Social Media Club Mumbai

Cross posted from the Superchooha blog

Someone off late showed some interest in my friend. My advise to her was of course Google him. To her surprise [not mine], within minutes she knew a lot about him. Let’s take the very talented and the lady’s man Mayur Makheri as our case study here.

Ladies, he is also the Head, Social Media Strategy at Superchooha. Go follow him!

A Google search reveals this
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=DCM&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=mayur+makheri&start=10&sa=N

His Linkedin tells me

• His educational background. Good enough to tell the parents. [MBA kiya hai bhai]
• His work ex. Has a marketing background, will give a good sales pitch to the relatives
• Is currently at a leading position at Superchooha. That means access to credit cards with high credit limit.

His Twitter tells me

• Passionate about social media. Good!
• Is a happy go lucky person http://twitter.com/admads/status/10209106475
• Can get naughty http://twitter.com/admads/status/9972195493

His Facebook tells me

• http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3115098&id=502864919 Can be absolute nuts
• We have x friends in common, is not a fake id
• Is a Cancerian, perfect! [source- FB birthday]
• The photos tell me his friends love and adore him. Awww how cute
• And he loves traveling

He seems like a great guy to be with and take home. Woohoo! Who needs Shaadi.com? On these lines do check http://www.youpid.in/ an Indian initiative on a matrimonial social network. [We have no association with them whatsoever, just that it's a pretty cool concept]

Mr. Mayur Makheri you are socially [media] naked now. Go figure!

cross posted from amitklein.com

There’s no doubt that Google Search is a great product, but aside from some cosmetic changes in how results are displayed there hasn’t been any major innovation in search in the last few years (aright, Goggles is pretty awesome):

There are a number of questions which Google fails to answer:

• “where’s the best bagel in new york?”
• “what’s a cheap, clean, centrally located hotel in bangkok”
• “which DSLR camera should I buy?”

In the cases above, you’re most likely to get SEO-optimized aggregator/review site whose primary motivation is affiliate sales.  And forget about finding anything usable to:

• “what’s everyone up to this weekend?”
• “should I get a tattoo?”
• “is business school right for me”

Increasingly, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for these types of questions:

Aardvark is another really nice product that tries to answer these experiential/recommendation type of questions.  It’s easy to use (via a chat bot) and gets quick and solid responses.  The same question got me three responses within 10 min (here’s two): (more…)

Cross posted from the Superchooha blog

You open the internet, and it’s everywhere. It’s Twitter this and Twitter that. Why has it become so popular in the recent years, achieving a staggering growth of 500%?

It’s not because it’s a cool piece of technology. It’s caught on because it’s changed the way we communicate on the internet for the better. It has made us move away from emails and telephones which are good only for 1-1 conversations to a more open, simple and faster platform. Let’s take a look at how micro-blogging can fit into an enterprise’s internal communication channels.

Current communications
Phone calls and emails take up most of our times, making it very easy for information to get lost; on top of it the closed communication structures hinder faster spread of information through the network. I mean seriously, how many times had you wait for days before the CEO can reach your mail in his inbox? (more…)

Below are the meeting notes from last Saturday.  We had video too, trying to get that up soon.

General Notes
Participation was lower this week, not sure if that’s due to the holidays or what but we only had about 8 people (a far cry from the 25 we had a month ago). We decided we need to do more stuff. In our next meeting Jan 9th we will be launching a SMM campaign for … wait for it … SMC MUMBAI! We’ll discuss strategies to raise awareness about our group (now that we have some content and consistency across meetings) and try to set some goals (i.e. getting 30 people to the following meeting).

Twitter Discussion
Brands leverage twitter for the following reasons:

Research

• identifying evangelists / key advocates
• identifying biggest critics / attempt to reach out and convert
• tracking sentiment / buzz / what people are saying about your brand
• track keywords – retweeting – responding to tweets – introducing to product
• product feedback
• identifying trends in your industry
• finding out what people are saying about your competitors

Sales

• deals / offers / coupons
• @threadless – case study
  • give teasers
  • make retweetable content
  • combine with a contest
  • measure response – 4% conversion rate – record sales – 70k visitors from twitter
• accepting orders (restaurants / coffee)
  • twitter small business case studies
  • korean bbq
• micro transactions (tipjoy)

PR

• creating a buzz around new product launches / events
• announcements / new products / events
• sharing wins for the company
• promote blog posts / news updates
• loyalty / engagement (giving people a chance to interact)

Contests

• priyanka chopra – tell your favorite love story
• games (movies) – spymaster

One off campaign

• mad men example (characters from tv series dedicated accounts tweeting)

Customer service

• managing customer feedback / addressing complaints / customer service
  • kingfisher airlines – pretty good job
  • icici bank – sucks
  • cleartrip – not focused

Increasing reputation / authority

• individuals – @chrisbrogan
• b2b – @Wockhardthosp

Best Practices?

• Aggregating all employee tweets (a la twitter.zappos.com) – dangerous though promotes transparency
• Don’t just tweet about you / your product – Tweet about the industry / tangential (but still on brand and related) content
• Retweet other people / engage / answer questions / ask questions
• Listen before talking
• Show biographical information (photo, info) – don’t be a corporate
• keep tweets under 110 characters – so people can rt
• transparency – don’t move it offline – whatever you can – make public
• guykawasaki – repeats everything 4 times – for worldwide audience – 3rd tweet that gets the most traffic – is this a smart strategy?
• dont tweet all the time
• posting a link – add something to it – your opinion – not just post a headline and link

Last week I gave two sessions on Social Media Marketing at SPJain. Videos and slides below… let me know what you think:

This past weekend we talked about measuring online reputation… check out the vids:

SMCMumbai1 from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.

SMCMumbai2 from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.