The Real Value of Social Media: Engagement

Engagement has been the key element of human existence since time immemorial. Without engagement it is simply not possible to conceive of various institutions, families & fabric and culture around the world. It is due to engagement and the need of sharing which has led to so much advancement in technology and human capabilities. Social media marketing is no different. The very word 'Social' involves engagement. Actually engagement is what makes social media unique to the traditional media.

Traditional Approach

Earlier brands used to craft a message or commercial to be displayed on TV, Newspapers and Radio and it was static as your customers were not able to interact with the brand, although they kept on repeating their messages again and again so that their customers and prospects have a strong brand recall. In fact traditional media is still relevant and i strongly believe in the marketing mix where traditional and new media both play an important role hand-in-hand.

New Approach

The point is traditional media has certain limitations, like customers can't interact with other customers directly and not even with the brand. Social media has been a great boon as far as democratizing the conversations is concerned. From 'one-to-many', now the mode of communication is 'one-to-many' + 'many-to-many'. Brands' role is now to participate and engage rather than just broadcast and sit back to see the increase in sales.

Present Scenario

These days customers have so much power that they can go to any social network or customer forum or even start their own websites or blogs to share their grieving.  Especially on twitter news spread like wildfire. One just have to look at the post by Shrinidhi Hande on his bad experience with Mahindra Holidays. He wrote a detailed post on the discrepancies in Mahindra's service and warned readers to avoid availing any service from them. This post was written in february 2007, and even now after 4 years you can see the comments rolling in. This is the power of the medium. One just has to search for 'x brand sucks' and there you can see a detailed list of crimes committed by a brand. :)

The moral of the story is you may delete negative comments on your online properties but you don't have any power over 3rd party social media properties. So, it is better to engage and handle negative criticism as soon as possible.

The Real Value

The real value of social media is engagement as it brings you customer insights, creates relationships with your customers and ultimately increase in sales. So, rather than running after number of fans or followers on facebook and twitter, go for building valuable relationships. Help your customers, participate in their conversation. That will create a real value for you.

Google Plus a New Rival to Facebook: Will it Be Successful?

Google launched Google Plus (Google+) a new social network from it's stable which seems to be very promising from the initial usage experience. Right now it is invitation based & i got invitation from a friend yesterday morning. Here's a view of my profile on Google+:

Circles

Circles are an interesting way of grouping together the people in your network to form number of meaningful clusters which enables you to share only that much information which you want to share with them. Like you can have separate circles for your work place, family, friends etc and the good thing is that others can see only that you have added them to some circle but in which one, they can't know.

Sparks

Sparks is a very good introduction which displays random content from across the web (over which google has a strong hold). The content is categorized based upon different interest areas. You can create a new spark based upon your interest area or you can see the regular sparks shown by Google. Sharing of content (blog posts, articles & videos) from sparks with your circles is very easy & happens in a flash. I personally feel they should add Google reader feature or some customization option in the sparks tab to make it more useful.

Huddle

So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, right this second. Group messaging was first made popular by blackberry messenger service (BBM) from RIM but bringing that to the web is a good feature although i don't rate it as an innovation. Already this kind of chat can be done on facebook closed groups.

Hangout

Hangout is a great feature which lets you to have a video chat with up to 10 people at the same time & it has a very nice "narrative detection" element which automatically detects the active user who is speaking to the other members & thus his video is relayed to all other members in the real time.

This comes into action for the video chat with more than 2 people. The experience is smooth & there's hardly any lag. I rate this feature as the most powerful yet on Google Plus and it certainly adds a very element to social media.

Mobile

I haven't tried out the Google+ mobile feature yet but it seems to be an interesting feature after looking at the post by RWW it seems that experience of using Google on android phones is really good. Like while you're snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they're always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.

Usage Experience

Google+ is fantastic in terms of features but facebook users will not find it so easy to accustom themselves to it. It took me few hours to get hold of all the features. But the platform is really promising & can add a new dimension of social networking. Account creation being invitation only created a lot of buzz yesterday all around on the web.Although it will be rolled out soon to all the web users soon.

Did you get the invite? :)

5 Steps to Monetise Your Blog: For Newbies

Blogging or webloging is a way to express your thoughts in public. You want others to know about your ideas. Blogging has many advantages, it can establish you as a thought leader, can get you a job, conference invitations & can even make money for you. There are some people who start blogging only to make money which is absolutely right while others have no such intention, it is only there for their intellectual development. Making money through blogging is an art and even i am trying to learn this art. Yes, this art can be learned by reading the posts of fellow bloggers who have created great content on this topic.

Best Practices for Newbies

#1. Blog Design

Don't create very shiny & cluttered blog. Simplicity is best. Even if you have a clean white background & few colorful icons & widgets it looks better than fully filled magazine style blog.

#2. Frequency of Posts

Spend at least initial four months creating some interesting and relevant content related to your niche. Ideally you should have at least 16 posts in the first 4 months i.e. 1 post every week. Then you can increase your blogging frequency by publishing 2 posts every week.

#3. Building Relationship

It is important for a newbie to build relationship with the fellow bloggers. You can create a blogroll of interesting bloggers in your niche and display the blogroll widget on your blog home page. Also, link to their relevant posts in your blog posts in the right context. Don't forget to read and leave relevant comments on their posts. This way they will notice you & even link back to your posts bringing in more traffic to your blog.

#4. Ads Management

I would recommend starting with google adsense as it is time tested & easy to begin with. Also, google doesn't allow more than 3 ads per page and 3 ads per post as per their current policies. It's a good idea to start with ads with size of 468x60 as they are not intrusive and they should be placed at the bottom of the post. This prevents your blog to look cluttered & gives importance to the content too.


#5. Tracking Performance

A newbie should make it a regular practice to track the performance of his ads on the daily basis. It gives a fair amount of idea which posts are working, what kind of content draws more traffic and thus vital clicks. You can go on improving your blog based upon on your learning.

What do you think of these steps? Do you have more ideas? Please share in the comment box below.

Analysis of Volkswagen India's Social Media Practice: Case Study

India is a very important market for various automobile manufacturers whether Indian or foreign. According to a study by Booz & Company, the Indian Automobile industry will overtake the European market and is slated to become the world’s fourth largest by 2015 and will be selling almost 6 million units annually by 2020. This speaks of the interest shown by International brands in the Indian market as they are struggling in mature markets to sell their automobiles. Here, i am going to take up the case of Volkswagen India regarding their social media practice, what they are doing right or wrong.

Right now, Volkswagen India mainly has a presence across four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & LinkedIn. Apart from that they have dedicated sites for their 'Innovations for Everyone' and 'Think Blue campaign' campaigns. The important aspect of Volkswagen India's strategy is a long term approach to build loyal community and the use of all the marketing channels: TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor & Online to leverage their promotional campaigns. There are two other brands of Volkswagen in India: Audi & Skoda, but i'll stick to the analysis of their social media practice.

Facebook

Volkswagen has grown its facebook fan page organically to a community nearing the count of 25,000. As far as wall communication is concerned, they are engaging with their fans in a responsible manner by replying to their queries, appreciating the feedback, running the contests etc.

Surprisingly they are missing the welcome tab as in the case of Volkswagen International! They have a twitter stream as a landing tab which looks very cluttered although they may be trying to portray a human image with this to show how do they interact with their followers on twitter. But they should get a well designed welcome tab with a introductory video & some crucial information for a homely feel to a new fan.

Another weakness i found was on their feedback tab where most of the feedback by customers is negative & astonishingly there is no participation by the brand to handle this negative criticism! Also some people are spamming their feedback tab with the repetition of the same problem and there is no moderation of such feedback. Either don't keep such a tab or if you have to keep then solve the problems of your customers.

Twitter

Volkswagen's twitter presence is not that great as compared to its facebook page but still they are doing commendable job over there by being highly interactive with their followers and retweeting the positive tweets. They also try to solve the problems faced by their followers related to the vehicles owned by them, which is a good practice.

Another good practice i noticed is that they have identified the owners of Volkswagen vehicles on twitter & have added them to the respective lists of different vehicles. They use these lists to keep a track of their customers & occasionally inform them about any new initiatives or offers.

But what i found missing on their twitter profile is that they don't favorite any positive tweets. In fact they haven't favorited even a single tweet! They should immediately start doing this because it serves as a real time repository of real testimonials made by people on twitter in public. The stream of such favorited tweets can then be integrated on their site.

Youtube

As far as Youtube efforts of Volkswagen India are concerned, i would rate it 50-50 because as far as the distribution of videos among influential bloggers and other news media channels is concerned they have done it well and these videos have admirable number of views but they lack as far as leveraging their dedicated Youtube channel is concerned.

They should take a cue from Youtube channel of Volkswagen International who have total views of more than 57 million till date!. They should cross promote the videos of their dedicated channel on other online platforms and should provide some incentives for people to subscribe to their channel.

LinkedIn

I was highly impressed upon seeing the way Volkswagen India has utilised LinkedIn company page. Since company pages is a new feature from the stable of LinkedIn, very few companies have actually have taken advantage of it & Volkswagen is one of those. They have listed 7 of their vehicles on LinkedIn so far & have got staggering 2772 recommendations till the time of writing this post!

This is a powerful area where it can get a lot of benefit due to such a large number of recommendations. You never know when some executive on LinkedIn sees a recommendation by a person who happens to be his LinkedIn connection & he makes the decision to buy that car! Or there can be bulk orders too.

Special Campaigns

Volkswagen also started two campaigns at different times in India. 'Innovations for Everyone' was launched in 2010 while another campaign 'Think Blue' was launched recently in 2011. Both these campaigns were launched with much fanfare as an integrated marketing campaign across all the online & offline channels which created a lot of buzz for them.

People submit their ideas on the dedicated sites of these campaigns & they get voted for their innovation by other participants and the person with highest number of votes is declared the winner. Some of these ideas are passed on to the product team to study their feasibility of being introduced among the upcoming vehicles.

This shows the crowd-sourcing capability of Volkswagen India. I would rate these campaigns as highly successful and there is lot to learn from their success for marketers. Here's the highest viewed video on their dedicated channel so far regarding the innovation for everyone campaign.

What do you think of Volkswagen's social media practice? Share your ideas in the comment box below.

Social Media is Not FREE!

Usually many social media agencies have trouble convincing their clients on a very basic point that social media is not free. Yes, it is true. Social media is not free and i'll explain why. Clients usually have an opinion that social media is a totally free domain which doesn't require much marketing budget. Hire few interns & the matter is resolved, or hire some mom & pop agency and pay them some fix amount every month to manage your accounts. But this is a totally wrong approach.

Tremendous amount of information is being generated online by millions of users worldwide. A large brand can have millions of mentions around the world while a smaller brand can have few thousands. In that scenario, larger brands have no escape from using some high end analytics tools to listen about their brand & thus act upon the information in a timely fashion. While smaller brands can use some free tools to listen like Google Alerts or Twitter Search but investment is still required in terms of skilled social media marketers, salaries and time. Apart from that advertisements on social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn is a big plus looking at the way specific targeting can be done which is not possible in other mediums.

Social media networks are free to join because they will not expand without being freely available. And they earn money using customer or brand driven advertisements. Now, all kinds of brands can start their official accounts on these different social networks free of cost but as mentioned before, to manage those online properties one requires skilled manpower (who need industry standard salaries/perks) and an ongoing investment of time. For instance, Ching's Secret has a team of over 30 people managing their twitter & facebook accounts and at the same time they have integrated social media with ORM & CRM with nearly 65% of the marketing budget allocated for social media marketing.

So, in a nutshell, social media cost involves:
a) Cost of social media analytics tools like Radian6 or upgrading to premium version of free tools.
b) Cost of social media marketers.
c) Investment of time.
d) Cost of advertisements on social platforms like facebook, twitter etc.

What's your opinion about cost of social media? Share in the comment box below.