Gauravonomics Blog

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Quick Summary: I was quoted today in Thinking Aloud, the online magazine of IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India), in a story on social media marketing in India.

I have been tracking social media marketing in India for a while now both in my brand manager and blogger avatars.

I was quoted today in Thinking Aloud, the online magazine of IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India), in a story on social media marketing in India.

The article also quotes Raj Kurup, CEO of Creativeland Asia.

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.  Read More

Quick Summary: A number of good quality marketing, public relations & social media blogs in India form a mature niche now.

I recently compiled my list of social media agencies in India to highlight the high level of activity I’m suddenly seeing in that niche.

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.  Read More

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.

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 –

Quick Summary: Watch the New Indica V2 Dicor TVC on YouTube.

Have you watched the new Indica V2 Dicor TVC yet?

We broke the campaign over the weekend, and uploaded the TVC on YouTube almost simultaneously.

Now, I’m sharing the TVC on my blog, Twitter and Facebook.

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.

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)  Read More

Quick Summary: Read my mantra for building business relationships — treat partners/ vendors/ suppliers like customers.

Last week, I wrote about Anita Campbell’s compilation of best kept marketing secrets featuring tips from some of the world’s top marketers, small business experts and bloggers.

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?

Toby’s compilation post on building business relationships has a wealth of good advice and I would strongly encourage you to read through it.

Here’s my own mantra for building business relationships — treat partners/ vendors/ suppliers like customers.

All of us know how to build great business relationships with customers. All of us know that we should –  Read More

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.

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.  Read More

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.

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.  Read More

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.  Read More

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.

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?

In an earlier post on whether customer service is the new marketing, I had identified the role of social media in marketing by saying that social media is only a tool to create engagement, the middle level in the Marketing Chain of Being.

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.

Read about how a soft-hard-soft leadership style works best in an environment that is constantly changing.

Management literature is littered with debates on what is the right leadership style. Most of these models recognize that there is no right leadership style, that different leadership styles work in different environments.

Based on my own experience over the last few years, I have found that a soft-hard-soft leadership style works best in an environment that is constantly changing.

Simply put, a soft leadership style is focused on people and a hard leadership style is focused on targets and processes.

According to my Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model, managers need to adopt their leadership styles to how easy or difficult their environment is.

There are three stages in the Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model model –

Stage 1 – Soft-Soft

When the environment is soft and targets/ processes are not under pressure, managers should adopt a soft leadership style to maintain the feel-good factor in the team.

Stage 2 – Hard-Hard

Quick Summary: Read about the five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being, and the three laws that govern how brands move between them.

In an earlier post, I had written that, like the Renaissance Chain of Being, there is also a Marketing Chain of Being.

In this post, I’ll explain the five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being, and the three laws that govern how brands move between them.

There are five levels in the Marketing Chain of Being –

1. Commodity Hell, in which brands basically focus on price and channel promotions to sell more (think groceries).
2. Differentiation, in which brands highlight product features and benefits to command a price premium (think automobiles).
3. Engagement, in which brands use service (in both its customer service and conversation meaning) to develop relationships with customers (think Dell).
4. Cultural Currency, in which brands become shared social objects and help customers define their individual and group identities (think Nike+iPod).
5. Meaning, in which brands become the tools that customers use for self-realization or restoration (think Google).

Quick Summary: Read about how engagement is only the middle level in the ‘Marketing Chain of Being’ and how social media and customer service are only tools to create engagement.

The topic of the week in the marketing and public relations blogosphere is whether customer service is the new marketing, so much so that there’s even an upcoming event on the topic.

Most of the posts on the topic have focused on how social media is causing customer service and public relations to merge into each other to form the fabric of a new marketing paradigm.

I’m a brand manager, not a PR practitioner, and I can’t but feel that the above statement is rather simplistic. Yes, customer service is important. Yes, word of mouth is important, and, by association, public relations is important. Yes, good (or bad) customer service is an important factor in creating favorable (or unfavorable) word of mouth. Yes, social media gives customers the tools to amplify word of mouth. Yes, yes, yes and yes. But that’s only part of the story. Let me tell you the real story by going back to my post on the Marketing Chain of Being.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read about a new brand-centric business model for mobile advergaming.

At yesterday’s Mobile Monday Mumbai session, as I watched Jump Games CEO Salil Bhargava present a case for mobile advergaming, I kept asking myself why it didn’t (yet) make sense for Indian marketers.

Later, as Salil was joined by Anant Rangaswami from Campaign India magazine and Nidhi Taparia from Tata Indicom for a panel discussion moderated by VeerChand Bothra from Netcore Solutions, I actually asked them –

So, why exactly should mobile advergaming become an essential part of my media plan?

As I expected, the discussion quickly turned to how marketers expect too much from digital media.

However, since I think of myself as a digital media evangelist — I want mobile/ online advertising to work — I told myself to not think about all the reasons mobile advergaming won’t work for me and instead think about the set of conditions under which it would work for me.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read about The Xeta Shootout Contest, where you can make your own Xeta TV commercial in a video or storyboard format and win an Indica V2 Xeta.

Winning a car is now as easy as 1-2-3.

Step 1. Visit the Xeta Shootout Contest and watch the Indica V2 Xeta television commercial.

Step 2. Create your own Xeta TVC in the form of a video or a storyboard.

Step 3. Upload your entry on the contest website.

The best entry will win an Indica V2 Xeta.

You can also watch the entries submitted by others and comment on them, participate in a slogan contest on the message board, or tell your friends about the contest.

If you are wondering why I’m promoting The Xeta Shootout Contest on my blog, this is what I do in my Indica Brand Manager avatar, when I’m not blogging about being the next marketing guru.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read about the M20 list of top ranked blogs written by client-side marketers and my profile on the M20 blog.

I had always wondered if all marketing blogs were written by agency people, until I came across The M20: Top Marketer Blogs.

The M20 — maintained by Peter Kim — is a list of the top ranked blogs written by client-side marketers.

Apart from maintaining a list of the top twenty blogs, Peter also does regular profiles of client-side marketers who blog. Here’s mine.

By the way, here are the top twenty blogs by client-side marketers in November ‘07 –  Read More

Quick Summary: Read about how your following/ followers ratio is a foolproof indicator of your position on the blogging chain of being.

Today, I found myself Twittering about the following/ followers ratio, that is, the ratio between the number of people whose blog you read/ who you follow on Twitter and the number of people who read your blog/ follow you on Twitter. Then, as I compiled my updates into a Twitter thread, I had a Eureka moment — I realized that your following/ followers ratio is a foolproof indicator of your position on the blogging chain of being.

If your Following/ Followers ratio is > 2 or < 1/2, you are listening or talking, but not communicating. (Twitter)

That signal to noise (Following/ Followers) ratio rule holds for Twitter/ Pownce, but it also holds for blogs/ RSS feeds. (Twitter)

When you start communicating via a new medium, your Following/ Followers ratio will be typically > 2. (Twitter)

If you are good at using the medium, over time, you will build a following and the Following/ Followers ratio will fall between 1/2 and 2. (Twitter)  Read More

Quick Summary: Read about the marketing and blogging chain of being.

Have I ever told you why Grant McCracken is brilliant — because he often makes me think. Like he did today when he asked –

Could there be a great chain of being in the marketing world?

Of course, Grant, there is a great chain of being, not only in the marketing world, but also in the blogging world.

The Renaissance Chain of Being

The Marketing Chain of Being

The Blogging Chain of Being

By the way, here’s the inside story on why most bloggers blog — blogging allows the world to find out how brilliant we are, individually and collectively.

If you think I’m totally brilliant, do let me know via a comment or an e-mail.

David Armano on the importance of being an office influential –

Make no mistake, office influentials are self-educating themselves in ways that can be beneficial not only to themselves but to their organizations. Being an active participant in social media means you learn how to custom design web pages and profiles, manage your personal brand, network and communicate with people from all business and backgrounds.

That sounds a lot like yours truly, but I don’t think my Technorati rank will be a factor in deciding my annual bonus anytime soon.

Quick Summary: Read about how we have moved from corporate communications to the communications marketplace and, therefore, need to measure share of credibility instead of share of voice.

I was recently tagged by Connie Bensen on the social media measurement meme started by Geoff Livingston.

I have uploaded my response to the meme in the form of a presentation.

My presentation answers the question of how to measure returns on social media through three key insights –

- We have moved from corporate communications to the communications marketplace.
- Credibility is the currency of the communications marketplace.
- Therefore we need to measure share of credibility instead of share of voice.

The meme has resulted in some excellent posts and I would strongly urge you to spend an evening reading them — Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse, Connie Bensen (2), Clay Newton, David Jones, Beth Kanter, Valeria Maltoni, Peter Imbres, Kelli Matthews, Bill Sledzik and Greg Cangiolosi.

Instead of tagging five people, I’m sending out an open invite to all my readers this time — do pitch in with your own insights on measuring social media ROI.