The members of SMC Mumbai met again after a prolonged time-out on May 7th 2011 to discuss the emerging social media practices for product companies. The seminar was held at Directiplex in Andheri. The refreshing and encouraging fact was that many new members participated in the meet summing the total attendance to an approximate 30. The awareness has fairly increased with SMM. We hope that the trend will only continue to grow.

The seminar was slated to see three product companies – Deskaway, a software company primarily dealing in SaaS and Cloud; Yolkshire, an egg specialty start-up restaurant in Pune; Hokey Pokey a growing national chain of ice-cream parlours. Unfortunately Nitin Jain from Hokey Pokey couldn’t be present for the discussion. Nonetheless the seminar turned out to be quite enriching as Sahil Parikh and Sahil Khan, the respective owners for Deskaway and Yolkshire shared their experiences and thoughts on social media for their businesses.

Cross posted from Superchooha blog by Ralston D’ Souza.

It is very difficult to track the beginning or the end of Social media accurately. It is a vast realm that is changing at all times. The first known socially interactive platform in the world emerged in 1979. It was called Usenet. Its inventors were two computer scientists by the names of Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. In the interim of 1979 and the early 90’s, there were a number of platforms like BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) which were in some small abstract way an equivalent of social media today. IRC better known as Internet Relay Chat was in one sense the father of modern day chat platforms we have on almost every social networking website and mail client today. IRC’s were first used in order to share links and generally stay in touch. Also, ‘Leetspeak’ began at this juncture.

The comparison between modern Social media platforms and Usenet is based on the premise that both of them united people and contained the foremost essence or the crux of any social media platform: interaction emerging from common interests.

Over the years, marketing has adapted to social media and the fact that there is an increase in the presence of more and more people coming online and interacting. It is human tendency to trust people in a new medium of interaction. Cases in point being social media platforms like face book and twitter when they first emerged. Although niche, social media platforms are greater influencers as compared to television today because people get the missing dimension of interactivity which a TVC or a print commercial cannot give. Secondly, the user can choose who to interact with.

The clue train manifesto is a set of 95 theses regarding new market places. These theses are a call to action for businesses in the new market place. An instance of one such new market place is the internet. The manifesto goes on to say, that ‘a powerful global conversation has begun. Owing to a marketplace, which is more informed, and share relevant knowledge at a blinding speed, the stress is on having a conversation with people. So the more informed you are, the better the relevance and hence, better will be the quality of your conversations.

In social media, there is one paradigm of engagement only:

Attention ——> Relevance
As a newcomer to social media, I have realized that the online audience is smart. More so, they seek relevance. “What’s in it for me?” is generally their first and foremost question before they join your community or interact with you. Taking a patronizing tone with an audience this sharp, is the equivalent of social media suicide.

Although not all of them have what Daniel Goleman calls EQ, they can find out if the information is accurate, just in case you are taking the high ground by Pfaffing.

Why is it ‘Social’ Media?
The word ‘Social’ in its most basic sense refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary. Social Media is media meant to be disseminated through the use of the internet. Now this broad definition of Social Media can include Microblogging, Social networking (which is distinct from Social media), Social bookmarking, Blogging, Social network aggregation, Photo/video sharing and so much more.

Heraclitus wrote once, that you cannot enter the same river twice. For a beginner in Social Media all I can say is that there are many aspects of it that I have not completely discovered as yet and by the time I discover them, the river is not quite the same anymore!

The real challenge for social media just like for other digital media advertising or marketing initiatives is the ROI. But the mistake made by Banner s/SEM or SEO per se has been the metrics used for what was termed as ‘value’. ‘Clicks’ have been both the boon and bane for the digital medium and has possibly been the most measured and over measured metric. The question that marketers in the real world have always been asking is what value does that click bring to my brand, sales and business at the end of the day?

The same rule has started to apply to Social Media as well. While the Search marketers went from clicks to leads to conversions in search of value and some have even gone to measuring the lifetime value of those converted social media which is still in its infancy has to still define its value or ROI.

In a recent conversation with one of our clients I realized that the clients want to see a metric they understand. They want to put Digital and social media on the same platter as TV, Print and others and serve that to their management. The metrics he came up with were brand awareness, brand salience and lead generation. He asked can you tell me how can social media deliver these 3 in what way, to how many people, across how many geographies and for how many months?

This question made me realize that we need to start talking about social media marketing and its deliverables in real world metrics and not clicks, conversations, followers or fans. While these numbers are indicative they by no means are a true measure of the success of a campaign. I believe sooner or later someone has to bridge the real world and the virtual world divide in terms of understanding of value and then and only then would the real advertisers and marketers jump on to the social media bandwagon in a big way.

Cross Posted from {enygmatic}

I’ve had an interesting back and forth debate with Sanjay Mehta (@sm63) on twitter on what lessons we ought to learn from the recent Nestle social media debacle. For those who don’t know the story behind the Nestle debacle, here is a brief snapshot of what I have understood from various online accounts:

Greenpeace bought out a video that showed the effect that palm oil cultivation (a key ingredient in the chocolates that Nestle makes) has on the ecology and how it’s leading to a shrinking habitat for the orangutan. The video, which was up on YouTube, showed the KitKat logo (a Nestle product), with words “Killer” instead of KitKat. Nestle, citing trademark violations, had the video pulled down from YouTube. Greenpeace then turned to its army of twitter followers to help in hosting the video elsewhere on the Internet and the video went viral. All this also attracted attention to Nestle’s Facebook Fan Page, where Greenpeace activists turned “fans” were already launching an assault on the brand. A number of people started posting comments using the morphed logo with the words “Killer” as their avatar. This led to Nestle putting out a request to people to stop “violating” their trademark. A couple of high handed comments from the Nestle people managing the fan page ensured that this snowballed into an all out assault. People joined up as “fans” just to put in their 10 cents on how much they hated Nestle and how Nestle shouldn’t have asserted their right to their trademark. In the end it seems that Nestle has one big great PR screw-up in the hands. (more…)

Cross posted from the Superchooha blog

I myself being a recent graduate (engineer) I know how frustrating it was to learn everything on my own. I think the Indian schools and colleges, right from primary to top IIMs and IITs are very very deficient right now in teaching our country’s students about the new media.

I have seen people coming out from IIMs with MBA in journalism and not knowing what Twitter or Blogs are. Suggesting some ideas from my own personal experience – please put in yours in the comments and work together to change this!

1. What should be the right age to expose a student to new media technologies?

I think it should start from 7-8th grade itself which is the usual age when kids come in touch with computers and internet. And if they can be moulded in the right way, some percentage of them will grow up to use Twitter and Facebook in the right way and not to send ‘fraandhsip requests’ to anon chicks

2. What are we doing about teaching in B schools and journalism schools? What about the top marketing schools like MICA?

Any thoughts or personal observations here? I find the results woefully low. Even small efforts like guest lectures are not being taken.

3. Can we implement an industry / government defined course?

We will have to find interested colleges. Professors. Some survey of readiness of students to this topic. Then work together to define goals and results of the course. Its timing etc.

Amit Klein, Product Manager at Directi is doing some pretty good stuff in this regards. teaching online monitoring and marketing at NMIMS, Mumbai and ISB, Hyderabad. He’s been experimenting a lot even using Google Wave for internal collaboration.

Wat do you guys think? Can this dream be realised?

Cross posted from the Superchooha blog
Some shocking facts that I have come to realise from my small time in the industry:

Disclaimer

I’m not a social media guru / evangelist / stalwart in any way; but hell yeah! I know when things are going the wrong way. And yeah, this is not a rant – I am seriously surprised at the situation.

The industry is in a disorganised mess

• For most of the agencies out there, social media is about Facebook and Twitter (and maybe Foursquare 2 years down the line) And this holds true for firms who have been around for more than 2 years now. Shame.
• Weekly deliverables are in terms of of X updates on Twitter and Facebook! Billing is generated in terms of number of conversations achieved (relevant or irrelevant)
• Huge amount of mailers are sent to randomest of email databases to increase the number of fans on Facebook

Well, if you have fallen prey to this system of doing social media then:

Is this really social media strategy / consulting / execution? This looks more like social media outsourcing to me! (more…)