Here’s a quick summary of my thoughts on the social media marketing landscape in India –
- Social media marketing is a great tool for marketers to identify and redress customer dissatisfaction issue early, engage customers and citizens into meaningful conversations, and build customer loyalty at a low cost.
- In India, for most mainstream brands, social media is not yet a significant factor as of now. It is more important for reputation-based, service-oriented, consumer-fronted sectors like auto/ telecom/ financial services/ travel and hospitality. However, over time, social media will become important for all types of companies and brands.
Another related area where I’m suddenly seeing very high level of good quality activity is in the marketing, public relations & social media blogs niche in India.
Not very long back, I had mentioned that Gauravonomics Blog was one of the five Indian blogs on the AdAge Power150 list. Today, as many as fifteen Indian blogs can be on that list.
The blogs included in this list are not only written by marketing, public relations, or social media practitioners, they are also focused on these topics. Blogs on unrelated topics written by marketing, public relations, or social media practitioners are not included in the list.
The main objective of the list is to develop a sense of community in the niche. This is the reason why I have added blogger profiles on Facebook/ LinkedIn/ Twitter wherever possible. This is also the reason why I have structured this list alphabetically (by author name) and not as a ranking. Agency blogs and multi-author blogs are listed separately.
Quick Summary: In today’s attention-scarce economy, where freebies have become the cost of entry, enterprises need to strike the right balance between giving away freebies to get attention and retaining the ability to eventually monetize the attention.
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This post was inspired by a thought-provoking post by Piers Fawkes on free versus paid social networks (via Valeria Maltoni). Piers compares his experiences with a not-for-profit (Likemind) and a for-profit (The Purple List) social network and concludes that –
To leverage the opportunities that digital connectivity has fueled a company should be a 50/50 corporation. 50% about being social, 50% about making profit.
In our attention-scarce economy, consumers demand freebies in exchange for their attention. Enterprises give away freebies in the form of free content, or, in some cases, even free products, in the hope that they will get their customers’ attention, build lock-in, and eventually charge for value-added services. In an earlier post, I have called this trade-off the economics of free –
Therefore, Piers’ idea of the 50/50 Enterprise itself is not new. What is new is his insight that unless you decide upfront, and let your customers know upfront, that your enterprise has both free and paid elements, you may not be able to charge for the paid elements.
It’s my first TVC in my brand manager avatar, so be generous with your compliments and gentle with your criticisms. In either case, do e-mail me your feedback both on the TVC and the concept of brand managers talking about their brands on social networks.
Quick Summary: My take on the PR vs marketing debate in social media circles — nobody owns the social media sandbox.
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There’s a debate going on in search, marketing and PR blogs on what is Social Media Marketing, how does it relate to Search Marketing and Social Marketing, and who owns it.
On one extreme are the SEO/ SEM experts who primarily focus on the role of social bookmarking, social news and other social networking sites in driving traffic to websites (The Search Marketing Purists) –
Social media is easy to hype because there is a lot of traffic on social media sites. But if you try to do anything with social media traffic to convert it to revenue, you will be hard-pressed — unless you are selling CPM-based advertising. (Aaron Wall)
On the other extreme are the not-for-profit social workers who primarily focus on the role of marketing in influencing social behavior and bringing about social change (The Social Marketing Purists) —
Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society. (Nedra Kline Weinreich)
Toby Bloomberg is compiling another great list of tips (via Rajesh) from marketers and bloggers around the world by asking them —
How do you build great business relationships with people? Do “clients” and “partners/ vendors/ suppliers” have different points of view about what is important for each?
Quick Summary: Here’s an opportunity for you to get featured in a Best Kept Marketing Secrets e-book along with some of the world’s top marketers, small business experts and bloggers.
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Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends asked some of the world’s top marketers, small business experts and bloggers — including Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and John Battelle — to share one of their best kept marketing secrets. I’m totally amazed by the range of good advise contained in her compilation of best kept marketing secrets and the 100+ comments.
Now, Anita is planning to compile 100 of the best tips received till the end of February into a downloadable e-book.
If you are a marketer, I strongly suggest that you read Anita’s compilation of tips and then share your own tip in the comments section today itself.
Here are three reasons why you should contribute to the collaborative e-book –
1. Collaborative e-books are a brilliant way of networking and building visibility in your niche. I know many marketing bloggers because we were co-contributors for the Age of Conversation e-book.
Quick Summary: Duncan Watts debunks The Influentials and The Tipping Point, but word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing practitioners will do well to continue to focus on the tipping point potential of influentials.
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Here’s a potential game changer for word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing.
Word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing is based on the premise, best captured in bestsellers like The Influentials and The Tipping Point, that a small cadre of well-connected people can trigger, or tip, trends. Reach the influentials and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.
Now, based on his new research, network theory scientist Duncan Watts, who is working at Yahoo! on sabbatical from Columbia University, says that this simple premise is wrong. While I’m still trying to fully understand what Watts own premise is, here is my three sentence summary of what he seems to be saying –
- Even supper-connected influentials don’t have the power to start a trend, unless the social context is anyways susceptible to the trend.
- The key, therefore, lies not in identifying influentials who will tip a trend, but in identifying trends that are ready to be tipped.
As advertising permeates into more parts of our lives, people learn how to block out advertising, develop blind spots, which prompts advertisers to find yet more ways of cutting through the clutter, leading to a self-propagating cycle of more advertising and less ad-free non-commercial space.
Italian agency MTN Company recently used zebra crossing advertising to promote an architecture and design event called “Settimane dell’Architettura e del Design” (via I Believe in Advertising).
See the pictures on Flickr (they are not shared under a Creative Commons license, so do think twice before you put them up at your blogs) —
– or watched the making of the zebra crossing ads on YouTube –
The ads are done really tastefully and add to, rather than take away from, the public space they use as a platform. The Sentieri Urbani project, for instance, uses a similar street art approach to to beautify public space. My experience, however, is that it doesn’t take long for an innovative new medium like this to devolve into lowest common denominator space. It’s one thing to have black and white flowers and hearts on the zebra crossing, it’s another to have loud multi-colored “Buy Now!” price and promotion ads.
Quick Summary: Read about how marketers should use different social media tools to serve different objectives depending on the level they are at in the Marketing Chain of Being.
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Social media is such an elusive idea that most social media/ marketing/ public relations bloggers are still struggling to answer several basic questions about social media –
- What exactly is social media?
- How is social media related to marketing, advertising, customer service and PR?
- When should marketers use social media?
- How should marketers measure the effectiveness of social media?
However, when I thought a little more about it, I realized that social media has a (different) role to play at almost every level in the Marketing Chain of Being.
