Srini's Stuff

Social Samosa: Consumerism and Advertising: Building Brands as Products, not Commodities

2013-04-17T16:31:00.000+05:30

Consumerism is increasing day by day especially when it comes to mass marketing and advertising being shoved down consumers’ throats. It isn’t any different on social media either. As a marketer, it is important to introspect if your consumers are really listening to what your communication is, or if they have become zombies brainwashed to buy your product. Do they rely solely on brand recall without having knowledge of or believing in what they are purchasing? Market trends keep shifting and a brand that has strong recall today can be history tomorrow.

So, the real question is how do social media marketers or advertisers communicate with and engage consumers without really having to generate the hype of consumerism around them?

I’ve always believed that communication is always about the consumer, whether in social media or in mainline communication. Making the product stand out in your communication is more relevant than just influencing the consumer or key influencers surrounding him. The communication should not only seek to break the clutter but should also make fundamental sense.

A very good example of this is L&T Insurance’s ‘Likh Ke Doge Kya?’ campaign. I had the opportunity to listen to Ms. Deepali Nair of L&T Insurance speak at the Computer Society of India IT 2020 Conference, about how they worked backwards on the entire campaign, tailored it to suit Facebook first and then ran it on television. It was an interesting campaign and very successful too.

It wasn’t about what consumers want, but what consumers aren’t really asking for. In hindsight, I am sure that, ‘Likh ke doge kya?’ is a question they always ask insurance providers. It also takes a look at how fallible the whole insurance business is, especially when it comes to claims, terms and conditions and queries. In this case, it wasn’t about shoving another insurance product that no one knows about down the consumer’s throat, but about making a firm commitment that queries would be responded to within X amount of time, and they would give it in writing. What stood out in the campaign was the promise of execution – exercising ownership and being accountable.

So, what should we, as marketers, be doing?

Research what consumers don’t know

Keep doing your research. Don’t stop doing that at all. But change the way you do it. It is about time we started looking beyond what the consumer is telling us and try to gauge insights by reading between the lines – what the consumer is thinking but not saying.

Of course there will be rants, cribbing and negative sentiments on social media. Invest time in resolving those. But don’t miss out on what the consumer isn’t telling you. And yes, by all means, classify your consumers based on demographics, but don’t obsess over the behaviour and decision-making of your target group. Yes, consumers may not know what they want, but you do. It is all about thinking backwards.

Don’t listen to what they’re saying. Listen to what they aren’t telling you.

When it comes to social media, ORM has always been the tool to listen to what the consumers have to say about brands and what consumers have an opinion about. But it doesn’t mean that ‘listening’ only involves market research, gauging sentiments, categories and keywords. Try to analyze what is lacking in the market. As advertisers, we may not have a control on the product, but we always have a control over the positioning.

Don’t give them a reason to talk! Talk to them!

The trick is to engage consumers by being proactive. Do whatever it takes to ensure that you are there as a product and brand to listen to what they are thinking and not saying. Before discussing the product or brand, ask them interesting questions. Use promoted posts to create a focus group testing within your communities. Yes, focus groups aren’t always accurate. But, be blatant about the questions that you ask – questions, the answers to which, you, as a consumer, would know but perhaps, hesitate to speak up. Consider crowdsourcingas an option but don’t feed your consumers, let them feed on the existing situation.

Don’t just shove a product down their throat! Ask them why? Why are they really using your product, as opposed to any other product? Do you really know what your differentiators are? Have you used the product yourself? Have you sat through the product brief and tried to identify if there is any difference between your product and any other product that the consumer would know about? No? Well then, do that. If there are no differences and you are just another competitor, it is more likely that the brand recall, advertising and how far your reach goes will be decisive factors for the consumer in making a purchase decision.

But if you talk to your existing communities, you will get the answer. Use that to your advantage. Create a campaign on any social media platform using any tool available to find out WHY does your consumer buy your product? Based on the responses, engage with the consumer accordingly and use it as a reference point for your next communication.

Trends change but buying behaviour has one element that will always remain constant – the ignorance that drives those trends. Use it to your advantage. What I am trying to say is perhaps futuristic but very simple. Every campaign, advertisement, billboard or hoarding that reaches out to the masses is reflecting the consumerist sense of behaviour, which is today, what is making the product or brand irrelevant. But social media has the power to change that – by genuinely engaging with the consumer. This change will not only benefit consumers but also, create a larger and more profitable market in the long run.

Interestingly, the other day Gautam Ghosh pointed me to this blog about ‘Collaborative Economy‘ by Jeremiah Owyang, suggesting how brands are already creating a shared market space amongst consumers and using it to their advantage. Rather than over-spending on products that they don’t need, consumers have let better economic sense prevail and have decided to share their needs. And that is what consumers would prefer in the future.

So what will make or break your brands is, ‘Is your brand truly unique and doesn’t need a recall to be purchased by your consumers.’

Do you know of any brands who are doing this well? Let me know.

Social Samosa: Consumerism and Advertising: Is Your Brand Only a Commodity?

2013-04-17T16:29:00.001+05:30

Original Article on Social Samosa

Consumerism? What’s That?

Here’s what Wiki says:

Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the purchase of goods and services in ever-greater amounts.

It is certainly something that drives all of us to constantly keep buying and have the craving to buy time and again. With a bend to figure out, what to buy, when to buy, how much to buy and how often to buy, consumerism has certainly been part of our lives since kingdom come. Interesting to notice how it is primarily driven on the basis of what others are buying and on the sheer influence of a majority of factors in the market. Have you’ve watched this movie ‘The Joneses,’ You’ll know what I mean…

Some key factors that affect the purchasing decisions are:

What purchases are happening and what the market trends are.
How buying behaviors are affecting lives of people in your region.
How advertisers both on Social Media and offline are influencing the consumers.
Price point and offers / how much more do I get if I buy this today.
Finally there is the ‘I need this because I ‘NEED’ this.

Yes, a minimal thought is given these days by consumers on ‘need to have’ as opposed to ‘want to have’ because of the ridiculous amount of money brands are spending on advertising, giving deals and discounts and a lot of other factors to increase consumption and consumerism. That is also rolling out on Social / Digital Media. But in the bargain, the true question to ask is…

Are your consumers really listening to you? Or have they become zombies who are brainwashed to buy your product based on incessant levels of advertising? As an advertiser or marketer we certainly need to create the ‘want to have’ aspiration for our buyers. But as a product builder, it’ll always be the opposite of it unless, you are someone like an Apple Inc.

It is always a good thing to really reach out to your consumer and engage them within your community and target group. It’s also important to focus on the ‘Big or Small’ whatever data you analyze and engage with them one-one. Being there for your consumers, rather than shoving something down their throat through sometimes insignificant or even irrelevant forms of advertising, including Facebook andLinkedIn media buy. It is ironic that the same marketers and advertisers are consumers themselves at the end of the day be it on digital, social or mainline media.

Speaking of which, there’s an interesting story I have to tell. One that I observed in a grocery store while I was out to buy a couple of things to eat as a consumer. I usually get a lot of insights out there. Some things that you could really use as a marketer/advertiser especially if you want to understand your consumers better.

So here’s what happened:

I was waiting in the queue before checking out with my purchases. There was a father who was with his 2 year old son in front of me and there was a mother with his 9 year old son behind me in the queue. (Approximate ages of the kids)

Scenario 1

The father ( approximately 37 years old) had a fairly empty to medium filled trolley. He had picked up an ordinary packet of candies maybe worth Rs. 20 for his 2 year old kid. Then the kid saw a big Dairy Milk in the rack, which probably is worth Rs. 30/40 bucks. As soon as he decided he wanted it, the kid wouldn’t let go of his packet of candies either, suggesting that he wanted both. But the dad, persuaded his 2 year old to trade the packet of candies for the Dairy Milk!

Scenario 2

The mom (approximately 34 years old) was waiting behind me, her trolley was generally full of stuff that you’d buy to consume on a daily basis, the vegetables, the packet of cereals, milk, butter/cheese, eggs, a huge bottle of cold drinks, some fruits, and probably a few cosmetic items. Her 9 year old son walked in from behind and he had 2 bars of Snickers, the smaller ones which would probably cost Rs. 10/20. She just told him to drop it in the trolley with no questions asked. So, what does one intercept from this observation? Many things probably and different people would come up with different interpretations. But one good thing about both the scenarios playing out at the same time was that it probably gave me a pretty hands on perspective on this buying behaviour.

This is what I can speculate.

Father knows Dairy Milk and has a better brand recall about the product. Keeping in mind the Indian parent buying behavior especially when it comes to chocolates I’d like to say Dairy Milk is always viewed as a premium brand of chocolate, no matter what it costs. And hence the intuitive need to haggle with a 2 year old kid to get rid of the candies packet.

In this case, Snickers, it may not have had a bigger brand recall with the mother and she wouldn’t really mind his kid buying those two packets as they anyways looked small.

These were my first two thoughts on impulse to interpret the behavior that I witnessed.

But if you come to think of it, there could be a multiple amount of permutations and combinations that might have affected the purchasing and influencing decision.

For example,

What is the mindset of the father/mother?
What is the spending power of the father/mother?
What was his original intent of entering the grocery store and what he was willing to spend on extra purchases?
How strong are their impulses, their gender and age and the kind of purchasing patterns they have etc.
And of course, it would very well happen that the father and the mother both were just giving in to their kids demands, only difference in both of their behavior could have been the fact that the brand made a difference in their purchase.

So whether it is purchasing necessities, requirements or luxuries and indulgences, in our day to day lives, we all and I mean all of us consumers in the current economy and the conditions in India and worldwide are always affected by brands and brand recall certainly carries a lot of weight when making our purchases. I mean, that’s a given and I don’t even need to talk to this audience about it. We all know that.

Be it in mainline advertising or Social Media, our lives have dwelled within the breakup of our Target Demographic, the kind of things he/she buys, what age group he falls in and speculating what kind of things he/she likes, who are his primary/secondary influencers and what additional things are they interested in. That is our life 24×7, 365 and we all burn the midnight oil trying to decipher the consumer as if he/she was some code or a pattern sitting in front of our MacBooks, Desktops, iPads and laptops like the ‘operator’ from the Matrix.

Very few brands, let’s say Apple and mainly thanks to Steve Jobs, will take a call and say ‘Consumers don’t really know what they want.’ and if we were to do something that would appeal to them, then we aren’t really making a dent in the universe. We are mainly subverting our product to fit in and shove it down their throat for their consumption, actually consumption till the point where they actually puke until there’s no return.

So what am I trying to get to?

A few fundamental questions that I’d like to ask myself when it comes to Social Media or any form of marketing for that matter. I remember about a year and a half I wrote this blog post on brands getting their communication right.

I read that again now. Interesting to note that, this doesn’t change even today. But yes, I’d like to differ on one perspective.

Consumerism hasn’t yet reached its tipping point and most certainly all the things that we have been doing in the past will continue to stand. But what will make us and our brands more than just a commodity and as products to ‘stand out‘ is how we productize our services and servicize our products, something I learnt from The Purple Cow. Remember the irony I brought out in the beginning?

So the questions that will still linger in one’s mind are :

Do consumers make decisions based on brand recall and communication?
Or consumers have their own wandering mind which no matter how hard we try, we cannot decipher and the trends will keep shifting depending on the herd mentality of the consumers.
Lastly, how do we really communicate to the consumer especially when we don’t have control most of the times over the product as marketers / advertisers

In a separate post, I have answered these questions in a different way, one that’ll help your brand be more than just a commodity, be it on social media or offline. I have written about how we need to build brands as products not commodities.

Business2Community: Facebook’s Open Graph: Making Droids Out of Humans

2013-04-11T17:08:00.001+05:30

Original Article published at Busines2Community

I’m sure this is something that has been spoken about many times before especially when Facebook’s Open Graph was launched and a lot of products enabled the embedding of open graph into their APIs, and specifically ensuring that a lot of verbification happens on the go. Every product that has been launched within the start-up ecosystem has ensured that their app or product has an element of verb and being hooked on to their users in terms of ensuring that every time they use the app, automatically the action is shared on Facebook.

Fast forward to last week. I was just generally going through my own timeline for Facebook. I’ve been very sporadic as far as my use on Facebook is concerned. Generally speaking, my overall consumption and sharing on Facebook has reduced over a period of time now. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for that, and yes, day by day, Facebook is really becoming a repository of meaningless content mostly not so much worth curating even.

Of course, the kind of information that is already managed via my lists and by blocking / hiding feeds from unnecessary feeds is already taken care of. Yet, there isn’t a lot of information that I share myself and a lot of times users are sharing what’s happening in their lives.

Which is where, something I noticed on my timeline made me go back and think about how this Facebook Open Graph has changed the ball game already with how people are sharing information on their timelines. Soon enough, this is probably something that will determine how people will go about interacting with their friends or rather interacting with friends through applications.

Take a look at some of my recent updates.

Facebook Updates of the Open Graph Culture:

I biked 10 kms via Runkeeper
I read Steve JObs on GoodRead
I checked in at McDonalds, Mumbai
I am watching The House of Cards on GetGlue
I pinned Paris to ‘Places I want to Travel to’
I viewed ‘How to Sell Better’ on Slideshare

It’s already happening and very few of us realize how that is affecting our content sharing and consumption behaviours, but soon enough the Social would actually move towards A-Social and very cyborg like connections that we are heading towards. In fact, moving forward, with the introduction of Google Glass, this would be something that would completely change the game.

Going by how human intelligence is striving towards making everything automated and we are all becoming bots or droids of various products sharing various updates through so many social apps, it’d be hard to find a manual update and most interaction on Social would be droid like and less social in its truest sense.

What do you think?

Cheers

@srinistuff

Social Samosa: Social Web on the Go – Is Social and Mobile the future?

2013-04-08T14:57:00.000+05:30

Read the original article on Social Samosa

A very interesting and certainly very intriguing concept is of course how the shift of consumption of media is on the go. A lot of consumer mindset is of course shifting towards mobile. Many folks have even completely shifted their marketing strategies to mobile. Mobile internet is slowly getting big.

I was down in Singapore a month or so ago and I noticed that trend already existing and was very big there. With an internet penetration of 90% and above and Social / Digital media penetration of around 60% a lot of it there is via mobile.

I can see that will soon be the state of Internet in India too. Mobile and tablet devices reach consumers where PCs and Laptops don’t. Depending on the kind of brands that are very active on mobile campaigns it’s to be seen how that market shapes up.

But one thing is for sure, especially with more mobiles and tablets sold more than PCs and tablets and with the telecom industry booming in India, brands need to really give that importance to their consumers who are mobile and going to get mobile.

With premium services like Facebook mobile advertising, customized targeting via mobile or email as UID. Also with the new Facebook newsfeed coming into focus, mobile will play a key role in how brands will strike that first mover advantage or for that matter how many of them will start recognizing that sooner than later and transform their consumption patterns for users on mobile.

Something like customizable content for mobile would make amazing sense for your consumers.

For instance the recent announcement of Flipboard giving an option to users to create and curate their own content in form of magazines makes for an interesting use case of how mobile can be really used to drive customized content consumption.

Or using an app called MobileRoadie (www.mobileroadie.com) to create a Social media app for content consumption for niche audience of your content.

There already are brands weep are in India who’re using mobile to their advantage, like Shoppers Stop, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Cbazaar and many more…

How much longer before Social and Mobile integration becomes stronger? Is social and Mobile the future? What are your thoughts on this?

Cheers

@srinistuff

Social Samosa: Facebook Graph Search: Changing the Meaning of Brand Affinity?

2013-03-09T18:57:00.000+05:30

Original Article posted on Social Samosa

From the time it has been out, a lot of people initially had misunderstood ‘How Facebook graph search could be the next ‘Google Killer.’ By now we all know how it is truly not going to be a Google Killer per se. And in fact how it should be rather perceived as another tool within your peer user group to help you find interests supposedly based on common interests of your friends or what your friends have liked within your network.

Fortunately I had the opportunity of getting it and trying it out and by now most of us also would have had a chance to try it out. And certainly, it is quite intuitive within the context of the Facebook ecosystem and the way it queries search results is something which will bevery useful for brands who want to create contextually aware engagement with the users of their specific demographics.

So I take a look at the bigger picture and how it will affect brands and what is it that brands should really ‘do’ when it comes to Facebook Graph Search.

So, what does Facebook say about FGS to brands?

The search bar first returns the top search suggestions, including people, Pages, apps, places, groups, and suggested searches. People can search for things like restaurants near them, hotels in places they want to travel to, photos posted by Pages they like, or games that their friends like to play.

These search suggestions take people to a unique results page. The results returned are based on factors that include information that has been shared by your business and the connections of the person searching.

As has been the case for some time, we may also make search suggestions in the search bar that then can trigger web searches. Web searches will display Bing results and Bing ads, similar to results on Bing.com.

Pages and apps can still use sponsored results, which appear to people whether or not they have Graph Search (sponsored results have been globally available since August 2012). There are no new ad formats available today.

What do I say?

While all of the above is a great way to look at FGS and eventually may work wonders probably if the understanding of ‘Like’ on Facebook really meant what it says it is. Or Relationships are the way app developers build in their apps, pages while using Open Graph.

If “Facebook had launched in 2013, and immediately graph search was introduced, then the concept of ‘Like’ would be much deeper than it is meant to be amongst users as of now.

We all remember how ‘Like’ wasn’t even ‘Like’ before and how the ecosystem changed your ‘Interests in your about me / profile to actual Fan / Brand Pages and tagged them as ‘Likes.’

And that in my opinion is the ‘One major fundamental flaw in this entire aspect and eco-system.’

This also means, we can’t go ‘Back to the future’ and fix this! This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to try out or experiment with it. After all that’s why it is in beta. However I thought about certain aspects of this and tried to give some deeper meaning and thought to the brand, while I completely understand that not everything we do in advertising or social media should be scrutinized down to the tee always. Sometimes you just got to go with your gut, and I’ve done that many a times.

Nonetheless a perspective that I had to put out there through this blog and probably some of the questions that I’ve got in my mind would have answers out there amongst all of you.

“What does a consumer/user have in mind when he goes on a ‘Liking Anything Spree?’ Also, when the initial ‘Like’ button was brought into effect, what guideline did it give to the consumer especially when it came to ‘Liking’ Brand pages? Now I’m not saying that consumers have been tricked into this or are gullible enough to fall for this shit.

So it is as important for brands to know this concept before they actually start beefing up their profiles and ensuring that

We need to discount for some of those ‘Fans’ and need to ensure that when we do the new media planning campaigns, especially the ones that involve Facebook Graph Search based options when they roll out. Brands need to understand that ‘Just going on about’ getting random Likes due to search may not be as good as first,

To be absolutely sure what information will go away corresponding to the TG being influenced by FGS

Ensuring that the existing communication and information that is on their page is optimized for that.

Lastly, making sure that the information updated on your page should be more transparent, complete and avoid truthiness of any sort.

Of course, there’ll be a lot of gaming that might happen. Again we all know how SEO/SEM page rank algorithms and Panda worked and how Google keeps taking the edge away from marketers.

For all we know, an average Facebook Joe likes just about every damn thing on the face of the earth or did so up until now… Understanding relevance in the economic circumstances is least of his concern. Adjudicating whether the brand is good or the fact that he has an affinity to the brand because it is good in terms of its service / value that they provide is the least of their concern.

Some questions we ask ourselves if the consumer has reached that deeper level of understanding and even if he hasn’t, just like we do television ads, Facebook media buy is always lucrative and about truthiness. Well, mostly…

In today’s world ‘Brand Affinity’ is a very tricky business. As I might have spoken about it before, especially with convergent media focusing a lot on crisper communication, shorter retention span and most importantly lines between mainline, digital and social blurring inthe world of marketing, it becomes harder to really set pace with the consumer especially when it comes with creating ‘Brand Loyalty’

That is when brands especially if they are competing with each other, start adopting many tools, many machines of communication, trickery and forgery to blur these lines and resort to say a form of ‘truthiness’ which a lot of us know emerged way back in the ‘Mad Men’ era and has continued from then till today. Advertising has sowed a seed that has become very difficult for ‘Brands’ to undo and actually communicate what their brand really stands for or be percieved as.

So just as it does with ‘advertising’ / ‘branding’ same se tof rules apply to utilizing social search tools such as FGS or for that matter ‘enabling brands being socially searchable via Google+.

So today if a Facebook User really ‘Likes’ a brand… There’s more to the fact that he’s actually ‘Liked’ THE BRAND… Nonetheless, brands of course get satisfied by that fact and would even go to the extent of considering it a ‘Real feedback’ for their purpose. No deep diving or meaning or consideration into the idea of whether the audience they are dealing with on Facebook are really the consumer or aficionados who are their real ‘advocates’.

So this is what I ask

Is it a challenge for brands to really understand their brand affinity. And will that really drive further and get a brand to be more closer to a consumer via Facebook Graph Search, based on its relationships with the open graph of consumers, and consumers friends…

While we all know from a broader picture even from a tangible or intangible means of looking at Likes to drive ROI or for that matter brand awareness is still as native as

‘How many people ‘Like’ your page?

‘How many people are ‘Talking about your page.’

At least for a majority of the brands, and I’m just being the least unassuming based on my interaction within the business.

So what do you think about this whole situation with FGS Now? Especially when it comes to it driving ‘brand affinity based on search within Facebook ecosystem.’ Will FGS drive it or brands have to do much beyond just looking at FGS itself being the promoter of their brand within peer groups?

Do share with me your thoughts…

Cheers

@srinistuff

#BusinessRocks @ #smwsg - Pecha Kua Style...

2013-02-20T12:16:00.001+05:30

#BusinessRocks: Mix business with pleasure at this informal networking session where you can relax, have a beer, meet and mingle. "

When I read this, I told myself, THIS session must not be missed! Being a big fan of TED, and a participant speaker at #barcamps back in Mumbai... anything that has to do with the art of concise presentations, that's certainly on my list.

I'm a big fan of it when it comes to presentations and sharing focused insights. Also, it was an opportunity for me to meet, mingle with some interesting folks in Singapore, ones who had the kind of insights that I was really looking for.

It was hosted by Gina Romero,(@gina_romero) who hosts #businessrocks a lot in Singapore. She certainly fits the description of Rock Chick Entrepreneur to the tee. Her energy and passion yesterday truly demonstrated that... :)

The first thing that she got right was to get David Rogers @continualshift as the emcee!!! No wonder they're beer buddies!! They share the same level of energy and enthusiasm for the things they're passionate about.

So what is #BusinessRocks all about??

'It's like TED with Beer!' Well, what more do you want!!! This was something I couldn't resist! Also it was 7 presentations with 7 different topics to highlight an interesting theme...

So I'll also try to do a Pecha Kua Style summary of the presenters giving you an idea of what all the speakers said!

Openness by Carlie Jayne Guy, Research Insights Director, Wearesocial @CarlieJ52

Her presentation was primarily about how Tech geeks have changed the way we live our lives. Her job is to research insights on how these things affect our lives. She made some profound points especailly in this open and connected world and how data means a lot and how we can learn from analyzing that data. Especially with ORM tools of the likes of Radian6, Sysomos, Klout, Pinalytics, SocialBakers and WolframAlpha. Some great platforms to use for insights. To sum up her talk, she gave us her informed opinion on how openness matters and how data can drive your communication...

Inclusivity by Yusef Hamid, Digital Boomerang, @Sir_Rupert_

Next up was Yusef Hamid of Digital Boomerang.. We all are aware of so many cat memes and so many twitter accounts that are created nowadays for our dogs and cats. Yusef Hamid showed us how that is a modern example of people actually getting the best out of the mascots that they have created themselves, especially for their pets. Inclusivity being the main thing... In a funny and humorous way, witty yet trickily performed presentation, Yusef talked about how a Dog can truly be a man's best friend... ;) Now he has some 218 likes... Hopefully he'll get more and be more useful to him, besides the crazy stuff he keeps doing all day...

Transparency by Scott Bales, Moven - @ScottEBales

Scott comes from the banking industry and we all know how banking and secrecy are so closely tied in. He on the other hand is the guy who wants to change the (banking) world with transparency. A key question he asked was 'Is social end of secrecy?? From the banking industry perspective, maybe it should be... no? One thing he got spot on was, this

Transparency removes FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) True that Scott, True that...

Collaboration by Andrew Chow, IdeasAndrew - @IdeasAndrew

The difference being personal and being personable! Yes that is what kicked off Andrew, the birthday boy's talk! His key thought was about how collaboration can instigate a difference, a difference that Social has actually been meant for! Collaboration certainly adds to a much higher value to you and your brand and that is something which is easier in today's world with being social and being able to collaborate. He certainly enchanted the audience with his thoughts on how collaboration can make a difference to the thoughts and to personalize the way brands / people on social think. And he certainly got everyone's attention when he distributed free copies of his book Social Media 247... :)

Co-creation by Jamshed Wadia, Intel - @JamshedWadia

Along the same lines of Collaboration, co-creation is equally important in today's day and age, especially with brands who are primarily dependent on getting great insights and are on the constant look out to reinnovate, much like Intel! An apt topic for Jamshed Wadia of Intel to speak about... He shared with us various case studies which represented how co-creation transformed the way brands changed the thinking of consumers and empowered them even further. And of course, being an Indian, I felt mighty proud that @hellomehippo case study about (Hippo Chips Not Available? Tweet Us) campaign that he shared insights of. Thoroughly interesting and captivating presentation leading us to the importance of co-creation.

Networked power by Kristine Lauria - @KrissyMo

Kristine Lauria was all about (NETWORKING) But not just about networking to SHOUT your message across, but to actually get to listen and to enhance your brand, converse and most importantly realize how all that transforms into successful relationships. Always be asking, How can I help you, pay it forward and try to make that difference, giving back to the community. She laid stress on How social is all about connecting to other people and not about YOU!!! And that's again highlighting the key of how Social's about WE and not ME!!!

Agility by Christel Quek (Havas Media) - @ladyxtel

The last speaker of the evening was a very popular Chrsitel Quek. Didn't know she was voted amongst the top digital influencers!! Quite a good feeling to have met her after the session and in fact I liked the style of her presentations too... I'm a big fan of the art of story telling and analogies. Which is exactly what she used in her presentation. She talked about 7 tips which would help bring agility to your brand and your personal communication on Social! One interesting analogy was that of the Water snake, being blind and partially deaf, how it relies on its other senses to be able to survive and capture its prey! Some of her case studies were also truly interesting, especially the Applebee's and Superbowl case studies that she shared. Not the ones that were successful, but the ones that didn't quite resonate with their audiences and how we can learn from them.

This was quite a good event packed of sessions with the tempo that made this session interesting... Kudos to Gina and her team and of course to all the speakers who really did a good job of sharing their insights in the best 'Pecha Kua' style they could...

While we got a lot of value add and insight from this session, it had a fitting end with a serious and a very passionate, from the bottom of her heart closing by Gina for her Athena Network! Really interesting and truly her passion showed out when she spoke about it with a lump in her throat if you will...

And last but not least, something I truly wanted to do, catch up with my twitter friend @farah_sidek... To add to that, I also happened to meet @eskimon the Social Media Maestro of Singapore and his entire team of WeAreSocial Singapore That team has got some energy!!! WOW!!! :)

twitter.com/wearesocialsg

A word about Plan Athena:

It's Asia Pacific's leading community for female executives and entrepreneurs. A social enterprise it aims to reach women of all socio-economic profiles through training and skills development.

The overarching aim is to empower women to fulfill their right to have choices, opportunities and access to resources – all of which improve their sense of self-worth and ability to influence society and the economy.

So this week, Diageo have offered a prize of $10,000 to a Singapore project that supports their initiative and The Athena Network is one of the 3 shortlisted companies competing for the $10,000 prize.

P.S If you guys want to help her win $10,000 to help empower those women across Asia Pacific, you can do your bit... Check this out: http://www.theathenanetwork.com.sg

In a gist, here's what you need to do to help out!

1. Tweet #planwAthena as much as possible every day for the next 5 days.

2. Help us to spread the word! Please ask your friends to join in!

3. Be sure to include our HASHTAG: #planwAthena

Cheers

@srinistuff

#smwsgchange - Change the world with a hashtag

2013-02-20T10:08:00.001+05:30

This was one of the first actual sessions of #SMWSG. After the keynote at the Raffles Hotel, I headed here to find out what this session was about entirely. It was meant to be an inspiring panel discussion on how brands and individuals could make a difference in a genuine way through social media. So in essence the core discussion of the panel was to explore the concept of social media for social good, with first hand stories from companies doing just this.

It started off briskly with the round of introductions on what each and every person supported and what they did in their capacity of changing the world through social good.

The buzzword here of course was #crowdfunding and the panel experts were more or less folks from the field, (either a company which did crowdfunding or an association / organization which had a meaning for changing the world with some social good.)

The first speaker to share his insights was Robin Low, who shared about a very essential problem while working for the Japan Tsunami relief. He faced a problem where women who were part of the efforts or at the distraught areas, were unable to participate in helping out because they didn't have tampons. And how Robin Low drove people coming in via Tokyo or from Airports to buy as many tampons as they could and he'd reimburse them. Very simple problem, but dire straits call for dire measures we guess.

Another interesting insight that I could recall from the discussion was that of the founder Kevin Strazberger, he portrayed the importance and relevance of how Crowd funding is all about finding the niche and getting your target demographics right and then building that interest. Cause anything else is about the huge noise that's created. And we can't get anywhere when there's noise and clutter, that's for sure...

Dorjee Sun who is the CEO of Carbon Conservation and is passionate about forests, carbon, community development, conservation and climate change shared his insights on the Carbon Conservation’s work that covers energy efficiency, renewable energy, plantations and projects that incentivize the preservation of tropical rainforests by helping forest owners and local communities generate alternative revenues through the carbon finance market. His stress was more on the fact that in today's world we need to use and empower ourselves to make that change as much as possible and organizations should use and empower the crowd to build and source as many resources as possible. Social is the new ball game especially when it comes to crowd funding.

Overall the session was really great, there were a few debates, humble back and forth agreements, disagreements... which was quite fun to be part of...

I also asked the question to the panel of how #Kickstarter model could probably be as effective for Social Good as it is for the consumerism that is being driven because of so much commercialization and economic disdain that we are part of. To which Jason Aspes of Newton Circus said, that it could be possible, it's workable and not done yet... But how successful it could be, we all have to wait and watch.

Overall it was quite a good session, got great insights especially the discussions helped me to realize and understand that, Doing Social Good is far more challenging in today's world than using or adopting Social For consumeristic opportunities.

I'd heard how difficult it is from Beth Kanter's talk on a podcast by Mitch Joel, and that again resonated with me after I attended the session.

But it is certainly not difficult... I end this blog with this thought, something I read from Betty Lim's website... (crowdpowers.com) I met her at the event for a brief moment.

Walk the thought from 'Me to We' Isn't that what crowd funding and Changing the world together is all about?

Cheers

@srinistuff

#SMWSG - Social Media Week Singapore - Keynote

2013-02-19T11:31:00.001+05:30

Social Media Week Singapore began with great fanfare and truly amazing discussions yesterday. I was all excited to hear @damiencummings of Samsung Digital, Asia present his keynote along with Laura Berkovich of Google!

Certainly similar to their combination in the business space, both speakers from Samsung and Google held the audience by presenting very key specs of information and most importantly to highlight what's the crux of the social media space in today's world. Thought I've researched a bit before coming to the event, about the market in Singapore, I may not be the best person to comment on how their presentation related to the scenario out here.

However was interested in knowing attributes that they presented from an overall global perspective. And from my past experience with working on various brands and in the social web space since 2009 I'd certainly relate to a lot of issues that they highlighted and how the Social Era of business is changing everything we see, especially with the expansion of Social/Digital/Mobile!

Also how brands are shifting their trajectory by being more personal to users is what I've always enjoyed to see. Glad to see so much of advocacy of that phenomenon showcased by both Laura and Damien.

Laura Berkovich of Google laid an important case on how 'Peer Reccomendation' and Communities are the key in today's Social Media scenario. How it is important that Social Search is becoming the key for people to connect and know or discover each other. More important is the smaller world that is giving opportunities of connecting with each other. She also shared with us insights on how she connected with an astronaut in Japan via Google Hangout and how Barrack Obama connected through Google+ with his

While of course all these aspects are making the world smaller and connecting is about being more open and connected, there were certain questions that raised concerns in my mind as well as others when they were asked by the audience. To which however, Laura said that she herself is a private person and that you have complete control over privacy via whatever sites that you do share your content on. So my concern of course was 'How Social Networking sites set privacy to a default share with all than giving custom options and how they are hidden out there somewhere...'

I also asked a question to Laura about how Social Search is going to affect / impact brands especially with Google+ and FGS coming into effect. To which her response was 'How people googled earlier and there wasn't any Social elements coming forth.' Today if people search for content, they expect everything to be out there for their perusal. How peer recommendation will impact most brands as well in this aspect.

Totally loved Damien's insights on how people like to connect with people rather than brands. Also how people are connected via social networks online and just have about 107 friends who they may not even meet actually. Key insights from his session were about how brands have to change their approach on Social Media and why it's all the more important to talk to people via their passion points and not just talk about your product. A key that we've always been NOT doing... At least not so much until 2012... in India...

Post the session I had a chat with Damien Cummings and had a bit more insights on what he had to say. One thing I relate to and agree with is the fact that Social was something that always existed right from the time of IRC, or in fact way before that maybe... But what's relevant today is how people are using social to connect with people and not brands so much. He also shared with me how brands would be more receptive by people if there's a face to it and a more human connection... To add to that I feel we have to Build our own community and stick to a niche, even if we are a brand, if we interest the passion points and share that occasional update that interests your community, then fair enough. Overall it was a great discussion and personally I'm glad I went to this session and #SMWSG kicked off in style...

I must commend AKA Asia and #SMWSG for thoroughly prepared and well co-ordinated start to the event, and especially for giving us the Nokia powered, Social Media Week App.

Cheers

@srinistuff

Some of the tweets for this event, in case you want more insights.

Guidelines for live tweeting an event

2013-02-13T08:57:00.001+05:30

Read the original Post written for Social Samosa here

Live Tweeting an event? What’s the ‘BIG’ deal?
How many times have you or your team done this?
And how often have you asked this question to yourself?
“What guidelines do I follow exactly for Live Tweeting this event?”

One of the most important aspects I’ve realized starting from 2010, till today is that there’s nothing that has changed about the concept or for that matter the fundamental principles of what the activity actually entails for a brand.
What has changed however is the approach of the consumers / attitude of thetwitter users to such activities or approaches by brands!

Why? Simple, Twitter and its audience is evolving. And when that happens, no matter how concrete the fundamentals are, it’s always beneficial to shift your approach, for ‘The Times They are a changing…’

The first time I actually ‘live tweeted’ an event was for one of my technology clients back in 2010. And after that I’ve done a several dozen of them. And amazingly not a lot has changed in the basic fundamentals, but there has been a lot of learning on how people perceive these events and how consumer behaviour has shifted trends and what you could exploit to ensure the overall event is really meaningful for the brand rather than just a stream of updates the hogging limelight on your followers Timeline.

For most of the part, brands adopt a very functional and as simple approach as ‘Get the updates of the event out!’ To the people who couldn’t attend the event. So it shouldn’t be ‘Rocket Science’ now should it?

But today if asked or given the assignment, I don’t/won’t just randomly decide to go for an event because:

“I’m the expert on A. Tweeting Fast B. Being Responsive C. Being good with use of technology…”

These are really not the reasons why a specific person should go to ‘Live Tweet’ an event. What’s important is we understand what this activity does for the brand and how will it add value for the brand via Social Web and how it actually matters to its audience and its consumers.

The reason I decided to write this post is because, usually I’m the Go-To Guy for live tweeting events for brands at work! And many a times, live tweeting associates itself with loads of challenges, last minute problems and co-ordination with clients.

So sharing my learning in a comprehensive way for everyone to learn from it. Mostly my insights from the mistakes I’ve made or the learning that I have acquired from live tweeting events for various brands across different verticals.

So the first Question:Why to Live Tweet an Event?

Is this what you say to yourself

1. To ensure that #brandhashtag / #eventhashtag gets visibility across City, India, World?
2. To get more RTs, Mentions and Buzz across the twitterverse for your brand?
3. To ensure that brands start getting insights on what people are talking about the brand?

Here’s what I say

STRIKE THOSE QUESTIONS OFF YOUR MIND!

Cause before you think from a brands perspective, FIRST THINK OF YOUR CONSUMER!

What questions should you ask?
1. How does this help the brand in its overall communication strategy?
2. What is the value addition created by live tweeting this event?
3. Does it ensure live updates (with real insight) of the event go out to your twitter followers? (Not just who’s come on stage or who’s talking, but what do they really mean when they are saying this and that.)
4. Lastly how does it help your brand in this age of ‘connection economy’ especially to take your brand forward on building inbound rather than outbound connections?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

What should I do to prepare for Live Tweeting the event?

So Live tweeting doesn’t start on the day of the event! When you actually decide to figure out what the event is going to be all about? Your ‘Live
Tweeting’ starts right there.

1. Research about the event before Tweeting:

This also means researching on what the brand is all about. Who are is target audience? What exactly does the brand aim to achieve through this event. You need to understand what kind of audience the brand will attract and what kind of content and tonality will appeal to those users / audience.
Essentially always good to have the person who’s working on the brand to actually live tweet or if you are going in for someone who’s privy to the platform, then it’s best if you gave him/her a detailed brief about the brand and the event. Also ensure that you create enough awareness before the event and people are already aware of the event!

The content you’ve been posting about the event then should be consistent with what you’ll be posting at the event.

Key Points:

Read about the brand, Industry.
Identify Top Influencers, people related to the brand (If they’re on twitter)
Create list of people attending the event. (No need to follow them via the handle, add them to the list)
Know who the speakers at the event are and add them / follow them. Try to get their agenda.
Ensure that you know the venue, the people, the agenda and the background of the event!

2. Technology never fails! People and Processes Do!

A lot of times at such events, we end up not providing the relevant coverage or the actual insightful and value added tweets especially because we realize that there’s no/minimal network coverage. (A lot of Hotels have jammers and your internet dongles won’t work.)

They may ask you to buy their exorbitantly priced Wi-Fi cards, for which you run around last minute behind clients / events team or your own company’s finance team to get cash voucher etc. approved. Some places don’t or may not have charging points placed at the right places for you to settle down.
Cameras don’t work last minute or batteries fail you. It’s like Mr. Murphy was just lurching around the corner to get you. What you need to understand is that it’s not the technology that’s failing you it’s just the people and the processes. So be weary of that fact and prepare in advance

Key Points:

Ensure you have checked about the WiFi and sorted out that issue before hand.
As a backup try to get two dongles or an android phone with 3G to tether a Wifi Hotspot
Carry your cameras with extra batteries, memory card, card reader, USB cable etc.
In case you have an extra battery for your mobile phone it’s a bonus. Else carry your charger!
You can live tweet via mobile phones as well. Works best especially when/if your laptop dies.

3. #HashTags matter the most!

This one’s relatively simple and a lot of you might already be doing this. But it’s imperative that you decide what hashtag will suit your brands event and more importantly how easy it is for users to add even if they want to manually. Don’t create overtly long hashtags that are just confusing or too drab for users to type in if they don’t find it. A lot of them might be using mobile devices to tweet. So realize how important the #hashtag is especially if they want to search for other conversations and interact with the users, including you.

Key Points:

Create a simple hashtag
Create a hashtag that is easy for your users to type manually
Create a hashtag that will elicit resonance and more shelf life in general.
Great idea to include a hashtag that’ll go with the event as well as specific issue / topic.

4. GIVE Insights on what the updates mean to your users:

It’s important to put thought into what tweet goes out and how purposeful they are in the context of the event. It’s very easy to just give updates on what’s happening live, like say a commentary of things that are happening as we speak so to say. But what’s more important is that how well it is impacting the resonance of the communication that the brand has to do with its users, for its users.

If I were to be at home and I realize that the updates that are going out via brands are just ‘Things Happening’ at the event then I’d really be put off! RT some interesting tweets by others, give them the credit that they deserve. They’d feel great about it too.

Key Points:

Don’t just live tweet what the speaker is doing / or talking about.
Talk about what his message is. Reach out to the people with the core message.

5. Most Important: Listen. Think. Converse

Many a times where you are at an event, your first instinct is to BE FAST! TWEET IMMEDIATELY! But hey, resist that urge! Its okay if your tweet doesn’t go out immediately after the Speaker has quoted something. Hold off for a while. Listen to what he/she’s actually trying to say. Understand the core message and then think about how it could be creatively put across to make purposeful content for your users.

And also, try to figure out if anyone else has already talked about it. Converse with them. Elicit an opinion if possible. Stick to valuable messages and forget the unimportant messages. You don’t need to spam your followers! If there are issues that people are talking about, talk to them, help them find a solution.

If you think you can go help them personally, go DO that! Imagine this; you being a brand evangelist are actually getting to help out via response got on twitter at the venue.

E.g. If people aren’t able to get WiFi, See streaming of videos on the screen in a multi hall event etc. Get the right people from your client end or your team to go help them out. And then respond to them on twitter! This really creates value add to the participating member who by the way also happen to be on twitter… Very good if you interact with the attendees.

6. Google before you Tweet! (Stay away from the itchy trigger finger)

Again a syndrome caused by hypochondriac behavior that kind of sets in to your mind; no matter how many live tweeting events have you covered!

Every tweet has to go out NOW NOW NOW! This is what your mind keeps thinking. The best way to approach it
KEEP CALM! TWEET SMART!

A lot of times, you may miss out on speaker’s names. If its there on the brand website, go there and refer to it. If you aren’t sure, of who he/she is or have missed listening to the name being announced… ask someone nearby. And if you find his name on the website, Google him up, most likely you’ll get his images!

If he quotes something, use it. If you aren’t sure what exactly it is, try to find out if it’s there on the web? If you want to state some facts or some data that he/she is using, then use Google before you tweet. Give the appropriate sources / credits.

7. Photos are good! But it’s Live Tweeting & not Live Instagramming!

General tendencies as a beginner, Twitpic every damn person, photo heck even what food is served at the event or what the chairs or the set up looks like!!! Well, it is okay to tweet the venue at the beginning (maybe to give an idea of what kind of turn out does the event have) but it’s absolutely not OK to just about include a photo in each and every tweet of yours. Be careful that you don’t really make it a habit.

8. Look for Foursquare Check-Ins

Great way to respond to users on twitter who’ve checked in. Good way to start conversations with the people who’ve come to attend. Of course it’s imperative that you go beyond just welcoming them. It’s great if you continue the conversation thread as much as possible. But most importantly make that connection with them. Let them actually be dazzled, out of the blue especially after they’ve checked in and are caught unaware! WOW them!

9. Tweetdeck / Commun.it - Tools that really help!

One of the key elements in this event is that there are a bunch of things you would have to keep a track of. For example

1. Search strings on what people are conversing.
2. Search for your brands @handle or @mentions essentially.
3. Search for relevant keywords that people are tweeting esp. where they may have forgotten to add hashtag.
4. List of people who already are attending the event.
5. List of your influencers who are from this field and probably are following the event.

It becomes easier if you use tools like Tweetdeck or Commun.it to track all these conversations and of course interact / converse / RT them.

10. Post Event follow-up!

Ensure that your post event follow up is good. In fact start thinking about the

Post event follow-up right at the mid way through the event. Try to get insights / feedback from users at the event or from your twitter. Some testimonials or feedback of things that could have been better would be great value add for your product / brand or the event itself.

It always helps to take a dipstick when you’re half way through the event. If possible DM your new followers who followed you at the event. See if you can get a sound byte or some quotes from them about the event and what they liked / what could be better.

Key Points

Summarize happenings of the event
Get quotes / bytes from event participants
Write a Blog summarizing and giving insights about the day that panned out!

Overall it is important that when you look at live tweeting, you put yourself in the shoes of ‘Event participant, Users who could not attend the event, or followers / people who are your target audience and want more insights about the event / brand. I’m sure there are few more pointers that some of you could share based on your experiences too!

Do let me know what they are? Could be great to add them up as well! What say?

Cheers
@srinistuff

Why do we need to 'Engage?'

2013-02-05T20:50:00.002+05:30

Everyone today talks about how initiatives on their Social Platforms need to engage with the users and their audience! But has any one asked this question to themselves as to,

'Why do we need to engage?'

What's the reason behind that 'engagement' as we like to call it. Now we've been talking about long term / short term engagements which are primarily just a way of ensuring that you or your brand gets those 'eyeballs' or 'numbers' and our clients are 'happy.'

How many times do we really give a thought to what we really are doing when we are talking about 'Social Media Engagement.' for your brands or for that matter yourself.

A very difficult question, but a very simple answer!

Don't just 'Do Facebook, Do Twitter, Do LinkedIn, Do Blog' In fact don't even believe in the ever so popular mnemonic and brand recall 'Just Do It.' No offence Nike...

What's important is for us to know, 'Why are we 'Doing Facebook, Doing Twitter, Doing LinkedIn...'

Heck, I think we shouldn't DO ANYTHING.... Don't Do Facebook, Don't Do Twitter or Don't Do LinkedIn if you have to really see business value...

Just those numbers or those eyeballs or the direct sales that you see don't mean anything. What matters at the end of the day is, what kind of value is it adding to your ONE CUSTOMER, that ONE CUSTOMER that you really and I mean really engaged with! If the answer to that question is positive and a satisfactory and that which adds REAL VALUE to his life, then you can sleep peacefully that night...

That's my belief. What about you?

Cheers
@srinistuff

Best ways to promote and run a successful blog

2013-02-01T16:58:00.000+05:30

Original Article as a guest-blog for SocioFi.- Apps Made Easy

I’ve been blogging for around 8 years with two blogs and I can share those experiences with you.

I believe these experiences that I’ve encountered for almost a decade will pretty much help you to promote and run a successful blog for sure.

Below mentioned are my two blogs

Travel Tales… - My travel blog

Srini’s Stuff - My Personal Blog mainly focusing on Social Media and technology

Blogging originally was primarily to maintain web logs of your activities and used essentially by coders and designers who knew HTML and coding to keep a log of their activities on the web log in order to keep a diary of sorts about their activities.

But we all know how that has witnessed a great change over the last decade and how the connection economy has flourished to such an extent that someone like a Seth Godin promotes runs and in fact maintains a daily blog without even having such a wide and active presence on Social Media.

That’s another fact that his streams jump in via widgets on his blog and that he’s a famous author and a successful entrepreneur. But the crux of the matter here is that with a consistent approach towards ensuring your digital efforts is what makes it or breaks it to run a successful blog.

Here are my pointers to ensure that your Blog works out well Rest is up to you on how you go about executing the ‘plan’ and ‘strategy’ to ensure this happens for sure. I’d like to break it down in Two Parts

Part 1 – Content Creation

1. Story Telling

One of the most important aspects of Blogging or for that matter any form of content creation in today’s world is to ensure that your blog content has a short, sweet and a flow oriented story telling approach. That’s the best way one can ensure you garner more readers. Have you watched Marley and Me? Confessions of a Shopaholic? Julie and Julia? Why do you think the readers related to the bloggers/writers well in those movies? Story telling was one primary reason.

2. Focus on Visuals

Visuals on your blog are the key elements. Everybody of course loves content, but if you add a bit of visuals on the side which make content consumption easier, then your job is half done. Also, your SEO, and indexing becomes a lot stronger if you add relevant tags to the images. I’ve had a spike of 1000 hits on one particular day only because of contextual tagging on one image that was No. 1 for that search on that particular day on Google.

3. Thought provoking/invoking

Does your content make your reader think? Does it give them an opportunity to relate to what you are saying?

4. Formatting and Design

Now isn’t that the most important element of whatever you do in life? Steve Jobs and Apple is the best example of this attribute. After all the best presentation always strikes a chord with the readers. Uncluttered designs resonate well with most audiences.

5. Building a niche

Ensure that the content you create is strictly resonant with your specific target audience. Try to provide a unique form / unique content and unique way of creating and telling your story, one that other ‘blogs don’t focus on. Build on that niche. It’s not important that many people read your blog, but many ‘important people’ read your blog and recommend it to many others.

6. Be Consistent

Keep at it. Try focusing on a long term strategy and create architecture for your blog. Define your tone of voice, author profile and generally layer out how your blog should sound like. Try to tell stories as often as you can, but not so often that readers stop waiting for that next blog or lose interest in your blog. Also, it’s easier to be consistent if your blog is crisp, to the point and more importantly something that relates with the target audience.

Part 2 – Content Promotion

1. Promotion isn’t SPAMMING

If you understand this thumb rule, you’ll be doing everyone around and yourself a big big favor. One of the most common mistakes that people do while taking this job on! They end up sending email invites to any lay person without understanding if he/she could actually relate to their blog or for that matter even care to read that content. Be smart; find the right audience, right forum, and right tools to reach out to your audience.

2. Converse with People

Very important aspect of promotion and marketing that people don’t tend to pay much attention to. Before you converse though, one needs to listen! So listen to what people are talking about. i.e. look for conversations in forums, twitter, web and everywhere else. Once you get a conversation, and then engage with those users. Don’t PROMOTE OR PLUG your blog immediately. Start conversing and IF IT FITS the context, and then subtly tell them about your blog.

3. Community Management

Create communities, empower people to join your groups and communities. Join other relevant communities on digital/social media. If there is an opportunity tie up/ partner with relevant brands, bloggers, influencers who can give you a wider platform to talk to new people and tell them about your ‘Blog’ Try finding relevant ‘Blog’ communities.

You can join communities on LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, Web forums. You can also try sponsoring physical events

4. Active Social Presence

Ensure that your Blog has a Social Identity and an active social presence. This is quite a given and an age old technique. Agreed that you don’t necessarily need to spread yourself too thin, but ensure that your blog is up on relevant social networks and that it’ll give you more opportunity to manage assets and create more communities and grow your circle of social influence. Try Social Bookmarking as well. Using @Blogger for your blog is the best choice you’ve made, now flourish that with a further presence on Google+. Helps index your blog on Google searches to a certain extent. Also posting frequently on Google+ having conversations there would help you even more.

5. Media Buying and Planning

Of course, once you’ve done with organic routes to be able to reach out, try various media buying tools; advertising options i.e. Facebook Advertising, Google Ad words and sites like Outbrain.com Outbrain is quite an interesting product in itself. It has a good reach and has great reviews for its greater reach and presence across bigger blogger networks in terms of contextual advertising.

These are some of my inputs, hope they help. If anyone else has more insights, would love to hear from you guys. What say?

Cheers
@srinistuff

Key components of any Social Media Newsletter or Digests

2013-01-29T17:53:00.000+05:30

This is my answer to the question, What are the key components of any Social Media Newsletter or digest? On +Quora

I've been managing an newsletter / knowledge docket for the Social Media Agency that I work at currently (Social Wavelength) It's called Social 5. We create this docket for our clients and I'm sure many other agencies have something of that sort that is sent out weekly/fortnightly/monthly for their clients as primary target audience.

So will share some experiences as to what in my opinion could be a very good idea/structure to create a Social Media Newsletter for respective target audience as such.

So what is it that drives these newsletters? I'm sure every one now gets a lot of information with smartphone / tablet apps like Pulse, Flipboard, Zite, Reader, Pocket etc. So why the need for another newsletter in your inbox to clutter your mailbox?
What really does matter to audiences on 'e-mail' per se?

Answer: Same thing as would matter when they are exploring / reading various social media sites. Unique, insightful and interesting information. More importantly the connection that they would feel to become the 'informed' professional in Social Media space.

So here are a few key components that I'd think would make sense while creating a 'newsletter/digest' typically informing them of Social Media happenings / content / news and more importantly insights that matter to their brands, relationships and individual use.

1. Intelligent Curation

Try to find out what interests your target audience. Curate content that will provide them insights, information and most importantly allow them to understand concepts and learning that will help them improve their work / profile or give insights on their business.

2. Appealing Design

This is a fundamental that I always follow in any form of content promotion and marketing approach. You'll probably find me advocating this as one of the top two points in most of my talks / blogs about content marketing. First comes the design and then the content marketing. We constantly keep giving Steve Jobs's example and I'm sure we very well know why.

3. Must Read or Should Read?

Same concept as to product development. Does your content and overall thoughts you are curating / preparing for your newsletter really resonate with your audience? Does it give an opportunity for

4. User Interface and Ease of Access

Does your newsletter come across as easy to read in email or is it too complicated i.e. One that follows multiple processes or steps to actually end up going to various links OR One that can be read in your mail in say, 10 minutes tops. (Tools like Xydo Curation can be great help) If you don't want to redirect people, you can always send a pdf with links. That works for a lot of folks too.

5. Frequency of your newsletter/emailer

A key to ensure that your newsletter doesn't just become another cog in the machine or another SPAM / MARK AS READ EMAIL. Does it make the user click that STAR / favorite if he's too busy to read then, or does it really get him to wait for every week/fortnight to get more content / insights.

6. Does it stand out

What does your Newsletter give that others don't? Think of that and this question will answer itself. It's imperative that you stand out. By that it does not mean you just wear a pink shirt with a green pant in a crowd full of suits. It means that how much of value add it provides to your reader by being that exceptional.

7. How Social/ Intelligent is your content

It need not always be something that is curated. One off posts in the newsletter could be an editorial format as well. But overall, are you just randomly curating links from popular posts/blogs which people might have read and is information that they are already privy to, or is it an insightful blog that provides new angles and shift in analysis of data / trends on Social Web.

Some of my inputs on what could be key components of any Social

Media Newsletter / Digest. Do you want to add a few more points to round it to a NICE TEN components? Would love to hear from you.

Cheers
@srinistuff

What's the best/unique way for Lead Generation through your website?

2013-01-25T16:09:00.004+05:30

This is my answer to What's the best unique way for Lead generation through your website on +Quora

What could be better than providing an eBook? At least that's what most people are doing nowadays.. The How Tos, The Social Media Guides, The Guides to this or that... I'm not such a big advocate of this strategy, however there is an audience which seemingly falls bait for this kind of tactic and it does seem to work. In the longer run, people will realize that it is information which is just compiled off the internet and that same information can be easily available

However I have some suggestions of my own to ensure that you create a good Lead generation aspect. Maybe unique, maybe something very simple and doable, but whatever it is, they are certainly tried and tested.

1. Create Applications that drive engagement

In today's day and age, rather than the same old Content Marketing strategy a lot of consumers of the social web or the social era are beginning to be enticed by engagements. They like to interact and not just listen to broadcast messages. So create applications which will empower website owners to 'ask for ' not forcefully capture users data. Of course this means the user agrees himself/herself to share that data. And if the application has an engaging drive and interest, he may also recommend it to relevant users. That takes care of you word of mouth strategy and trying to make it spread faster than you can generally.

2. Create data trends or interesting patterns.

Yes I agree with what Tom Webster says

"So much of what we see passing as studies, ‘research’ or anything in Mashable that says ‘study’ in brackets, is produced primarily for content marketing. Data that’s produced for the purposes of content marketing is inherently incurious. It is not designed to increase your insight, it is not designed to help your specific business to do better. It is designed to get you to click on a link, to watch a video, to become a lead somehow. So that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, that just means it’s heart is not the same place as your heart is.”

But at the same time if you are looking to generate leads then yes, this is the appropriate way. Only ensure that you give out the disclaimer stating something which affirms this fact and people know whether to actually spend time in looking at those trend patterns and if it is really relevant to them. They'd be your genuine leads.

3. Create Real Value even before they become leads

9 out of 10 times conversions of visitors to leads depends generally on how good the product or the service that you provide is. One of the most interesting ways to really add value even before they become leads is to give them a sneak preview of what your product or service can do? Show case something really interesting or an example of your past work that has worked out before. Heck use Social Tools on your website to get other people give testimonials (Facebook connect/badges) Facebook Recommendations or if it's a product integrate it into the Facebook's Store where if someone uses it on the web he / she will get a prompt to actually rate your product or application on Facebook. This way people will know that your product is really good. Demo these aspects through social integration.

There are a lot more ways that one can understand how leads can be generated through your website, but I'm all up for transparency, creating value through persistent efforts not only in just the content aspect but also making your website as social as possible. Use Social Web as a tool and make the people do the work for you and that won't happen unless you have a really good product or service. So work on that too. Once that's taken care of, everything else will fall in place. A clear six degrees of separation has worked wonders in the past.. So why not now?

Cheers

@srinistuff

SocioFi: Facebook Graph Search! Are we there yet?

2013-01-24T11:44:00.003+05:30

The original Article appeared as a guest post on SocioFi Blog

A lot of rounds happening last week when Facebook announced its graph search. Many of you might have tried this feature, or signed up for it and some of you might have already got the feature. As Facebook slowly rolls out this feature and much anticipated news that has already flown out there about how this feature is going to revolutionize the search business especially using the open graph and social graph aspect of Social networking in order to ensure that Facebook stays true to its mission of making the world more open and connected. So how much of that is really true or how much of that will really be successful?

First things first. A lot of people are making statements and stating that Facebook search / open graph search is going to be quite a competition to Google! Well, come to think of it, it’s not. While the realm of this search is completely different and if you look at the aspect of this search it boils down to the existing 1 billion ‘users’ that are on Facebook. It isn’t as open as you may think it to be, furthermore it goes only through the social graph. In few examples Bing searches / results might come into play but don’t know how much though.

Facebook’s goal also and the model is for its people to stay on site, while Google primarily offers people to leave the site with result waiting elsewhere. And a lot of Facebook Graph Search ‘fans’ if we may call them are overhyping its capabilities. Many tech websites and media have understood or rather I’d say misunderstood FGS to be something like a real ‘search-engine’, where Facebook’s open graph allows improving their searching capabilities, and then finally finding some information on Facebook itself. If that was the case, why not just improve their partnership with Bing? Or integrate that in Facebook itself? Certainly FGS is a way where they have an ability to tap into their resources on their existing ‘data points’ i.e. ‘users’ and help advertisers search / use advertising better for their brands. One step ahead of the game! Maybe, Maybe not… All depends on how users perceive this and how they modify their existing profiles accordingly.

Now that we’ve got that aside, a quick look at what Facebook graph search is all about

Facebook says this about how they ensure that they make the world more open and connected:

“The main way we do this is by giving people the tools to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. We call this map the graph. It’s big and constantly expanding with new people, content and connections. There are already more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections.”

So what do we really have to perceive of this?

This is what Facebook says,

“Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. When you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. You can edit the title – and in doing so create your own custom view of the content you and your friends have shared on Facebook.”

Well, we all know that Facebook is in the business of gathering data about their users to be able to target ads better and sells ad-slots at higher prices unlike Google where it infamously thrives on data about the web itself and analyzing that data in order to make people come back to their website because these people find what they want to find. In general, you see, Facebook and Google have different business models even though they seem to be the same at the first look. That’s why Facebook will never try to build a comparable search-engine like the one Google operates.

All in all, Facebook Graph Search, is what it is.. And let’s accept it for the product it is rather than comparing it with Google! Another aspect of it is that, their competition models also in this case are different, so are their visions and goals. What do you think?

How much 'Social' is 'Too Much Social'?

2013-01-24T03:32:00.001+05:30

Ever had that thought of disconnecting yourself from the Social Media world? I have... I'm sure you have too... But why?

Ever thought of this aspect as a consumer of products and ever sprouting social networks or communications via brands as to how much of this new age communication and social media frenzy is too much for you? Does it affect you or are you part of another revolutionary system that sublimally slides in and becomes another layer of your life? Is Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress and what not just another layer in our day to day interaction with friends or family?

A funny interaction I just had today with a cousin of mine. He said that he was looking for a weekend destination for the long weekend coming up ahead and said that he was looking up stuff on Google and got directed to my travel blog srinistuff.com about that destination and he thought of calling me up and asking me about that destination.

Funny why? Cause if it was a decade ago, the first thing one would do is of course rely on the World Wide Web and various other websites. Now thanks to Google and Social Plugins / Social Extensions made available by +Google+ user generated content becomes rather more viable option.

Now come to think of it, he knows I extensively travel and he could have just picked up the phone and called me. But his first instinct was to Google / look for information on the 'Social Web' as we know it... And of course after that, the 'User generated review' played a lot more importance as he felt the peer connection right there.

What is peculiar though in this entire process is how bit by bit, we are becoming somehow completely part of this circle, a circle which recently 'Facebook Social Graph' is going to exploit and make every bit of data, every bit of Likes, Every places you checked into, every location you tagged on the map, every photo you took and uploaded, every bit of information that they have about the 1 billion consumers or even more accessible on this phenomenon called Facebook Graph Search (FGS)...

While we wait for that to implement, I think of how easy 'search' was back then... As a traveler, just pick up the map, locate and explore!!! But now, ahh we all have Social to look forward too.. Ain't it?

Social Samosa: On Facebook! To be or not to be?

2013-01-19T12:56:00.003+05:30

Original Post here on Social Samosa

So I found this question on Quora:

What are good reasons for not maintaining a Facebook presence?

I’m a big fan of Quora and love answering questions there. However, I decided to write this answer and put it up as a blog post for the benefit of those who aren’t on Quora as yet. So, here goes:

Fundamentally, it’s a very good question to ask yourself, and users have probably been asking themselves this question from time to time. There are many reasons why one chooses to be ‘off’ Facebook and extensively declare a war against maintaining a ‘social presence on the web’… The ones I can list are:

Because my family is on Facebook and I don’t want to share content with them.
Because it’s not ‘safe’ considering the many security and safety violations.
Because I am not your ‘social’ guy/girl and I don’t need to share what I eat, where I go, what I read with everyone.
Because Facebook is the next Friendster is the next Orkut is the next MySpace is the next Hi5 is the next Yahoo Chat Room, so on and so forth… (Not in the particular order of evolution)
Because I keep getting weird requests from people whom I barely know…

If you ask me, at the core of it, these are among the reasons why many should choose to stay off Facebook and maybe, just maybe… someday I will as well.

(This is me wearing the hat of a Social Media user borrowing insights from the Social Media Marketer in me…)

1. Privacy According to Facebook’s Terms of Service

This is an age old fact, made stronger by the current release of ‘No more user voting required for Privacy changes policy.’ So we all knew, Facebook’s Terms Of Service clearly mention that they own your data (section 2.1) and if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14).

Okay, so this is helpful in determining fake profiles, marketers, spamsters etc. We get it, but the underlying message and its implications are quite beyond just that. Right?

If and when they choose, they can decide to become the ‘Big Brother’ themselves; the Black Suited Corporate head honchos that represented IBM back in the day. Remember the Apple ad by Steve Jobs? The one with a girl hurling the hammer at the screen? Yes, no matter if Mr. Mark Zuckerberg wears a hood to portray his cool quotient; he’s most definitely headed in that direction. See the pattern there?

One could say that our friend Mr. Mark Zuckerberg is just protecting Facebook’s interests and probably its users too, but look at it this way, What about how this practice is enforced and how are we looking at it in context of its other activities (Let’s say advertising services to begin with.) This argument is still quite weak isn’t it?

So if it were up to me as a user I won’t give them a benefit of the doubt, we all know that we are the product and not the customer. Right?

Despite the recent ‘show’ of encouraging users to vote on whether they should get the rights to vote on changes in terms of privacy, Facebook made it clear that they really didn’t give a damn about the feature in the first place.

That they didn’t promote enough for people to know in the first place was good enough to realize that. Now by doing this show of transparency, all they ended up doing was create confusion and chaos amongst users, so much so that people created a weird spread of Privacy Note hoaxes that they shared as status updates.

Such is the ignorance of ‘users’ / ‘customers’ which again reinstates my belief in the fact that we are the ‘product’ who keep getting tossed and turned in a pan to be served to advertisers as their favorite dish. Just another target demographic, a number and probably just another figure in their reports. What say?

2. It’s a ‘Time Sink’ for sure…

It’s certainly the ‘Black Hole‘. How many of you have heard people say that! It definitely is addictive. As read in Eric Reiss’s “Lean Startup”

“In 2004 three college sophomores arrived in the silicon valley with their fledgling college social network live on a handful of college campuses. It was not a market leading social network or even the first social network; other companies had launched better networks with more features.

With 150,000 registered users it made very little revenue. That summer it got $500,000 in venture capital and less than a year later they raised an additional 12.7 million dollars. Many things about it are remarkable. But I’d like to focus on only one.

How Facebook was able to raise so much money when it’s actual usage was so small.

By all accounts what impressed investors the most were two facts about FB’s early growth. The first fact was the raw amount of time Facebook’s active users spent on the time More than half of the users came back to the site every single day.

Cut to 2012, the growth and value hypotheses in general still holds true.

More than 1/7th of the world’s population use Facebook.
1 in 5 minutes online are spent on Social Networking sites with Facebook leading the pack.
Facebook, now reaches 82% of the world’s internet-using population
55% on Online world’s online population uses Facebook as of October 2012.
In India alone Facebook has a 83.4% reach with over 50.9 million visitors being online

With around a billion users spending that much time on this social networking site, you know now what it holds in store for future users, investors, advertisers now that it also has become public.

I mean if you want to, there are individually many other portals and many other tools as such that can be useful, knowledge gaining and most importantly something that won’t really dig you in and suck you in like Facebook does, to the core of blatant raw uselessness per se, except maybe some updates about your friends and some interesting brands or people you subscribe to.

So much so, that you start liking random ads by advertisers because you are so into it and are waiting for your news feed to refresh itself that you don’t want to leave the portal and you take a dig at these inbuilt features without having to go anywhere else and keep yourself engaged and occupied.

With the Facebook’s logout ads, that aspect and that bondage to users with their advertisers is so apparent that you’ll end up just liking that brand as it’s targeted to you without second thoughts even.

Another reason why I am more active nowadays on Quora; consume content off Twitter & even Google+. While Quora is as much as a time sink as Facebook, even more for me, it results in increasing my knowledge quotient and overall awareness of the world, much like what Wikipedia does.

Only sharing that I do is probably, some random travel related photos, stories, notes of some write-ups of mine or something to do with my brands that I work for. Again, want to reconsider this soon in the future as a user. But the marketer in me is the devil’s advocate vouching to post on Facebook, when it comes to that aspect… See what I’m trying to say?

Try going back to the original web for once… Many blogs, many portals and many other interesting communitiesout there will be twice as much as valuable as anything on Facebook.

Try podcasts, audio books, and various blogs of your area of interest niche or for fun. There are many such portals that you’ll find interesting. Funny memes that most of the times get shared are originally from there.

You see what I mean? With the Like button and social sharing integrated everywhere out there, we have all become hostages and as a user while as much as I’d like to refrain from it, I end up doing the same for the benefit of my Facebook friends! Sigh…

3. Users are just data points, (Read: Bait and Switch), Open Graph, this, that and more…

While Facebook is telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, it is relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to users. What this amounts to is a bait and switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share and then they make it publicly available.

Since they are in the business of making money information about users for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. (Of course we all know that, and as marketers we argue that there are privacy settings, opt-out options and much more that Facebook allows for as an option) pretty much like reading the fine print in an agreement before buying a product. But of course, we know that as marketers, but many users won’t and hence the point in question.

Hence Facebook is much worse than Twitter in this aspect: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It’s also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning). Sad story that…

Our data is most definitely shared with applications that we install which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers too, many of whom may not bother about keeping the data secure. (Not that you share credit card info or extremely sensitive information on Facebook, but still it might bother some users, and hence falls in the ‘reasons to quit Facebook.’ )

Essentially all data of yours must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Add OpenGraph API to it you are not just falling into hands of Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem as a whole.

The ‘so-called’ Open Graph API is a clincher. Kudos to guys at Facebook for coming up with such an amazing name to actually disguise it’s closed nature. All of us marketers pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about users. Most consumers will have no clue that this data is essentially public.

To come full circle Facebook claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. What an irony hah? And they call it ‘open graph.’ From that front when it comes to the concept of making things proprietary, I’d respect Apple and Steve Jobs more, despite being the open source / open web guy that I am by nature. At least he is up front about it…

In this case you can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network / social web platform we chose. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

No wonder Microsoft’s Bill Gates was one of the early investors in Facebook. Microsoft supports the Linux community! (See the pattern?)

While a lot of these things I’ve mentioned in the blog have been written as a user of Facebook I know and I haven’t taken many efforts to actually think beyond just being a mere user, up until now… Most of us already know these facts and have stated it I’m sure, it’s just a reiteration of it was something I wanted to pen down in my thoughts.

Do read my personal disclaimer note at the end of the blog before coming to conclusions about the entire article to get an understanding of the perspective of why I wrote this article!

Do let me know what your views are and I’d be happy to hear from you especially if your thoughts contradict mine?

Personal Disclaimer Note:

I’m in the business of Social Media. I advocate and evangelize use of Social Web freely and strongly oppose the curb of freedom of the use of these or any other form / medium of expression.

Being a Social Media Marketer per se I understand the nuances of how some of these very reasons could be beneficial to us marketers. I’m sure this blog post wouldn’t do any disservice as such to Facebook or to my fellow marketers and I know for sure that not many users will end up quitting Facebook after reading my blog. ;)

So the reasons I have stated are that of a user of Facebook than a marketer (but obvious). At the same time, being a marketer I’ve learnt it’s imperative for brands and agencies to realize that ‘Customers aren’t merely products’ they are your real friends who’ll eventually make it or beak it for your brand.

So don’t give them truthiness and give them the truth instead. I’m an open web guy as well in general, and don’t mind sharing my personal work in various social networks such as Facebook, as long as it helps the community and users all over.

In essence, I believe that I’m a user first and a marketer later! This blog post is of a fundamental level and my personal opinion as well as a quest to answer some questions I’ve pondered upon in my journey in this field so far. It doesn’t endorse views of my current company or this blog portal.

Are YOU the 'Ideal' Social Consumer?

2013-01-15T14:43:00.000+05:30

You buy products on the internet, You buy products offline... Either ways You talk about it a lot. You talk about Your purchases especially if You know that the product / company is out there in one of the social web platforms. You like that Your voice is being heard as a consumer. And being that consumer who can ask for something more than mediocre or average excites You. That's because, You have this channel or for that matter other channels to go to. You like the fact that unlike earlier days, You now Matter more to the product / company! Now, You have a VOICE!

A lot of times You complain, You crib, You also could go to the extent of threatening the brand asking "If, the brand really knows Your potential reach out there?" (On Social Web Forums)

Now, let me ask You this...

How many times do You really appreciate the service proactively if you get one of the best services. Or for that matter if someone does their job and gets Your job done in the expected time. So what if that's 'just' their job... They are doing it for You.

From another angle, being a marketer myself, I'd love it if my work gets appreciated! (On Social Web Forums)

So yes, I think it's time for You start doing that... :)

P.S 'You = ME' What about you??

Cheers

@srinistuff

What is the hype about the Social Era?

2013-01-14T18:42:00.001+05:30

What kind of a world are we living in? With every day and each passing moment we are tied in and connected to the world what is key in the so called 'Social Era?'

Heard this from +Seth Godin on a recent Podcast on +Michael Stelzner Social Media Examiner Podcast

"It's incredibly frustrating for me to see people who have bought into the propaganda of the industrial age. It was fine when it worked for them, it enabled people to hide and be happy at the same time. But now everywhere I look I find people who are frustrated at the same time that I see people who are leaving opportunities untapped. And I wanted to bring those two things together in a manifesto, a rant that would hopefully shine some light on the revolution I think that we are living with right this minute."

He also went on to say this:

"The Industrial revolution of 1910, 1880 is something we got taught in the social studies class. I don't think people really understand the impact of it. You know before 1880 there were no such thing as jobs. The unemployment rate was 0. People probably worked on land or they worked for their father or they worked in the family business unless they were the king. Right now we have a new revolution, one that is replacing the Industrial Revolution and that is the Social Revolution"

Coming to think of it, it is quite true... However, Social Era existed much much before the invention of your so called 'information superhighway' or even the Internet per se... But it made me also wonder:

Why the hype? Why is Social so big, so important in the current day and age?

I guess the answer to that is pretty simple.

We've found means of connecting to a world we didn't know existed back then.
The world has evolved in terms of its societal requirements and needs and we can't do away with any of them.
The means of connecting has made us dependant on technology, more than the need to value people.
The ease of access gives a new meaning to create a bigger 'Social Reach'
It has an intellectual liberation to the cause and the concept and the reach gives more freedom, one that was unknown back then.

While there are far more reasons as to why 'The Social Era' continues to thrive and will continue doing so, we sometimes tend to always forget the bigger question... It's always a good thing that people realize the answers to these two questions.

Does 'media' matter more or 'social'?
Is it the tools or the people that make a difference?

Think about it...

Cheers

@srinistuff

SocioFi: Using Pinterest for your brands? No? Should You?

2013-01-10T13:35:00.000+05:30

I wrote this article for the company blog of SocioFi: Apps Made Easy

Heard of Pinterest? (Obviously, stupid question.)

Let me rephrase, Using Pinterest for your brands? (Ohh come on, now…)

Let me really ask you this then… Why are you using Pinterest for your brands? How are you really benefiting from Pinterest?

By all means Pinterest has certainly been the product of the year 2012 when it comes to the evolution of the Social era of business so to speak. I can randomly state some stats off the web. I’m sure that’s something you’d already know.

So I won’t even need to elaborate on that. By now if you have figured the platform out, you might have read and heard a lot about why and how brands are successfully using this platform and if you have already started using it, great! If you haven’t then I guess you will start using it or maybe not.

This blog post is not the regular run of the mill one where I would like to list down why Pinterest is a huge benefit for your brands or why you should be using it. No, I won’t tell you that because I for one don’t know what your brand is or even understand what their target audience is, generally speaking.

So let’s take a step back and try to realize some fundamental aspects of why and how Pinterest became this big and probably introspect on whether this could be a useful fit for your brands or why you should say to yourself that I don’t need it, or your brand doesn’t need it especially if you are an agency getting a push from your brand or if you are a brand manager and are getting a push from your competitor per se or someone at the CMO/CXO level who heard about Pinterest in a strategic conference and thought to himself:

“Hmmm, We should be on Pinterest.”

And by saying that I’m not undermining anyone’s thought/intellect, I’m just saying, that’s the way of the ‘social media’ world nowadays. I’m sure you would agree.

I’d like to give an analogy to justify what I’m saying by quoting Tom Webster who I heard on TwistImage’s podcast:

“So much of what we see passing as studies, ‘research’ or anything in Mashable that says ‘study’ in brackets, is produced primarily for content marketing. Data that’s produced for the purposes of content marketing is inherently incurious. It is not designed to increase your insight, it is not designed to help your specific business to do better. It is designed to get you to click on a link, to watch a video, to become a lead somehow. So that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, that just means it’s heart is not the same place as your heart is.”

So very true in a general sense… Not just when it comes to data from ‘research’ but also in the context of platforms and it’s applications for particular brands.

I mean come to think of it, yes Social Web is all about trial and error and of course the sooner the better. We all have heard multiple people talking about the referral traffic rates via Pinterest being extremely huge and how brands can benefit from them.

So that’s not what I shall talk about here. Instead this post should be a little introspective about how Pinterest came about and what it’s evolution looks like, most importantly providing an insight on whether as a brand manager or as a Social Media Manager for your organization how would you go about making that crucial decision especially when you want to do something that will fit the taste and the need for your brand.

For now, I’d like to highlight a few things and would love your inputs to take it forward from there… So the first thing is:

1. ‘Pinterest is not about ‘sharing’ per se.’ Pinterest is about collecting!

That is the fundamental that drives users and consumers on Pinterest and if that aspect really fits your brand then yes, by all means you are one step ahead of the game on your ‘Pinterest strategy’ so to speak. Collecting is a human trait that has been an age old fascination. That is exactly what the start up exploited and that is what you can think of especially if your brand dwells in that domain. Not just women, but men also can be your prime focus or target if you know this aspect and leverage it from your brands perspective. And this phenomenon is something that a lot of people like to do. Some of them doing so quite obsessively. People can be quite crazy about collecting and collections.

2. Visual Appeal is what Consumers care for!

This post has no visual and a lot of content, and it is meant for a different set of users, users who would want such insight. Similarly, Pinterest is for the nature of people and generally consumers of content who are delighted with Visuals! Visual engagement addiction has never been more obvious than what has been revealed by Pinterest. If that is what your brand delves in, then yes, this is something that you will get excited about.

3. Do your brands fundamentals go with the insights of users on Pinterest?

Now this is where I can state some of those stats that I was talking about at the beginning of the post, making a contextual reference of how and why actually those stats would matter to you or your brand. On an overarching theme to understand whether your brand is really meant to be really on Pinterest.

For example: “If you create and sell products, Pinterest is the ideal platform to showcase what you have to offer. You can create boards that pertain to individual product lines and “pin” images (that essentially link back to your site). With the pins, you can also include product descriptions, etc. Be careful though as like most social networks, Pinterest is about sharing, not selling. For companies that do not have products to show off, Pinterest offers a way to flaunt brand personality and really engage with your customers/audience.” I’m sure this is something you’ve already heard of…

But what is more important is that you ask yourself these questions, and have you really asked them yet, as a brand manager, as a community manager or for that matter as a business yourself.

Does your brand have enough Visual Content?
Is your content creative or interesting enough?
Does your website or brand really has that much of visual content or support it to begin with?
Most importantly does the conversion strategy work for you?

What is your thought process if you are a brand manager/brand that wants to or is already using Pinterest?

SocioFi - What's 'Really' up with Instagram?

2012-12-21T15:24:00.000+05:30

Instagram will sell your photos without your permission?

Instagram will share your data with Facebook?

With so much news doing rounds on various tech blogs, news sites in the last couple of days, a quick overview and recap of what’s going on and really find out what the confusion is all about and hopefully clear it out for all of you.

So here’s what exactly happened and is happening with Instagram?

Why the outrage against Instagram by users?

On 18^th December Instagram updated its blog with its Privacy and Terms of Service Changes on Instagram. As it is known, no one ever reads the Terms and Conditions down to the tee, but obvious. This was again evident a few weeks ago when a really inane chain of Facebook posts was doing rounds on Facebook about Privacy, which really meant nothing as Facebook Privacy changes that had been released were really about the voting issues and certain semantics that people didn’t care to read. People started to abuse, outrage, curse and a lot more… on twitter, on Facebook, basically everywhere else they could. Tools popped up which helped you to back up your Instagram photos and delete your account. Some articles showcasing how some went back to Flickr, cause of this ‘supposed’ move by Instagram.

Here are some quotes that may have been ‘misinterpreted’:

“We may share User Content and your information (including but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”). Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including by providing analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including by providing you with better and more relevant experiences). But these Affiliates will honor the choices you make about who can see your photos.”

“Instagram, its Affiliates, or Service Providers may transfer information that we collect about you, including personal information across borders and from your country or jurisdiction to other countries or jurisdictions around the world.”

Due to which, there were many blogs, general news sites that put up ‘tangy’ and ‘sensational’ news stating ‘Instagram now has right to sell your photos (Ownership changes)

What do you expect then? Outrage was evident, but of course…

Read the rest of the article here

SocioFi - Communities Launched on Google+

2012-12-21T15:19:00.003+05:30

Yes, we’ve been wondering about this for a while now… With so many options and alternatives around, why and when would Google+ introduce communities? Recently one of my colleagues told me, that it’s here… And immediately he created a few groups and invited me to a couple of them. I personally am not an avid user of Google+ as of now. Have explored it in the past and was there even before it launched to everyone. (Read: beta invites) But most of my time goes in tinkering around Facebook, Twitter and most recently, Quora. Yes, I shall of course write another post that’ll detail my passion and love for Quora, but for now, I’m pretty happy that communities on Google+ have been introduced.

We all know, Google+ as a whole has a good level of traction from ‘The Geek’ community. Having said that, introduction of Google+ community is quite a blessing! Of course there are a lot of pros and cons about communities existing generally, but having said that one’s handling technology based websites, technology in general or for that matter niche groups and in fact product companies like SocioFi themselves… will appreciate the existence on Google+ for such a feature.

While Google+ says this

“Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1′ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search…), and 135 million are active in just the stream.”

I’d tend to say it’s a little different from what it looks like… One has to but agree that a lot of traction in terms of numbers is from Gmail as well. Also number of users vs. number of active users is a question one must answer. However, with the introduction of the Communities, aspect, the ballgame is a little different now, especially with Google+ having a Hangout feature, which can be explored well on the community front.

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Time to Get Out... Musashi... Time to get Out!

2012-12-10T03:20:00.000+05:30

Previous Part here: http://bit.ly/townofdrown-2

But it was too late... too late to think of all that, she realized that as soon as she heard that tinkering sound, sound of blades being dragged along the ground...

But it was too late... too late to think of all that, she realized that as soon as she heard that tinkering sound, sound of blades being dragged along the ground...

She had been waiting for long… Too much time had gone by… She had become anxious by the time she finished smoking her last cigarette. Her last shot of sake was over. She was wavering between the glances at the wall clock inside the restaurant and at the distant horizon which she could see beyond the glass doors. She knew if this much time has gone by, something has certainly gone wrong.

She was waiting for someone, but someone that she was hoping for never came. Instead, what she faced that day must have been the worst horror of her life. She couldn’t even imagine what would happen to her and how her life will totally shift itself from where it was, to where it should have never been... When she heard the sound, she realized it was for her…

As soon as she heard the sound of the blades, blades being dragged along the ground, she realized that somebody was coming for her. She quickly scouted for something within the restaurant that could help her protect herself from only to find wide gazes of shock staring outside the windows and the glass doors of the restaurant. Everyone was staring at a bunch of people who were coming towards the restaurant with fiery eyes. A Yakuza clan? A bunch of local Yakuzas? Who were these people?

Everybody was awestruck at their appearance, their body covered with multiple tattoos. Ones that represented different levels within their group. The leader of this group sporting most number of tattoos, indicating his seniority and term of service with that group. They had a maddening look in their eyes, a streak of anger mixed with visceral look in their eyes, indicating their deep urge to just barge in and do something that was beyond anyone’s realm of imagination rather than doing something with tact or any strategy.

They had a bunch of katana swords dangling in their hands. Some had short knives and a couple of them carried baseball bats. There was no way anyone could stop them from taking the place over and make it look like the next destination for a scuffle between a bunch of Yakuza clans. They knew that at this point in time, there was no one who was going to come in between them and their goal… Their goal of looking for Musashi… And to take her along, along with her to where she was supposed to have already gone!

Having seen them like that, Musashi now switched her glances from the doors, windows and the wall clock to the back of the bar… In hope… In hope of something that could save her life… Or help her escape this horrid cage that she had gotten herself into… She was desperately trying to make a run for it, before they entered the hotel…

But it was too late... too late to think of all that, she realized that as soon as she heard that tinkering sound, sound of blades being dragged along the ground...

But it was too late... too late to think of all that, she realized that as soon as she heard that tinkering sound, sound of blades being dragged along the ground...

To be continued...

How is the blogosphere like a giant social network? How can Bloggers benefit?

2012-12-09T15:12:00.002+05:30

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Blogosphere: How is the blogosphere like a giant social network and what might bloggers do to benefit from this? on Quora

What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up?

2012-12-06T01:04:00.000+05:30

Answer to a question I asked on Quora while doing some research for Facebook Global Pages! I intend to write a blog about my findings later on. But thanks to Jack Lindamood, Software engineer at Facebook who worked on Global Pages at Facebook. Thanks Jack for the detailed answer. It was very helpful!

Read Quote of Jack Lindamood's answer to Facebook: What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up? on Quora

What's the best way to market yourself (or myself)?

2012-12-06T01:03:00.000+05:30

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to What's the best way to market yourself (or myself)? on Quora