Keeping it simple

How are social platforms powering mobile commerce?

2011-09-07T06:39:00.000+05:30

[This post was originally written for socialmediatoday.com as a guest post and was published on Sept 1]

The world is increasing becoming mobile. The technology creators of today are creating goods for the SoLoMo consumer – the one who is social, location and mobile savvy. The social networks are realizing this fact and they know the social networking of tomorrow (and by that I mean in the next 2 years) would move vastly to mobile phones and the social web would be heavily accessed with a location layer. Here are a few stats to get a better idea:

Research shows that one-third (33 %) of the Facebook postings are mobile
Americans spend nearly 2.7 hours per day connected to mobile web, and a vast majority of their time goes into social networking with mobile phones
Mobile users tend to be more ‘social’ than the traditional desktop users. This can be seen from a study that 91% of mobile phone users go online to socialize compared to only 79% of traditional desktop users

The numbers above along with the rising mobile penetration predictions clearly show the future shift in social networking towards mobile and the social platforms giants, especially the big 5 – Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Foursquare and Google, clearly understand this. Hence it is not surprising to see that almost all of them have come up with their own set of mobile strategies. Moreover these platforms also know that in order to generate revenues in the fast growing mobile world, to attract brands that want to go mobile and boost up their own revenue models from a mobile consumer they would need a heavy focus towards m-commerce.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to see how the mobile strategies of social platforms are powering m-commerce. This article will tell you how each social giant is coming up with mobile strategies and how their mobile strategy is imapcting the mobile commerce of today and tomorrow.

Scope

I believe that m-commerce has a greater meaning than just monetary transaction using mobile phones. In this post I have tried to derive and work upon this greater meaning and not limited myself to the transaction part. Hence, I have tried to use m-commerce in the context of marketing, commerce, sales and CRM; basically the use of mobile to move a consumer across every aspect of the sales funnel.

Facebook

The social network is seeing heavy shift in its traffic on mobile phones. Here are few of initiatives for powering mobile commerce

Facebook launched Facebook places in USA and Europe. With this initiative, they partnered with a couple of brands that offered discount deals to consumers on checking-in at various places. The idea led a lot of brands to create marketing campaigns using Facebook places.Starbucks offered free filter coffee to those who check-in, while Mazda offered free cars and cars on discounts. Dallas airport offered discounts from hospitality brands inside the airport on checking-in while Jet Blue launched the go places campaign and a Facebook app that rewarded badges and real gifts to people who checked-in. You can see some of the most creative Facebook Places mobile marketing examples in this mashable article.

(An update here – Facebook recently ended its deals initiative after testing it in 8 cities)

Another mobile commerce initiative taken by Facebook is to facilitate Facebook credit purchase with mobile payment. What this means is, you can buy Facebook credits and the charges would be reflected in your mobile bill. Facebook has partnered with mobile payment companies Zong and Boku to help consumers buy credits with mobile payment. If you are wondering how you can do this, visit the help post by Facebook Help Center

Similarly, Facebook’s seriousness about m-commerce can also be seen from its HTML 5 efforts. It appears that Facebook is creating a platform that is fully mobile compatible so that users can access Facebook apps using the mobile browser. With this, facebook can sell credits via the mobile browser and keep the complete control of the platform to itself by bypassing the Apple and Android appstore. This would greatly help Facebook in increasing its revenues from the credit purchases made by the mobile phone users who will be buying virtual good while using the Facebook apps.

Twitter

For Twitter, having a mobile strategy is even more important as 43% of Twitter users access it from mobile while 9% access is through tablets. Moreover, Twitter’s mobile focus is obvious, especially as it started with an SMSing service. The Twitter’s 140 characters were decided to that they can fit within an SMS.

Twitter too has created tools to help brands in the mobile marketing. I find the FastFollow tool most fascinating through which you can SMS twitter handle of a brand to get its updates on your mobile by sending ‘follow (Twitter handle)’ to 40404 in the US. Similarly using the ‘Get’ tool you can get the latest updates from a user even if you do not follow him. [SMS ‘Get (username)]

Another of Twitter mobile strategy that is interesting for brands is the location tagging. This feature with which you can tweet with your location can be enabled if you have a browser that supports HTML5 and geo location, or with iPhone or Android phone. Your followers can see where are you Tweeting from.

The mass popularity of Twitter clubbed with location tagging and SMS features makes it a great marketing tool for brands. However I am yet to see some interesting mobile marketing campaigns with Twitter. The only campaign that comes to my mind is by Kogi Barbeque that uses Twitter to update users about the location of the food truck. The customers, who can constantly check the tweets on their mobile phones are able to know the exact location of the food truck.

Foursquare

When it comes to the mobile strategies for social networks, in my research, I have realized that foursquare has the smartest initiative for brands to power mobile marketing and commerce.

To begin with, Foursquare has a lot of partner brands that reward customers for checking –in their store (something like Facebook places deals). Customers can exhibit their loyalty with frequent check-in and brands get to know and reward their most loyal customers.

But it does not end here. Foursquare has another offering of Foursquare pages for businesses. With these pages, businesses can add tips for their consumers at various locations. These tips can be brand’s way of sharing its expertise with its followers or engaging them around something more interesting.

Brands have made good use of Foursquare pages for innovative campaigns to increase sales and gain promotions. For example, New York Times partnered with Four Square during 2010 Winter Olympics and guided the visitors to the best tourist’s spots across Vancouver. Similarly, Foursquare partnered with restaurant reviewer Zagat to help users find the best restaurants around them with reviews and ratings. You can see some of the best Foursquare marketing campaigns at the following articles (1) and (2).

Another Foursquare feature that has great marketing and sales potential is Foursquare lists. With foursquare lists, consumers can create tips for their networks like best places to eat at a particular place, top things to buy or visit by tagging brands. Brands can use these lists to generate advocacy, know their evangelists and engage their customers through an effective CRM program. I will look forward to some interesting mobile marketing by brands using Foursquare lists.

Groupon

Groupon’s mobile strategy is more like a location layer above its deals model. You get the groupon experience but on your mobile phone that can help you customize your deals based on your location.

Groupon’s mobile apps help users purchase deals from their mobile phone, bypass the step where they have to print the proof of purchase and see the deals near their location. Moreover, with Groupon ‘now’, the mobile users need not even wait for the deal to get activated. They can check the deals around their location and grab them right away at the touch of a button.

Surely Groupon has some great ideas to facilitate mobile commerce. Their mobile apps are adding a location layer which is greatly improving the consumer experience of purchasing deals.

Another interesting aspect of Groupon’s mobile commerce strategy is Groupon’s attempt to become world’s largest mobile advertising network. Groupon is partnering with big mobile apps and app makers to run real time promotions of Groupon’s deals from its clients based on proximity. Hence, the next time you will use an app like Loopt and are near a Groupon deal, you will get a notification on your phone.

Google

With the recent launch of Google plus and the integration of search with social, it would be difficult to not call Google a social giant.

Google has some very interesting mobile commerce tools in its arsenal of mobile strategies.Google Shopper app helps users simplify their everyday shopping experience. The app can be used to scan barcodes or book covers to get more information about the product. The app can also be used to find products or know the best prices from online stores or even get information about the stores nearby your vicinity. Certain versions at certain geographies also give you daily deals and deals in proximity.

Google Catalogs, a free app for tablets makes catalog browsing and product purchasing a very engaging experience. Users can browse across multiple catalogs, get rich media info like videos and high resolution images and really enhance their product research experience. The app helps users to share their findings with friends and even purchase them online or find nearby stores.

Google Wallet is another path breaking initiative by Google to make your payments quick and simpler. Google wallet will hold your payment cards that hold in your wallet today. The app uses NFC (near field communications) to make the fund transfer really simple. All you have to do is just tap your phone on the reader and get your payment done. The eventual aim of the app is to sync loyalty card, receipts, boarding pass, tickets etc all in one mobile app. Google even plans to use this apps for customers to avail Google offers.

I hope this article helped you understand how the mobile strategies of world’s major social platforms are impacting mobile commerce. You can find the research summarized below:

How top social networks are powering mobile commerce

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How are travel brands using social media

2011-08-14T07:38:00.000+05:30

This post was originally written for social media today and published on August 11. You can see the original post here

Social Media has always been an attractive avenue for travel brands. The prime reason is that travel is a very social experience both as a purchase as well as an activity. People consult their friends for travel recommendations and seek their advice for places they should visit, airlines they should prefer and hotels they should stay. Moreover, people travel with their friends, make new friends during trips and travelling together (at least for holidays and leisure) is always considered more exciting that travelling alone.

Travel brands are trying to bring this social experience online for people to get travel recommendations, share their travel experiences and help make their customers’ travel better. Seeing the increasing excitement of travel brands for social media campaigns, I decided to look into some of the most interesting patterns emerging in the social media efforts by travel brands.

Scope: Here in this research I have tried to analyze how travel brands are using social media for their marketing campaigns. Here I have considered all brands that generate their revenues explicitly from customer travel or enthusiasm for travel as travel brands (and hence travel guides, travel media too falls in this category).

Research: The research shows that there are broadly 8 social media campaign strategies being used by travel brands.

You will see that these broad 8 social media strategies leverage 4 different social dynamics. Social Games, Social Media Campaigns and loyalty campaigns leverage the consumer generated content to thrive, while blogs and advocacy programs thrive on smart conversations by the brand or its representatives with the consumers. Certain forums and social websites leverage the community social dynamics where consumers crowd source content for their passion towards travel while some other travel brands use social applications to connect people to travel better. Each of this strategy is detailed below:

Social Media Campaigns

Many travel brands have explored social media campaigns to engage its audience and bring participation and fan base. One of my favourite examples is Queensland tourism campaign for ‘the best job in the world’. In this campaign, the organizers launched a user generated contest to offer the job for the caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef Islands. The caretaker would be supposed to communicate his explorations and his experiences to the world through his blog. The campaign was a great success. Some time back even European Travel Commission launched a photo contest on Facebook asking users to submit their morphed pictures at various travel locations

Loyalty Campaigns

Social Media has given many new faces to loyalty campaigns and completely changed the way brands are rewarding consumers for loyalty. Take for instance, Jet Blue’s Go Places app, where Jet Blue is rewarding customers for checking-in at Jet Blue Terminals using Facebook Places. Customers unlock official badges and reward points for real rewards. Tripadvisor has launched a campaign to recognize its most loyal reviewers and community members. The campaign showcases Tripadvisor’s star reviewers and their reviews / forum posts

Social Games

With the success of social games like Farmville, Mafia Wars etc, brands have realized the power of games in engaging consumers. Travel Channel has used a similar idea to launch a social game called Kidnapped. The game aims at increasing customer awareness and information about various interesting locations around the globe. The game challenges consumers to kidnap their friends and to escape, the kidnapped person has to answer trivia related to that city where he/ she has been kidnapped.

Blog

Travel blogs by brands are an excellent way of communicating the brand’s passion for travel to the consumers. Lonely planet here does an excellent job of educating consumers about making their travel experiences better. If you visit their blog, you will see travel showcase, destination, tips and stories. Similarly Southwest Airlines’ blog – Nuts About Southwest aims at communicating to the traveller community how Southwest Airlines can make their travel experience better

Advocacy program

Certain brands try to generate a word of mouth by providing an advocacy platform to experts to express their opinions and thoughts to consumers. British Airlines has created one such platform called Metrotwin to promote tourism between London and New York by ‘twinning’ the two cities and providing recommendation of best places at both the cities. The recommendations here are made by experts who bring out the best places to eat, shop and stay in the two cities

Social apps to connect

These apps leverage the fact that travelling is a social activity and people prefer the recommendation of their friends or friends of friends to take travel decisions. Tripadvisor has a travel map app that maps where all the friends in your Facebook network have been around the world. Airbnb Social Connections app helps you rent places in your personal network. It shows you others in your network (friends or friends or friends) who have places to rent.

Crowdsourced content

It is here that the travel brands leverage community dynamics to energize people to put meaningful content on their websites in form of reviews, ideas and comments to help other users get better information for travel.Tripadvisor and Lonely Planet do this with reviews, likes and ratings to help customers produce recommendations

Travel forums

Travel forums have always been a popular destination for people researching for travel information. Now brands are hosting travel forums to participate and support such conversations. Virgin Airlines hosts v-flyer travel forum and traveller online community to facilitate conversations and social relationships. Lonely Planet hosts the Thorn Tree forum to empower such discussions.

Hope this researched help you look into some of the top social media marketing implementations by travel brands. The research above is summarized in the presentation below:

How travel brands are using social media for marketing

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6 formats for B2B blogging

2011-07-25T07:01:00.000+05:30

I wrote this article for social media today. You can see the original article here

If you are planning a blogging strategy for your B2B marketing or running a company blog, one of the biggest challenges you face is asking your colleagues to write blog posts. And when you do that, one of the most common questions you get to hear is – ‘So what should I blog about?’

This question is not always easy to answer. After all how are you supposed to know what the other person should blog! But the problem that your colleagues are facing is obvious. A hectic day to day schedule often does not leave much time to blog for the company and even if they are determined to create a post, thinking of the right topic is always a challenge for people who are not frequent bloggers.

Since a lot of companies must be facing similar problems, I thought it might be a good idea to create a blog styling guide to help people get an idea of various B2B blogging formats that they can explore.

However, please see that blogging is a way to socially express yourself and there can be no universal template. Hence please feel free to explore your own formats / styles to write articles. But if you are looking for ideas to write blog post or to suggest post to others, this style guide is for you.

What formats can you write:

A) Research - In this blogging format you share your research on certain topics and come up with a conclusion. Such types of posts make more sense when your job involves a lot of research. You can dig into a particular subject and come out with trends and insights. Here you can also talk about best practices in a particular domain, best examples of certain things etc

For example you can see a research post on benchmark examples of B2B Facebook landing pages, a research post on how banks and financial institutions are using social media, 20 examples of F-Commerce beyond F-Stores and my post on how world’s top brands are adopting social media

B) How to-s - This is a format where you are educating or teaching somebody how to solve a particular problem. This very post belongs to the same category. Such blogs become very easy to write when you work on new problems

As examples, see this blog post by mashable on how to create online communities , Open Forum article on how to encourage your whole company to blog.

C) Share - In this format you start with sharing something thought provoking - a video / excerpt of another blog post / picture / podcast and add your opinion on top of it. This kind of format in increasingly becoming popular with bloggers since it is short in size and comes as an outcome of your daily research

For example see this blog post from 37 signals where the writer is sharing a video and adding his opinions on top of it, Kaushal Sarda’s post where he shares videos on designing next generation cameras

D) Documentation of ideas or upcoming projects – Many companies believe in open research, i.e. they believe in sharing their ideas and thoughts with the community. These companies believe in the philosophy that sharing emerging ideas with the community aids in making them better.

If you are a part of such a company and are working on a new idea, it is good to document and blog about it. Apart from the obvious benefits it brings as an added blog post, documenting your thoughts helps you clear them in your head and provides a ready reference you can hit back.

As examples, see Gauravonomics post on his idea of a novel and a complimenting social game and my post on how thought leadership in B2B companies can be gamified

E) Opinions - Your thoughts on a popular subject or trending topic etc. You can use various listening tools like Alterian SM2, Radian 6 or even Twitter to see what is trending in your areas of expertise.

You can see this post on why investors love social commerce and why single people should not start-up(interesting... eh ;) )

F) Cases and learning: You handled some situations in a project and learnt something valuable; hence you are documenting it, so that others in the company / community can learn. As an example you can see this post on learnings from Amazon outage – building fault tolerant systems on cloud

G) Any other format - there are actually many other possible formats / structures. If you use any other format - add to the thread.

7 Facebook commerce strategies for brands

2011-06-30T08:29:00.000+05:30

[This post was originally written for Social Media Today. You can read the original article herewhich got published on June 16th]

Background: F-commerce is increasing generating buzz in the social media and social technology market. Growing upon the people’s social graph, Facebook is suddenly emerging not only as a place to connect and share interesting stuff with people but also as a tool for commerce for brands and customers. World’s biggest brands are selling on Facebook today. In fact, the top 3 brands on Facebook – Coca Cola, Starbucks and Disney, sell directly on Facebook. E-commerce leaders are predicting that within the next 5 years more sales will be happening on Facebook that Amazon.

Hence we thought it would be a good idea to research on some interesting F-commerce strategies and see what different things are being done by brands in F-Commerce (Hat tip tosocial commerce today for their excellent research on Facebook commerce, which was very valuable for writing this article).

Here are the top 7 F-commerce strategies brand owners should know:

Facebook Stores:

Facebook stores (also known as F-Stores) are the typical stores on Facebook. The idea behind having such stores is to bring the store where the consumer is (i.e. on Facebook). Consumers can decide upon the product, make selections and transactions without leaving Facebook. Moreover, such stores get the viral advantages of Facebook like ‘likes’ and ‘Facebook shares’.

Many brands such as Tide, Gillette, Coca-Cola, 1-800-flowers, jcpenny and many more are selling on Facebook through Facebook stores

Group Buying

Facebook might have jumped into the ‘group buying’ waters with Facebook deals, but some brands are already using group buying to pump up sales in their stores. Certain brands like W Hotels activate heavily discounted deals when a set number of people bid on it. Skoda, ran the ‘More you like… less you pay campaign’ on their Facebook store, which was an online auction where each ‘like’ reduced the cost of the car by 1 Euro until somebody bought it. Similarly Searsis using the same mechanism on its Facebook store where deals go live when they have received enough likes. This ensures each product on the store generates buzz from its fans

Exclusive Offers

Since your fans and your Facebook store both are on your Facebook page, there are high chances that it will be your fans who will be shopping from your Facebook page. So why not use your store to reward them with exclusive offers to generate buzz along with sales.

Many brands are using this strategy to give exclusive offers on their Facebook stores. Pantene did this some time back when they were giving early access to their new products on their F-stores. Ketchup brand Heinz and Women shoes and Handbag brand Nine West are also using F-stores to give limited edition products to their fans

Facebook connect for network recommendations

Some of the biggest e-commerce and retail brands seem to be using this for moving their customers ahead into the sales funnel. Such Facebook commerce applications leverage Facebook’s open graph to show valuable recommendations to potential customers and buyers.

For instance, Amazon’s ‘Your Amazon Facebook Page’ application recommends movies, music and other products based on the recommendations of your friends on Facebook. Tripadvisor’stravel map application shows you a map of all your friends and the places they have been across the globe, which is a simple but smart way of gaining travel recommendations. Similarly, Levis Friends Store displays jeans liked by other people and your friends.

Shop and tell

You will find this as the emerging trend among onsite Facebook stores. With Shop and tell plugins brands can integrate referral features to their shopping carts so that whenever someone makes a purchase on the store, they can recommend the product to people in their network. In return they can avail rewards such as discounts, free shipping etc. Many companies like Flaunt it, Tip from me and Finz.it provide such type of plugins.

Another interesting shop and tell tool is Swipely which integrates with your card information to notify people in your network about your purchases. It also shows what is happening at the places you shop as a shopping feed.

Certain brands tweaked this model to generate recommendations and word of mouth. They are selling consumers content (books, papers, research reports, music) and products (beers, gifts) in exchange of a Tweet or a Facebook wall update about your brand. See pay with a tweet for more information.

Facebook check in deals

Certain brands are making smart use of Facebook check –in deals for boosting up their sales. Facebook check- in deals allows users to find deals in their vicinity using their mobile phones and find offers. Such kind of campaigns helps brands since user check-ins, when they come up in activity feeds, act as a marketing channel for the brands. We see a great potential in Facebook check in deals for F-commerce since a lot of interesting stuff can be experimented in this space.

Brands like Gap used Facebook check ins to give free jeans to the first 10, 000 check ins and discounts to the rest of the customers who checked in. Mazda too used Facebook book check ins to give 20% off on Mazda Roadster customers who checked in.

In store Facebook commerce

While some brands are trying to bring their stores to Facebook through Facebook stores, some others are doing the vice versa, that is, bringing Facebook to their on -ground retail stores. If your brand has offline retail stores targeting a lot of youth, then this strategy would definitely win you a lot of buzz and recommendation.

Coca Cola village is an interesting example of in store F-commerce, where there was a real life ‘like’ button that sent ‘likes’ to the users Facebook account by scanning their wristbands.DieselCam – an initiative by Diesel, had devices installed in trial rooms where people could take post their pics with Diesel Gear on their Facebook account.

Hope this research will help brand owners and social media research understand the wide scope of social commerce. It you know of any more strategies, please add to this list.

7 Facebook Commerce startegies for brands

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Facebook apps for marketing campaigns

2011-06-16T08:14:00.000+05:30

[I wrote this post originally for Social Media Today and it got published on June 7th 2011. I am cross-posting the post. You can read the original post here]

Background: Some time back I had published a research about how brands are using Facebook apps for enhancing their CRM. In this post I would like to focus on the second value proposition that Facebook apps bring to brands – an amazing opportunity to run campaigns.

I have been increasingly seeing brands using Facebook apps to give a boost to their marketing. In fact if you see the list of Facebook preferred developer consultants, you will see some very interesting case studies of brands using Facebook apps. Therefore, in this post I would like to focus on why and how brands are using Facebook apps for their contests and campaigns

Just as a reminder, in this post I am only focusing and benchmarking Facebook apps that have been used as marketing centric campaigns. Apps which are powering commerce, driving sales, customer support and philanthropy are not a part of this research.

Why brands are using Facebook apps for campaigns: This is a million dollar question. Here are a few reasons why marketing and brand managers are getting so much attracted to Facebook apps:

Getting campaign where the crowd is – this is the obvious reason. With more than 600 million active users on Facebook, a very large number of brands have realized that their target audience is active on Facebook. So why not use the good old strategy, take the show where the crowd is!
I have x thousand facebook fans, what next! – You have a large set of fans on your Facebook page and your community manager is daily putting up interesting news content to keep them engaged. But then, the next question that comes up is – what next! What more can you do to keep your fans excited about your brand or to say, what is the next step of customer engagement? Here Facebook apps turn out to be an exciting way to engage your fans, give them something new and get meaningful conversations / creations out of them
I want x thousand fans, how do I get them! – A lot of brands use Facebook ads to get fans for their page. But once a user lands on your page through your ad, how do you convince him that you are worth a ‘like’. Here Facebook apps come in handy, which help in providing relevant content, videos, information on the landing pages to grab user’s attention and help him decide. ( See Vans Facebook landing tab) Also many apps are have viral features to help them spread to your user’s network, resulting in more people getting in your engagement funnel
Campaigns bring the attention, Facebook retains it: I was going through @gauravonomics’ slideshare channel where he talks about the active role a campaign plays for a community. Essentially, each Facebook campaign bring attention to the brand (in form of new fans), but even when the campaign dies out, your fans are still with you and you can launch more active programs to engage them. Compare this with a traditional media campaign, where each new campaign has to be started from scratch.
Replicating an off Facebook social media campaign- Sometimes due to technical, design or functional constrains, brands prefer running social media campaigns using microsite or community platforms. Here building a facebook application helps you direct traffic to your campaign. For example, Pepsi built a Pepsi Refresh voting app to promote the Pepsi refresh campaign.

How brands are using Facebook for campaigns and contests

Although brands are being very creative in their campaigns and many digital agencies, creative agencies or consultants are helping them to come up with the best campaign to suit their needs, however most of the campaign focussed facebook applications can be divided into 8 broad categories:

Static content campaign for awareness: These are probably the most explored type of Facebook applications. These applications focus on awareness campaigns, providing rich media, videos, pictures to their fans in a shareable format. For e.g. Levi’s ‘Water talks about Levi’s efforts to save millions of litres of water. The application shows videos associated with the cause and helps people spread awareness about the Levi’s innovation. Hot Wheels has a landing tab application that runs viral video campaigns for team hot wheels.

Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls: Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls form a low engagement – low virality campaign app model for marketers. However many brands use them since they trigger participation and have valuable buzz generation capabilities. For example, Southwest Airlines runs sweepstakes and polls on their Facebook app.

Apps for viral campaigns: These are again low engagement campaigns designed to spread a message, virtual product by fans. Coca Cola gifts app allows user to gift their friends virtual coke products

Photo / video contest: It is from here that the apps start becoming more engaging, and the scope to have a remarkable campaign increases. These applications ask users to submit photos / videos around a certain theme and ask other users to vote for their favourite photo / video. The campaigns become viral since the participants start spreading it to get more votes / attention. Sony in its video contest on Facebook asked users to create trailers for the promotion of the movie ‘the priest’ and submit it as a contest entry to the Facebook app. Nike’s Free Arena contest asks users to submit videos of their sporty moves and stunts and get community to vote for the best video. Similarly Levi’s ran a video contest for their Facebook community to find the next ‘face and voice’ of their women’s wear brand.

Ideation contests: Ideation Facebook contest apps focus on asking the community ideas around a certain theme, lifestyle, passion or cause and ask the rest of the community to curate (rate, vote, comment, share) the ideas. The result is a user generated and community selected best idea which can result in a improved product, a new innovation, business idea, customer feedback, market research etc. For example Kohl ran an ideation campaign some time back where participants were encouraged to nominate and vote for the school they felt was most deserving of funds, and submit their ideas about how the funds could best be used by the school.

Loyalty campaigns: It is fascinating to see brands using Facebook apps for loyalty campaigns. Certain brands are leveraging Facebook apps to power up their loyalty cards. Starbucks card app allows users to manage their card through Facebook, edit profiles, reload, see transactions and get points for loyalty. Users can even reload their friends’ cards. (reference)

Other brands like Jetblue are leveraging apps integrated with Facebook places to power their loyalty and this brings a very interesting value proposition for the brands since Facebook platform provides them the social graph of users (friends, activity, profile), Facebook places provides the ability to check –in and gain loyalty points and the Facebook application integrates the two. The result is a powerful brand app that users can use to check-in when they reach official jetblue terminals, receive loyalty points, see friends’ activities for Jetblue and see leaderboard for the most loyal customers.

Social Games for engagement: Social Games are again are great way to build a campaign application. They are engaging, they attract high user activity, they are viral and can generate a lot of buzz. Certain brands like Travel Channel build their own social games like Kidnapp! to engage their audience (The game challenges users to kidnap their friends to their favorite international hideout city. To escape from the hideout city and begin kidnapping their friends, kidnapped players must answer a trivia question related to that city.) Certain other brands are using existing Facebook games for their campaigns. For example, Bing some time back advertised on Farmville to acquire a large number of Facebook fans. Similarly, Dreamworks used Cityville to promote their Kung-Fu Panda 2 movie where users could build drive-in movie theatres in their city, get collection items etc.

Referral campaigns: I have not seen many brands using Facebook apps for referral campaign. But Appirio Facebook application allows users to make effective referrals to their friends. Once somebody signs up for the app, he / she can see who other people in their network would like the product too based on their interests and likes and other information on Facebook. The app makes appropriate suggestion to users to make effective referrals to other in their network. See the case study for Mark. for more information.

Facebook apps can be a very effective tool for referral campaign since a social network works best in making referrals.

Hope this article would help marketing managers and brand managers understand how they can use Facebook apps for their campaigns. Would love to know more use cases from you. You can find a summary of this research below:

How brands are using facebook apps for marketing campaigns

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World's top brands social media adoption

2011-06-11T08:00:00.000+05:30

[This post was originally written for pluggd.in and posted on June 7th. You can read the originalpost here]

I was going through the BrandZ report on the world’s top brands for the year 2011. It was great to see that some of the top brands in the world are also the ones which are heavily adopting social media for their marketing.

I found following noteworthy things from the rankings:

4 out of world’s top 5 brands are technology brands and among the top 100, 18 brands belong to technology sector
Many online brands emerge in the list like Google (2), Amazon (14), Facebook (35), Ebay (82) and Baidu (29)
11 out of top 50 brands are using online communities as a growing and sustainable social media tool for marketing

The last point was most interesting to me. If you see the overall social media adoption among the top 50 brand, you will see that most of these brands are moving beyond the traditional channels like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to blogs, social applications, content thought leadership, viral campaigns, consumer generated campaigns and eventually models like sustainable online communities to engage their audiences, energize their loyal fans and facilitate word of mouth.

Hence in this post, I will like to talk about how 11 of the world’s biggest brands have adopted to sustainable social media solutions such as online communities to engage their customers, partners and employees.

IBM (rank 3):

IBM, in its continued efforts to build a smarter planet, has powered ‘A Smarter Planet’community. They believe that a planet is built smarter at an industry level and wants to facilitate related conversations on various topics like banking, energy, retail, traffic etc. Apart from that IBM powers developer forums and support communities to help users learn from one another

Microsoft (rank 5): Microsoft is another brand that really understands the power of online communities. They have built many communities and networks to individually cater segments of their target audience. For e.g. Microsoft Developer network is targeted towards developers,Microsoft partner network is targeted to provide tools and resources to Microsoft customers and partners to get more out of Microsoft products, Microsoft Dynamics Community is targeted for professional using Microsoft dynamics products and solution and Windows community provides users forum to hold discussions about various windows products

Coca Cola (rank 6) – Although the beverage major does not have a separate community site to engage fans, this is one brand that has made maximum use of its Facebook page. Legend has it that this page was originally created by 2 Coca Cola fans Dusty Sorg and Micheal J and is managed by them and not the Coca Cola Company.

However, with more than 27 million people present on the fan page and high volume of fan activity, news, promotions, and campaigns running; Coca Cola is doing a great job engaging its fans. They even have a social media policy on their Facebook page to help manage sanity in the community. They keep on launching social media campaigns to engage their audience and use the Facebook page to promote the campaigns. So you can see Expedition 206 app to promote the Expedition 206 campaign. Also coca cola has launched a community campaign – live positively to mobilize fans to lend a helping hand to the global community.

GE (rank 10) – GE’s Ecomagination Challenge is the benchmark example of how business can become social enough to crowd source innovation. Ecomagination is a fabulous user generated innovation contest that leverages the collective wisdom of crowd to come up with the best ideas on how to improve our energy future. The contest operates in phases (phase 1 was about building energy efficient grid and phase 2 is focussed at building energy efficient homes), where users give ideas and other vote for the ideas they support. GE plans to invest $200 million to winning idea to bring the concept into shape.

Walmart (rank 15): I really love the Walmart’s advocacy program for Eleven Moms. Eleven Moms is a mommy community lead by twenty (and not eleven) moms across USA. The moms are popular bloggers who talk about topics like parenting, value for money and this helps Walmart engage with a big set of their target audience. To engage their other sets of audience, Walmart powers discussion boards around parenting, health, lifestyle etc.

HP (rank 18) – HP leverages a lot on support community to help reduce support center costs, empower their consumers and partners to solve each other’s problems and generate consumer insight on support related issues. You can check out their support community on Facebook, HP support forum, HP Enterprise business community and support forum for their software solutions

SAP (rank 19) – I truly love the way SAP has built a community (SAP community network) of SAP professional to learn, teach and network with other SAP customers, partners and employees. Users can learn from each other through blogs, wiki, discussion, collaborate on projects and crowd source innovation on ideas for better SAP products

Loius Vuitton (rank 26) – The luxury brand runs an digital social magazine called nownessshowcasing stories of contemporary culture, global lifestyle, music, art, travel, sport and fashion. Some of the world’s foremost designers and creative thinkers in luxury industry participate in this community.

BMW (rank 30) – BMW’s Mini has built a one if the most interesting online communities I have seen, called ‘creative use of space’. While most of the brands build their communities around a lifestyle, passion or cause, BMW has built an urban community around a value – making creative use of space. This community is about taking part in events, competitions and projects about making creative use of space. Basically, it is a hub of creative people and designers to connect around event and information. This is how the community explains its purpose:

“When Sir Alec Issigonis invented the MINI he thought of a car that maximizes use of minimum space. Keeping issues like declining energy resources in mind, he created a functional and exciting car that is the ultimate creative use of space.

As urban dwellers we too are constantly thinking of new ways to explore or re-imagine the spaces around us to be more functional, beautiful, and available. MINI Space (the online community) puts up an inspiring framework for you to make creative use of space.”

Pampers (rank 34) – Pampers is one brand that really understand the concept of a social business and this is reflected by the fact that their website – www.pampers.com is actually a community around parenting! Thousands of parents engage around helping and learning about taking care of their children across various stages of development. I think this is a great way to engage your target audience (parents) by providing them an online space that they will repeatedly visit to learn more about parenting. Pampers gets a platform to run promotions, listen what they are saying and engage with their audience

American Express (rank 40): American Express has built an online community for small businesses called Open Forum. Undoubtedly, this is a smart move since companies like AMEX have a large focus towards targeting small businesses and engaging them on their network is perhaps the best way to do that. The community provides tools and information to small businesses to connect with others and learn about managing their business better.

Hope this research help you understand the power of online communities for marketing and brand building. It is great to see some of the world’s biggest brand making serious efforts to engage with their world. Find the presentation below that summarizes the research.

World’s top brands and their social media adoption

View more presentations from Kuliza Technologies

Marketing with online cricket communities

2011-06-05T07:37:00.000+05:30

With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.

How are these online communities engaging fans?

When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!

If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.

Hence I thought it might be a good idea to look into how these teams are engaging its fans. Some of these are benchmark practices to be followed by marketing managers for leading their social media marketing initiatives:

Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers andRajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs

Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on itscontest page, Chennai Super Kings is managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans

How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?

Needless to say, such communities are an immense asset to the game of cricket. It is adding an additional online layer to the excitement that thrives in cricket stadiums, beer bars, car radios and in front of television sets in homes. But the interesting thing to note is the way it is helping out in revenue generation and brand building initiatives of the teams’ parent brand.

Leaving aside the obvious eyeballs grabbing and focussed banner and branding opportunities that such communities bring (for e.g. see the bottom of the Kolkata Knight Rider website), such communities are helping brand sell merchandize, tickets and premium memberships too. But the most important asset such communities are bringing to the brand is that they are providing a round the year platform to engage the audience rather than the IPL event which generates buzz for at most a quarter. For e.g Royal Challenger brand would get a 12 month buzz, attention and user activity from its online community as compared to a season long buzz and attention generated by offline campaigns.

Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.

[As a matter of fact, Kuliza helps brands build online communities to connect customers, partners and employees and run social media campaigns. For more information, see ouronline community offering or learn about our featured work for txtWeb]

How social media is changing the game for startups

2011-05-25T11:20:00.000+05:30

[This post has been originally written for plugged.in which was published on 17th May,2011. You can read the original article here]

Having sold and marketed social media for the past 2 years, I have realized the immense potential in this concept, especially for start-ups, SMEs and fast growing companies. And when I say ‘potential’ I don’t just mean potential as a business model but potential to market better, gain valuable PR, hire smart people and build a great network.

Social media has proved to be the most impactful tool for start-ups and SMEs to compete with bigger players in their markets even with immense marketing resource pressure. The concept that a great idea that can lead to meaningful conversation, will gain attention of people and get them to engage and connect with each other has proven to companies that they no longer need to worry about running after PR agencies, start-up reporters or high marketing costs but gain traction with smart content, engaging ideas and channel presence.

In this post I would like to discuss how some start-ups are solving some of their major challenges like lead generation, building a brand on thought leadership and knowledge creation through social media:

Lead Generation

I really admire the way Hubspot (a Sequoia and Google Ventures funded inbound marketing company) markets itself. The company has a very active Facebook page that they use very smartly for lead generation. You will see a very good pipe line management by Hubspot where it uses its webinars to bring people to the Facebook page, engages them through conversations about inbound marketing and finally upon ‘liking’ the page, takes them to a lead generation form where presently one can download a webinar on ‘marketing through Facebook’ in exchange of contact information.

I found this type of lead generation tactic more methodological than the more known lead generation tactics through engagement on Twitter and Forums. However if you want to know more about these, here is an interesting article which you can use

Thoughtleadership

Another impactful way social media can help start-ups and SMEs to get attention of its target audience and acquire the ‘field expert positioning’ in their mind, is the way it can be used for thought leadership through tools like blogs, webinars, Twitter, Quora and forums etc. David Ogilvy, in his book, ‘Ogilvy on advertising’, mentions that their own advertising campaigns used to be page long articles about teaching other people, how to advertise better. Today social media gives you a publishing platform to do this without an advertising campaign. The reason why start-ups can give a tough fight to established organizations in the thought leadership battle is lack of hierarchies, bubbling passion for the field of work, an easy manageable content flow and social media policy

Adaptive path (a US based user experience design and consulting firm) uses social media very impressively for thoughtleadership. They use their blog (called ‘ideas’) for sharing ideas or topics like experience design, user research, interaction design, game mechanics etc. I see a lot of people blogging in this 40 people company. Their Twitter channel is used for promoting blogs, events and related industry news. Hubspot too uses its marketing blogand inbound marketing community as channels to showcase its thoughtleadership in inbound marketing areas

Knowledge creation for industry

Gathering knowledge and relevant resources can be a huge time and effort investment for start-ups and small companies. Never the less, certain businesses thrive upon such knowledge and information which are critical for their business

There is an increasing trend by such companies towards open research which is knowledge creation on an open source model. Altimeter group (a research based advisory firm focussing on emerging technologies) has a Social Media Resources wiki where people collaborate on information on social media agencies, consultants in the space, social media boutiques, interactive marketing agencies etc. Daachis Group’s social software wiki is another brilliant effort in this space.

Hope this post would help start-ups in rethinking how they can leverage this fascinating medium for their business better. Do let me know how your company uses social media for promoting its business.

2011-05-24T07:29:00.000+05:30

How online cricket communities are connecting fans and driving passion

With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.

How are these online communities engaging fans?

When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!

If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.

Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers and Rajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs

Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on its contest page, Chennai Super Kings is managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans

How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?

Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.

The emergence of event based communities

2011-05-12T08:39:00.000+05:30

[I wrote this post originally for Kuliza's ZaGarage blog. You can see the original post here.]

Background

Offline events have always been a great fit for online community creation, for one - events are themselves a social engagement and connecting visitors online before or after the event happens makes sense. Secondly, some of the events are built around passions (like Academy Awards, Super Bowl etc) and it is valuable to connect people around these passions not just to promote the event but to promote the passion itself.

Sometime back I got the chance to look into SXSW's (the mega music, film and interactive fest that happened in the month of march) event networking community, which is a closed network of people who are attending the event. I found the community an interesting way to connect people and facilitate networking before they actually attend the event making it a more valuable connect model for those who see a great potential in the event to meet interesting people. Some of the other interesting features included your personal network integration (like on Facebook / Twitter) with the platform so that you can see who other people in you network are attending SXSW. You can see a few snapshots below: (thse actually belong to @ksarda who kindly gave me access to this closed network)

Why an online community is a great idea?

Like SXSW, I am seeing an increasing preference for brands, PR companies and event management companies towards such event based social networks and communities. Brands are reaching out to white label social networks products or getting custom communities built specific for their event. The reasons in my mind for such rising inclination are:

Event promotion: Since they show the buzz being generate around event, interest of other people in the event
Increase event longevity: Event based communities start generating buzz around the event, conversations around the topic, even before the event and provide a platform for continued discussions after the event has ended.
Valuable information: Brand get to know who are the evangelists around the topics they want to attach themselves. They come to know about supporters to the concept of the event, something no other medium can tell them
Increase in event interaction: Such communities not only help in increasing numbers to the event but also help improve the overall event quality. It connects people around a particular interest (the one around which the event is based) and engages them in conversations and this makes the meetings at the actual event more fruitful. Overall this turns out to be a very impactful model.

What are the interesting communities in this space?

In my research I have come across 3 types of event based online communities. They are:

Communities for small and large events built over white label platforms (e.g.Esomar Congress 2009 event community)
Custom built communities around events (e.g. sxsw 2011)
Communities of passion built around events (e.g. grammy )

To begin with, there are many players in the white label platform market whose services you can use for building a community around your event. Crowdvine (that powered UX 2010 Week and Esomar Congress 2009) and Pathable (that powered World Education Congress 2010) are few of the companies that specialize in building event based online communities. Some other companies have platforms which can be customized, grown and moulded according to your needs like Qontext, which powered SugarCon Community (btw I loved this platform for their clean UI) and Ning that powered the unofficial sxsw insider guide. These platforms contain all the required features to build an event based network like people profile, discussions, news, networking tools, rich media, blogs etc.

Whether you would want a community on an already existing white label platform or you would like to build your own from scratch, like sxsw 2011, depends on what you want the community for. If the purpose of the community is to facilitate networking, build a conversation platform around the theme of the event which can be sustained even after the event gets over, you should be fine with such white label platforms. But if you want a deep integration of user interface with your existing website (i.e. if you want the look and feel of you community exactly like your existing website) you might prefer a custom built community. The problem with a lot of white label platforms is that all communities end up looking the same. Similarly many white label platforms only allow integration with a certain set of plugins and hence if you want something very specific (like running a contest around your event or integration with the event registration site) you would need services to customize these platforms or build one from scratch.

However there is a certain set of event based networks that instead of promoting the event, focus on promoting the passion around the event. Here the focus shifts from networking to connecting around passion. If you see the Grammy website or the NFL website the highlight is vis -a- vis music and football rather than the event. But research shows that such a promotion of passion has been highly impactful in increasing the viewership of the event.

What works in event based communities -what are the important questions you need to ask before planning a event based community

What is the key objective: Is it event promotion though networking, thought leadership, video campaign, contest, referral campaign or connecting people around their interest
How long do you want it: Is the community planned to cease after the event or you want to sustain it for loner. In fact you might even want to build a community that can add upon it's network event after event and operates round the year. In such case the community has to be built around something bigger than the event itself (like a lifestyle, passion or cause and events appear as campaign to energize the community)
Which tools do you need: Are the tools and platforms of your choice facilitating your objectives.

Hope this discussion was fruitful in helping you out in your online community decision for your event. Comments, feedback and added research are most welcome.

[ This research will be a part of the social technology quarterly by Kuliza which we plan to publish by end of this quarter. Also I would like to take this opportunity to add here that Kuliza helps companies build user communities and Facebook apps through it's ZaSocial offerings. ]

Gamifying thought leadership

2011-05-01T08:28:00.000+05:30

In my previous blog I had talked about how internal company culture can support companies B2B branding efforts such as thought leadership and creating internal brands. There I had also talked about the key role of employees in creating thought leader positioning of the company and without the help of its people, a B2B services brand will be helpless in communicating it's thought leadership and field expertise.

However, creating such thought leadership practices are easier said than done and many marketing and brand manager struggle in getting their employees to have an active presence on thought leadership channels like research blogs, conferences, webinars, research papers, guest articles and lectures etc. If you are one such person, this blog post is for you.

In this blog post I will focus on how some simple principles of game mechanics can be used to motivate people in your company to help you in your thought leadership and how we plan to do it in Kuliza. Now I don't think a lot about gamification but 2 people at Kuliza,@ksarda & @diarmaidb do, and I would like to thank them for helping me structure this. This initiative is part of my continued effort at Kuliza to integrate culture into marketing and provide a joint branding effort.

Why 'gamify' thoughtleadership?

For one, gamification of processes is an excellent way of positively reinforcing people and motivating them in a fun, non corporate way. They get a reason to be active and to move up. Secondly, if you ask people to take out time to document their research, participate or speak at meetups etc, these things might appear as a hassle to them. You gamify the process, attach level and tasks on the ladder and give them the full picture of where they can reach - they will see more value in these initiatives. Thirdly, gamification attaches reputation and recognition to performance and contribution. This helps you know, who are the key thought leaders in the company, who are the most enthusiastic people, who are the best bloggers, frequent speakers etc. Finally, gamification helps us break a large process into pieces (levels) and focus on one piece at a time. For e.g. at Kuliza we recognized more than 10 channels for communicating thoughtleadership (see diagram below) but helping everybody in all 10 would be a difficult task. By gamifying this process, we know what is each person's maturity and hence where should be the focus.

How to gamify thoughtleadership? Here are some of our thoughts:

a) Build the arena:

Define the objectives that you want to achieve through thoughtleadership. In our case, since we are incepting these practices for the first time, we have kept a focus on various channels, where we want to establish presence. Hence we identified around 10 channels.

b) Level'em up!

Attach these objectives on the thought leadership ladder. It is important to decide the total number of levels on the ladder.Having too many would make the game look difficult to win and having too less will make crossing each level too tough. Also the easier objectives need to be attached to the lower levels of the ladder than the difficult ones. At Kuliza, we also took care that the initial stages not only have easier objectives but also can be completed faster. (finally something valuable was achieved from the hours that went into playingsuper mario)

3) 'Points' to be noted

One you know the objectives of each level, you need to associate points achieved upon completion of a task (or a microtask) and here the creative bug can lead the way. For example, in our game, each level is divided into tasks. The players (employees) get points for doing task (like participating in meetups, forums at lower level to writing case studies, reports, guest columns at higher levels). To complete a level you need to achieve a total number of points and a minimum number of points for each task.

Finally there are booster points for producing content of extraordinary quality, moving fast on the ladder, etc and badges/ rewards for achievements like clearing a level, being the first to clear a level among other, being rank one consistently in a quarter etc.

4) Rules of the game:

Finally you need to think of the loopholes in the game and come up with set of simple rules to be fair and just to all, and keep the motivation level up. Like, everybody starts from zero, even if here might already be active on 5 of the 10 channels. Only quality content is counted and goes up on the channels and nobody should write just for the sake of moving up the ladder.

What comes up is an awesome (but simple) picture of this wonderful game!

However there are certain issues we need to fix and we know this game is not perfect as of now. It lacks challenges in between levels, which are a key part of game mechanics; we need to refine tasks at higher level , think a bit more on booster points. All said, but one thing is sure, this is going to be fun! Once again, comments and feedback are welcome on our ideas.

What makes a video go viral?

2011-04-15T10:18:00.000+05:30

It's Friday again and it's time to watch Rebecca Blacks super hit (of course for all the wrong reasons) number-'Friday'

Those who don't know the back ground - Rebecca Black, a 13 year old teenage, hit the internet limelights in March when her video went viral on YouTube. The video was a gift to her by her mother - a $2,000 package by Ark Music Company, that helps aspiring teenagers create music videos (report). Although she must have definitely made up this money from the YouTube views and iTunes downloads her song is getting ( Mashable recently calculated the amout to be more that $60,000), but this comes along with a lot of nasty comments on the video, more than 2 million dislikes on the YouTube channel, plenty of spoofs, a Good Morning America interview, more than 100 million views and what not!

All this makes me realize that if there is anything that makes such videos go viral (by the way, that is another billion dollar question haunting meeting rooms of marketing departments that want a super hit video for themselves post the success of Old Spice, Dove and Will It Blend) - it is us! It is we, the people, who control the social web and make these videos go viral. It's not humor, not kids, not crazy science experiments and not cute animals. It was this massive buzz generated by people that made this song popular, since in my opinion, there was nothing so special in this song and there must be 100s others like this.

All of this reminds we of David Armano's words in his TEDx talk on Social Media, that 'media isn't social, but people are social and social media is just about people.'

By the way, another interesting thing that went viral was was a blog post called 'To Afridi, with love' post Pakistan's loss to India in the World Cup semi finals. This blog post and related conversations has lead to the creation of a group called India - Pakistan friends on Facebook! Now we can say Zuckerberg did something that 100s of politicians could not ;)

Integrating culture with B2B branding

2011-04-08T09:29:00.001+05:30

[Originally written for Kuliza's social technology blog - ZaGarage]

Background: After spending almost 2 years in B2B focussed services companies, I have become more convinced of the need to branding efforts in this space. However, as compared to B2B product companies, establishing a B2B services brand is altogether a very different game. In this space, a majority of the perceived value of your brand is the summation of the individual personal brands of your people (employees) and in some cases partners.

In emerging B2B services companies like Kuliza, this turns out to be a total game changer as your branding efforts are no longer a function of what you are saying to the world in your promotions but how capable does the world consider your people with respect to your core brand promise. And since people in the company become an important part in branding, it becomes a necessity for your HR and culture functions to support your branding. In a way, it becomes a very interesting scenario where your marketing and culture functions jointly operate to create a brand in the minds of your potential customers and employees.

I had this idea for some time in my mind, until I read Tony Hsieh’s blog on ‘Your culture is your brand’ and Bill Taylors HBR article which revolved around the same concept. Hence I realized it would be a good idea to share some initial thoughts and learnings on how can brand managers get their internal company culture to support their branding efforts.

Scope:

Here I would like to focus on small to medium sized B2B services companies that plan to have a serious social web presence. Many of the suggestion here come out from our own learnings at initiating branding practices at Kuliza.

Learnings:

Here are the ways that can help create a company culture support its branding efforts:

Create personal brands internally

This is easier said than done, but social web has given us many tools to help people in the company establish their presence. B2B services brands are increasingly trying to show that they work with experts. They are taking blogging and microblogging more seriously to position themselves thought leaders and educators in their respective spaces.

But where they are making mistakes is that they end up focussing on the brand rather than the people. The brands hence loose the opportunity of creating an impression of field expertise for its people in its audiences’ minds.

Creating a culture of blogging inside organization is itself a difficult task. Here is a nice article on how your company should blog and how to start blogging practices inside your company.

But then blogging and microblogging are just a subset of the solution. There are ample platforms where your employees can generate personal reputation, from events speaking, conferences to being a recognized face in forums and Q&A platforms like Quora.

Create a culture of open research and independence of views

One of the reasons why companies’ efforts for blogging fail is because they give responsibilities to their people to create content but fail upon creating a sandbox within which they can play. This is important for employees to understand the boundaries within which they can help the company.

Encourage you employees to disclose their affiliation to your company in their posts and web profiles (Dell does that heavily), encourage them to cross post the blogs they write for company on their own blog, create a culture of open research where they can showcase their ideas to the world (Altimeter Group believes very strongly in this). Have a social media policy (ours is here) and a community manager + moderator to continue producing quality content even from such a distributed effort.

It is also a good idea that your KPIs in such cases is not just the reach of your brand (for e.g. your brand’s Twitter channel, blog readers, Facebook Fans) but the combined reach of all people who would like to show their association with the brand. This is a great idea for employees and the company to work together in creating a brand for each other.

Team up with your HR and culture departments

This is something we are fortunate to have at Kuliza. Our branding is a combined function of Marketing and HR and the branding team consists of the Chief Evangelist, the Brand Manager and the CPO. This helps in keeping the HR team in sync with the branding activities and understanding the attached value and challenges.

This helps the marketing team get valuable feedback in motivating employees in company branding initiatives. In fact the ZaGarage Talk initiative at Kuliza is a joint effort from this team, which focuses idea exchange inside Kuliza on social technology and entrepreneurship. The previous one was ZaLife blog – Kuliza’s culture blog

Create internal champions

The way in social media marketing, you have to let go off the control of your brand to evangelists and outside community, similarly here too you have to let go off the control of your branding efforts to your employees.

The best way to do that is create internal champions who would help you in your branding efforts, motivate their office friends to participate and volunteer for certain responsibilities in the branding efforts. Remember: Evangelizing begins at home.

In Kuliza we are planning to have internal champions for our services – ZaSocial, ZaMobile and ZaCloud and they can choose upon which Branding function – marketing, culture, IP and training – will they like to contribute their time other than their core jobs (which might be developer management, project management etc)

Communicate your branding efforts to employees

Again, this is easier said than done, but when the employees turn up to be the brand ambassadors, it is better that they understand the overall picture.

For example, it is a good idea if people inside the company understand the value of blogging and microblogging; how it is good for them and their company; what are the good practices they should follow for their social web presence; what is the personality of the brand you want to convey outside. Similarly you should be ready to listen to their suggestions and learn from their ideas.

Train your team to face the world

Lastly, it is really important to have a culture of teaching, training and mutual idea exchange. The people need to be ready to become the representatives of your brand. If you are planning to position yourself as thought leaders in your space, you won’t like the research to be concentrated with only some people in your company. There is a need for research to be shared and people to be trained in what others are thinking / researching in the organization.

Creating corporate blog based communities

2011-04-05T12:52:00.003+05:30

I wrote this blog post for my company blog - ZaGarage. You can see the original post here

Background:

With the society, workforce and businesses being strongly connected by social technologies, corporates are realizing that the way they used to traditionally market themselves is changing. Social technologies have impacted marketers in many ways, one being that they have realized that they can no longer just broadcast (or shout) but have to get into meaningful conversations with their customers, partners and employees. Secondly, social technologies have given a strong tool to small and medium businesses to effectively market themselves at lower costs.

Many marketers are therefore increasingly adapting to a more social and conversational model of marketing, one of them being creating corporate blog based communities, where you can find company employees sharing their ideas and opinions with others on more social platforms like blogs. Dell, Zappos, HP, Southwest Airlines have adopted to this model and used it for success.

At Kuliza, where we ourselves are big evangelists of social technologies, when it came to our new website redesign, we knew that it has to be created in the shape of a blog based community. Here are a few of my learnings on how to create corporate blog based communities:

a) What will you blog about?

What is the core talkworthy idea about which you will talk in your blog? Believe me, but if you are not Dell or a big brand with thousands of fans, supporters and evangelists, probably nobody will even care if you go on talking about what is going on in your company. You have to create your conversation channel around a talkworthy thing (or the social object ) which is core to your brand and its positioning. For e.g. signal vs noise, 37 signal's company blog, is positioned as a blog about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture and more.

b) Defining the core of your communication

Once you have thought of creating a blog based community for your company, it is really important that your blog becomes your core communication channel. In fact it is good idea to showcase all your research, case studies, news, opinions, thoughtleadership on the blog. I think that adaptive path understands this really well. They talk about all the interesting things that they are doing related to design, in their blog.

Also if you have presence on channel like Facebook and Twitter, you can use your news and blog updates as updates on these outposts to drive traffic to your blog. Hence your blog becomes a core landing spot for your community and your Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare channels act as outposts that drive traffic to it. Southwest airlines uses this tactic very efficiently. They leverage their more than a million Facebook fans to drive traffic to their blog.

c) If you are social, then where are the people?

What are you doing so that the communication is not one way? Are you trying to solve your target audience's problems through your blog. Does it add value to their everyday lives. Is it conversational, opinionated and makes them think?

Remember, you are out there not just for the sake of writing a blog but to have valuable conversations. If you want people to be interested in your blog, you have to also listen, respond, learn from their ideas and appreciate their contributions.

d) What goes at the backend?

You now have a blog based community and you are ready to start talking to the world. But then it is also a prestigious property of your brand and you would like quality content to go on it from your colleagues, partner and company management. Also you would like to stop unwanted contributions from troublemakers. Hence it becomes important to have simple but set rules and policies for engagement. These are the guidelines your authors or community members should stick to while writing, commenting or replying to somebody.

When it comes to a channel like a company blog, the voice of your authors becomes the voice of the brand, and hence you will need a moderator / editor to take responsibility of the content, create workflows to that potential leads from the blog go to the right people and take care of content not meeting the community policy.

At Kuliza, we have tried to use these ideas for our branding. Our ZaGarage blog talks about how social technologies can have a positive impact on businesses and society. This is our core marketing channel and a landing platform for everyone driven by our Facebook, Twitter and other outposts. The objective of our conversations is to provide ideas and research on social technologies that can help product managers, marketing managers, agency heads and CTOs (our target audience) do their jobs better. But we still are learning and would love to know how we can make our conversation channel more useful.

SMS based apps for enterprise

2011-02-06T00:12:00.000+05:30

I wrote the following blog post as a guest post for txtWeb.com - A online SMS bases app developer network. For the original blog post, click here

I remember a discussion with a friend sometime back about how the Indian handset market, which until now had been dominated by certain players, is suddenly seeing a surge in competitors leading to reduction in prices. Moreover, these handset players are focussing on apps and softwares as the next set of inventories to make profits. Nokia is heavily focussing on the Ovi stores while Apple, blackberry app stores are creating news every day.

This discussion made me think about txtWeb and the vast potential an SMS based app store has. Whenever I visit the txtWeb app store, I see a large variety of apps aiming at solving some critical problem for mobile users. There are apps for entertainment, health, finance, jobs etc. But one core category where I see immense opportunity for SMS based apps is apps for enterprise, i.e. apps for companies and corporations to help them in their day to day businesses. I see this emerging opportunity for 2 main reasons:

1) Many companies have large number of field workers (e.g. Shell, DHL, LnT etc) and more often they don’t have their personal workstations but share a common one. Hence communicating with them through emails or enterprise collaboration softwares becomes a problem.

2) A majority of these field workers have regular handsets that support SMS (and not the smart phones or business phones). Hence SMS based apps become a useful way for information exchange, collaboration and work management.

Enterprises usually have immense internal collaboration and communication needs and they invest heavily into it. Many platforms like Social Text, Salesforce’s chatter and Yammer thrive upon the enterprise collaboration needs. SMS based apps for enterprise can make things like information exchange, internal collaboration, email management and a lot more, simpler for field employees. Just think of SMS apps where field managers can send group SMS to all field workers in their native languages. Sales teams (or technical support teams) can push new leads to Salesmen (technicians) in a particular location. Field workers can fill their payroll data through SMS. As you can see, the opportunities are really immense!

What more ways do you think SMS apps can have a positive impact on enterprise needs? Are there more players in this space who have already created enterprise SMS apps? Do share your ideas with us.

How to manage online communities: Content creation (part 3 of 6)

2010-12-19T10:41:00.000+05:30

In my previous blog posts on introduction to community management and community promotion, I had talked about the various roles of a community manager. Here is a picture to chart out the scope of the jobs that comes under community management:

In this blog I will talk about managing content for your community. It is important to understand that your online community has to be either content focussed or people (relationships / activities / profiles) focussed to be successful. (via @2020social slideshare channel) I have not seen communities surviving without a focus on any one of them. Content can be one big reason for people to return back to your community. If you see some popular social platforms like Wikipedia, digg, delicious or many blog blog based communities like mashable, techcrunch etc; they live and thrive on their content.

Broadly your community will see two types of content: the internal content that your community management or online marketing team, guest writers and community manager writes and the external content that your community members add. However both content types trigger responses from each other. Your internal content might trigger response from your community members and vice versa. Many a times one form of content does not trigger response in form of more content but also actions.

What to write?

This is a big challenge in form of a community manager. What content should be added? Ideally your upcoming week’s or month’s content should be charted out in a content calendar so that you can ask your team members to start writing well in advance and get time to think of relevant topics. In fact @gauravonomics has a social web content strategy framework that I have often used for solving the ‘what to write’ problem:

What you write on your community, also depends on what type of community do you have. Supposedly if you have a very content focussed blog based community platform, maybe engaging people on #4 and #5 is not that important. However if your community is a young mommy’s community focussing on child care, you would like to focus on #2 to #5 and might not be interested in #1.

Where to write?

Depending on the type of your online community, you might like to divide your content among channels like blog posts, discussion forums, your outposts like Facebook, Twitter and your email campaigns (if you are planning to have one). Also it is a good idea to have an overall strategic objective for each channel depending upon the competencies of that channel.

For example, some time back, when I was managing an SMS based app developer’s community, we used their blogs as a channel for establishing market thought leadership, their Facebook page for engaging consumers of SMS based apps and promoting the apps and their discussion boards as support forum for the community to solve app related problems for each other.

When to write?

A typical answer is – ‘at a regular frequency’ but I think that like us, our community also has good and bad days. So in the good times of your community (like launch of a new contest / campaign, great PR coverage etc, you might like to show more activity to your new visitors.

However at rest of your working days, a regular frequency is always the best idea that you can plan from your content calendar.

Please do share your own content management tips and experiences for making this post better.

So much can be learnt from a brand's ad campaigns

2010-12-04T20:07:00.000+05:30

We all remember Bajaj being a scooter company - the ones that our fathers relied upon and perhaps what must have been the first two - wheeler brand they must have purchased.
I have always been a big fan of Bajaj and the way they have marketed themselves in the two - wheeler segment.
If you remember their initial ads (when they clearly called themselves a scooter company), their ads presented a picture of patriotism - a brand for the average middle class Indian guy - who is hard working, loves his family and is brimming with the Indian cultural values. Also the vehicle represented more than just a means of transportation - it was a partner in the growth, a family member and moreover a friend that everybody loved. If you see the campaign below, it was the typical Bajaj ad in 90s - full of Indian culture, Indian middle class and patriotism.

Hamara Bajaj - Awesome video clips here

Now if we move forward, there we the times in the beginning of this century, when Bajaj realized that the average Indian middle class guy no longer needs a scooter. Scooters are old fashioned and bikes are in. It was a time for identity crisis for Bajaj. Whether they should stick to scooters, or promote their bikes or call themselves a two - wheeler company. Perhaps this identity crisis was reflected in their ad campaigns in beginning of this century - where they were trying to be everything - bikes, scooters, scootys- but the ad communicated that Bajaj is the carrier of the Indian youth, who is still rooted to his / her culture. Looks like they did not want to lose the 'patriotism' sentiments that the brand had acquired in consumers mind. But then you can see the confusion and identity crisis and the loss in impact.

Hamara Bajaj TV Advert - India - The most popular videos are here

Hamara Bajaj -2001 Version - The best free videos are right here

And finally the pulsar ad - clearing all confusions, Bajaj decides its bike focus and that it would like to be called a motorcycle company. You can notice the change in the jingle - trendier, zippier version of the very old Humara Bajaj ad.

Hamara Bajaj (pulsar Add) - Funny blooper videos are here

Surely, so much can be learnt from a brand's ad campaigns run over a period of time.

SMS based news networks: Citizen journalism through SMS

2010-12-01T11:02:00.000+05:30

I have always been a big fan of citizen journalism. The whole idea of citizens becoming reporters of news and giving you the stories they have witnessed, not only adds credibility to the story but also empowers citizens to generate awareness and keep limited power in the hands of journalists, news editors and especially these days, news lobbyists.

If you have a look at some popular citizen journalism platforms like CNN ireport, Citizen Journalist (By IBN) and NDTV Social (the branded ones) and Rambhai.com, demotix, merinews (the independent ones),you will see that on one end such websites are giving citizens a platform to give out their frank opinions and insights into events while on the other end, there is a crowdsourcing element attached to the news pieces where citizen news articles are voted/ commented/ shared with others and you can see the most democratically sorted news pieces which can rarely be wrong.

What I feel is that with a mobile handset in almost every second hand in India and the power of social media and SMS based engines like txtWeb, the concept of citizen journalism can be made even stronger. Platforms like Pakreport (built on Ushahidi) are using SMS in an excellent way to get citizen report disasters and casualities via SMS.

Another site called Votereport India used SMS reporting to report voting malpractices and incidents via SMS and online media. Similarly SMS Gupshup (if you follow the txtWeb blog you must have surely heard about it) allows users to form groups and send SMSes to members. This is another interesting way SMS based news networks can be architectured.

Given the popularity of news channels in India and the kind of semi cooked gossipi, manipulated material that is presented in news channels these days, I am sure citizen journalism and SMS based news networks have a long way to go. All that is lacking is appropriate tools to empower a citizen and an SMS can do that.

I wrote this article as a guest post for txtWeb. txtWeb.com is a consumer generated SMS based app store.

How to manage online communities: Community promotion

2010-11-20T23:57:00.000+05:30

In my previous blog post, I had described the roles of a community manager and an overview of what goes into each role. I had talked about 5 major roles of community manager which can be range from either a focus on scaling the community to a focus on engaging the community.

In this blog post I will be talking about the different ways a community manager can promote and scale online community and some ideas of executing these promotional and scaling tactics successfully.

Online communities cannot be promoted according to a rulebook. A community manager will have to keep on identifying new ways to promote the online community. However here are a few ways I have learnt, which are effective in getting more people to know about you.

1.Outposts: Your online community need to have outposts at places where people are already present. Typically these are your Facebook/ Twitter/ YouTube or LinkedIn channels of your online community.

If you are looking for some good Facebook pages see starbucks page for their social application and engaging microcontest, Southwest airlines for everything they do, Zappos.com for the kind of engaging updates they create. For good examples for B2B targeting Facebook pages see Cisco for the way it promotes its events, Bain & Company for showcasing their thought leadership and market impact and this list aggregated by Social Media B2B for some other examples on B2B targeting Facebook pages. If you are looking for some good Facebook pages in India you can think of Fastrack for their applications and engaging updates and MTV India for almost everything they do. Moreover, if you are looking forward to knowing more about best practices and trends for Facebook pages, you should click on the given links.

However the above pages are outposts for brands and not for online communities of brands. To see how some brands use their Facebook outposts to promote the online communities related to their brands see the Facebook page for Dell Go Green online community for their very engaging microcontests (disclosure: Dell is a client of 2020 Social – my ex employer) and Club Mahindra Jiyo life page for their updates and shared links. Jiyo life is a Club Mahindra campaign that promotes getting more out of life. Interestingly, the updates on Jiyo Life Facebook page are very core to their philosophy of living life to fullest and getting more out of life.

2. Offline events: Sure success is online, but success cannot stay just online in the virtual space. It is many a time very effective to hold meetups, offline events and on ground campaigns in integration with your online community engagement to give your members an opportunity to personally meet each other and establish their network/ connections. Communities like USL’s Spiritz & more and Servus Credit Union’s Young Free Alberta understand does this very well and compliment their online efforts with offline events, promotions and parties.

3. Social Advertisements: By now you must be familiar with the Facebook ads. Social adverts like those on facebook many additional advantages over the banner ads. One, you can see how many people in your network have ‘liked’ an ad and second, they can be very targeted. Also you can create different types of Facebook adverts, like ads for your site/ online community, ads for your facebook page, ads for your event etc.

4. Initiating word of mouth: The biggest advantage social media brings to you is the way you can engage and energize your evangelists. Identify the super users and influencers in your community. These can be most active content creators, curators or people you regularly read your content and talk about it in their tweets, fb updates, blogs etc. Once you identify them, give them appropriate tools to promote your online community. You can do this by simple tactics like adding Fb/ Twitter ‘share’ buttons, creating emailer lists and sending them targeted mails to seek feedback / recommendations, invitations for guest blog posts (if your community has a blog) or even inviting them to speak at your offline events (if you plan to have any) or inviting them to form groups / clubs to organize their own offline gatherings. The last part comes handy when your online community is build around a core passion (like cricket / app development) or a cause (global warming etc).

5. Outreach: I am not a fan of pushy outreach strategies. However if there happens to be a hub for your target audience, having a presence there is definitely valuable. You can participate in relevant discussion forums around themes core to your community, network with influencers writing on relevant topics etc to pull the attention of audiences to your community. However a quick tip here – avoid spamming and meaningless promotion of your links. I get them a lot on my blog and I always hate them and I almost never click on them.

In my next post in this series, I will talk about few ways to manage content on your online community.

On joining as Brand Manager at Kuliza

2010-11-11T19:43:00.000+05:30

Some days back I had announced my departure from 2020 Social. It has been a great journey with some awesome folks and I am glad that I got the opportunity to work with people like Gaurav Mishra, Dave Evans, Gautam Ghosh, Kaushal Sarda, Abha Arora and many other super colleagues in the 2020 Social office. Many people at that time had inquired about my next stint. Hence I thought perhaps writing a detailed blog post would be appropriate.

I am very excited to announce that I have joined Kuliza Technologies as Brand Manager. Kuliza Technologies is a 4 year old startup specializing in Social Technologies. It is great to join Kuliza at a very exciting phase when the company is thinking very seriously about its marketing and branding initiatives. Also as an icing on the cake, I will be working again with Kaushal Sarda (who is currently their chief evangelist) on the whole marketing and branding initiatives.

It has been an exciting journey starting as a chemical engineer, to a researcher on Brand Management, a Brand Management textbook author, a consultant in a boutique Social Media Marketing consulting firm to a Brand Manager in a Social Technology company. I would like to thank all the people who trusted me to shoulder such responsibilities.

Guess the first challenge I am facing right now is relocating to Bangalore! I proudly used to say that all I need to survive is food, water, an internet connection and a gym; and as of today I am struggling for all four of them ;). My house neither has arrangements for food or water, the internet connection at home need address proof which I don't have right now and I am still searching for a decent place to sweat out the corporate calories.

My idea for txtWeb - Creating a Vendor - Consumer network via SMS

2010-10-26T11:59:00.000+05:30

Think of a fine morning when you get up and realize that you need some fruits for your house. You pick up your mobile phone and send the keyword (Say @vendor) to a particular number. Immediately you get an SMS back showing you the list of possible vendors in your locality say
1. Fruit vendors
2. Vegetable vendors
3.General Stores
4. Carpenters
5. Painters and polishers
6. Home maintenance agencies etc
(The system knows your location since you have submitted your location details when you registered for the network).

You send the serial number corresponding to ‘fruit vendors’ as a reply to the same number and viola – within a few minutes you have a fruit vendor with his fruit cart at your door step. After talking to the fruit vendor while making the purchases, you realize that he got your address as an SMS saying that fruits are required at this address. He also tells you that since he has registered on this network, he is regularly getting SMSes and his business has improved significantly.

Later sometime in the afternoon sitting in your office, you remember that you had to contact a carpenter for getting a new wardrobe. Tech savvy as you are, you send the same SMS and now get list of various carpenters in your locality. You choose the carpenter and send it back as an SMS, and within a few minutes you get a call from the carpenter and you fix an appointment for the evening – the job is done now!

Having said the above, I have two questions to ask:
1) Is a network like this possible through internet in India?
2) Does the above stated idea look very far sighted?

I think even in the best of scenarios, a vendor – consumer network like this cannot be achieved through internet in India. But yes, when it comes to SMS, this looks very possible. Each of these vendors carries a mobile phone. In fact, I saw a road sweeper yesterday, talking on a simple mobile phone. So when it comes to a vendor – consumer network, it is the SMS that connects us.

Secondly, I think the above stated idea does not look very farfetched, especially when there are engines like txtWeb which allow you to build SMS based application. If you visit the txtWeb appstore even today, you can see apps like @ebay (get product info on ebay on your SMS), @rest (get info of restaurants), @ask (get answers to your query, directions etc), @trains (get info on trains) which show that the txtWeb developers are on their way of developing apps to help people in their daily needs and soon somebody would develop an app for a network like this.

My book in the list of 'Books by IITD authors'!

2010-10-24T21:17:00.000+05:30

My visit to IIT Delhi for Rendezvous 2010 resulted in a very pleasant surprise. In the midst of Accenture Rendezvous ( which if you happen to miss this year, let me tell you, you haven't missed much ;) ), I saw this banner of 'Books by IITD authors' and saw my book in it!

To add to it, I am glad that the book is doing farely well in the markets - at least better than what I expected in its first year of launch, considering that textbooks hardly have a marketing budget and they sell more on word of mouth which builds from year to year.

However I think there is immense room for improvement in the book. The book was written way back in 2008. Since then many interesting things have happened which are worth sharing. Moreover, even I have grown as a marketing professional and I think that now I have some more interesting things to discuss. Hence we will soon get started on the second edition of the book. I got some valuable feedback on the book from the marketing students in my guest lecture at IIT Delhi and I will be incorporating them in the next edition ( in fact, the most valuable suggestion was to get a new edition of the book - as in renew the case studies.) I think the kind of 'Case study' heavy book that we have made, would loose its value over time if we don't renew it. Hence it is anyway high time we should get cracking on the next edition.

All the best to us! :)

How to manage online communities

2010-10-11T19:58:00.001+05:30

There are three critical stages involved in building and nurturing online communities. The first is the ‘plan’ part, where the online community product is conceptualized on paper; the next is the ‘build’ part where these communities are coded on various content management systems like Joomla, Drupal etc; the final but most lengthy part is ‘engage’ where these communities need to be managed and nurtured.

You might think that communities have the capability of taking care of themselves through the networking effect. However that is in fact a very rosy picture. The truth is that such communities need to be promoted, handholded and inspected to get the best out of them. The way each successful party needs a host and bigger parties needs organizers and managers, similarly most of the online communities (which can be interpreted as an online avatar of a get-together) need dedicated resources like community managers to execute the above jobs. In case of larger online communities you need additional resources working with the community manager for successful scaling and nurturing of the online community.

I have generally seen that most people underestimate the role of community managers and think of them as people who are needed to put a comment here or there or at maximum start some discussion threads. However if you consider your online community as a product, then you must also see the role of community manager equivalent to the product manager. In fact while managing some online communities myself at 2020social I realized that a community manager’s role can be divided into 5 broad parts.

Content Moderation: Moderating content, seeing if all the published content is according to the community policy and sanity norms etc

Content Creation (and seeding/ copywriting): Creating critical content for the community. They can be your conversations and the community admin or content seeded by you to provoke further conversations.

Promotion: Promotion and scaling up of the community. This involves managing community outposts (Facebook/ Twitter pages) to other tactics that can lead to increase in relevant traffic on community.

Response Mechanism: Channelizing responses so that adequate responses are generated. This involves well thought response flowchart to acknowledge positive/ negative comments, handling crisis etc. This also involves setting up work flows for successful execution of ideas and providing support/ solutions to user queries.
Retention tactics: Miscellaneous tactics to increase engagement of users on the community. This can involve running micro campaigns or directing users to appropriate parts of the community so that they have more to discover and engage around on the online community

Moreover if you look at the roles, all of them can be set across to range from Scaling focussed roles, which focus on increasing the size of the community, get more relevant users, to retention focussed roles, which focus on engaging and retaining people once they have joined the community. In fact I would like to take each of these 5 roles separately in 5 different blog posts.

Thought leadership for B2B companies: part 1 of 2

2010-10-03T13:07:00.001+05:30

At 2020 Social we used to suggest a lot of our B2B prospects of a thought leadership way to inbound marketing and we used to practice it ourselves for our own marketing for 2020 Social. (All of us used to regularly write about social media marketing and social business strategies on our company blog). Believe me, almost all of our marketing effort went into showcasing our thought leadership in social media marketing and we rarely spent a penny on anything else. And even though we were a start up, we got a good number of prospects contacting us rather than we calling them up and asking them whether they have any requirements!

Today many B2B focussed services companies want to seen as thought leaders in their space; as companies that can help their clients not just with execution but also with ideas. They want to show that they know their stuff well, they think ahead of their competitors and they want to remain in a preaching mode. However, perhaps it would be wrong to say that this is a new concept because we saw this very thing being practiced years ago by Ogilvy and Mather for their own advertising campaigns. Here is a snapshot I took from the book 'Ogilvy on Advertising'. You can see that O&M's advertisements used to be one page articles teaching about 'How to do better advertising'

In this book, David Ogilvy writes - "The purpose of my ads (for his own company- O&M) was to project the agency as knowing more about advertising. You may argue that this strategy was ill-advised, knowledge being no guarantee of creativity. But at least it was unique, because no other agency could have run such advertisement - they lacked the required knowledge. My ads not only promised useful information, they provided it. And they worked - in many countries."

It is fascinating to to see that even at a time before there was web 2.0, the ideology of marketing oneself through one's knowledge existed. And today, when social technologies have given us all the tools to comfortably preach and publish our thought leadership in our area of expertise, I see very few companies actually practicing this in a proper manner.

I think among the companies that I have seen showcasing their thought leadership in their areas of expertise, Adaptive Path (a user experience design company) understands it the best. If you visit their homepage, it gives you a glimpse of what is recent on their blog and Twitter page. Moreover, most of their blog entries show that the company thinks ahead of others when it comes to user experience design and gives the reader the impression that it has got a team of some very smart people. Also you will notice that their homepage is designed differently than others. Three out of the seven tabs on the header talk about the thought leadership of the company - blog, events, ideas, which shows that the organization has a serious focus towards exhibiting their ideas. Also the homepage is designed in a way that you can get an idea of 'who is adaptive path' and 'what they do' in 15-20 seconds of staying on the homepage.

Among Indian companies, an organization which understands this ideology better than others is Infosys. You must visit their blogs page where the company has multiple blogs running about upcoming IT technology and its need in various industries.

This post is more about showing that if your are a B2B focussed company, and if you are indeed in the business of thinking ahead of the market then it is high time that you start showcasing your thought leadership. Ogilvy preferred printed posters, adaptive path prefers blogs and events. What other ways exist in exhibiting thought leadership and how are some other organizations doing it differently? These are some of the questions I will like to take up in my upcoming posts.

How to market your brand through Social Media - My guest lecture to IIT Delhi MBA class

2010-10-02T18:31:00.000+05:30

I remember having a long discussion with my IIT Delhi marketing faculty (with whom I co-authored a book on brand management) some time back about how social media and social technologies are changing traditional modes of marketing. I remember him asking me all sorts of question regarding the credibility of this upcoming media and at that time I found it pretty hard to convince him. Hence it was a bit surprising that a general chat with him last Tuesday got converted to an invitation to give a lecture to his marketing class on social media marketing and how brands are using this upcoming form of media!

Here is what I presented to the class. It was great to see that some of the students grasped this very fast and came up with questions like returns on social media marketing, monetary impact, benefits of going for online communities over a simple Facebook page etc.

Iitd pres 01102010

View more presentations from achintya85.

I would like to thank Dave Evans, Gaurav Mishra and 2020 Social for providing such great research out in the open that it was possible to plan this presentation and get adequate ideas at such short notice.

PS: At the end of the day, what stole the show was not just the opportunity of giving a lecture to some smart people but this SMS that I received from my prof in the evening: "Good feedback of the class.like this feedback I have received. Mahim, thank you for the guest lecture today. One of the best lectures in dms i have attended." :)