for consolidation and there are numerous opportunities waiting to be siezed.