Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

On 12th April, a popular Indian newspaper published a story, " Who really runs AirAsia India? " It raised some interesting questions about the operations of Air Asia. It stated that " Documents, emails show that Malaysia’s AirAsia Bhd has final say in decision-making, in violation of the  Indian law." Today suddenly after approximately a week I saw #AirAsiaScam trending #1 on Twitter. This came barely hours after Air Asia announced Air fares starting at Rs 999 for flights across India.

Follow @Sushant_KM Choosing an appropriate hashtag for your social media campaign can prove to be a tricky exercise. At times it can also determine success or failure of your campaign. A bad choice can result in negative conversations about your. How can you differentiate and make your campaign stand out? How can you make sure that the message reaches your audience?

Rajnigandha Pan Masala, one of the sponsors at Jaipur Literature festival every year organizes a contest i.e #RajnigandhaSixWordStory. It's a interesting brand engagement consistent with the theme of the festival.  Users have to share a six word story and they can stand a chance to win. The event being one of the largest of its kind in the world attracts a lot of participation and so does the contest. This year however it did not go as planned and the contest backfired. The narrative on social media was not about the contest, literature or the Jaipur Literature festival. It became a narrative about Rajnigandha, chewing tobacco and oral cancer.

Twitter has launched its TV ad campaign promoting moments, which was launched earlier this month. Since Jack Dorsey has been handed over the reins at Twitter, a lot new has happened. Twitter finally seems to have a sound  product roadmap . One of the biggest challenges being faced by Twitter right now is its sluggish user growth as compared to Facebook (apart from the lack of a steady revenue stream). This campaign should hopefully help set things up and speed up the growth of Twitter.

Being active on Social Media is no longer a competitive advantage for your brand. Everyone is doing it. Everyone is also focusing on content marketing, native ads and to add to your woes as a marketer is the ever increasing clutter on social media. So how can you differentiate and make your campaign stand out? How can you make sure that the message reaches your audience?

Online reputation management plays a very important role in building perception of a brand and in ultimately driving business results. User generated conversations and word of mouth have shown to have play a role in not just driving purchases but in also impacting stock prices. This makes having a strong Online Reputation Management system important for any brand. An effective Online reputation management system should contribute in building a positive perception of a brand through engagement and should lead to a higher equity for the brand.  Building online reputation and managing it requires benchmarking to assess performance of your brand and the team. It thus makes it important to select the right metric and understand its relevance.

Twitter has been a brand friendly platform. One of the biggest reasons for wide adoption of Twitter by celebrities, and brands has been its swiftness in dissemination of information apart from its transparency in not restricting content (unlike Facebook). The openness of the platform makes it easy to monitor, listen and communicate. Activities such as live Tweeting capture interest in events and couple it with quick dissemination of information. Journalists and the news media has benefited a lot from this. The causes of its heavy adoption are easily visible in its utility in disseminating information at a rapid pace. To add some context, In 2011 when an earthquake hit near Richmond , Virginia, New York residents read about it on Twitter when, 30 seconds later, they felt the quake.

The trending of #WhatsappTalks on Twitter might seem like just another Twitter trend. But, it also indicates the emergence of private networks such as WhatsApp and others like it crossing the active user base of more popular networks such as Twitter.

A few months back I had no smartphone. Life was much simpler. The phone ringtone was loud enough to be heard even when the phone was buried under the pillow. Even the one alarm that I could set on it was loud enough to wake me up. Only a few rare occasions drove me to the world of smartphones and their extravagant displays, with a smooth touch navigating through a web of mesmerizing applications.

Social Media has been termed as an effective way to build relationships. Brands are trying to harness this capability by building social presence on this new media. Celebrities today account for the maximum amount of followers on the web with twitter being a fine example for this. But is this new media effective in creating relationships with this vast list of followers, which celebrities often tend to have? In an interesting research by Lee and Jang , they explore the effectiveness of celebrities in building social presence on new media. They compare twitter and a news website to check the relative effectiveness of enhancing social presence. While the traditional PR machinery used by celebrities might give them news coverage, they contend that their tweets can reduce the barrier of relational development as compared to a news website. Their findings are counter-intuitive and very interesting.

The first phase of social media marketing was dominated by the race for numbers - A greater fan base meant success. To be fair the metric was an easy way of determining success of social media marketing. The only problem was that it did not factor in existing equity of brands. As a result strong brands quickly reached million follower count. This was more a result of the effort given in by previous brand managers. Social media marketers simply harnessed this existing equity.

The Indo-pak dialogue on social media is never a polite one. It can get ugly and sometimes outright disgusting. YouTube videos of Pakistani or Indian musicians is one such example where they go way out of hand. But the rest of social media especially twitter is different. In the case of Hina Rabbani Khar , her statements on India's reaction to beheading of its soldier did not go too well. The twitter trend started with several news agencies updating their twitter account reporting the statement and opinion. Then it was up to the Gangs of Twitter to decide her fate. I've noticed one interesting thing about this gang - Its popularity hinges on humor and satire.

Twitter has a unique feature - It always leads you to wiki page, blog or a news link. Twitter trends lead you to search about a topic and thus actually lead to a greater search traffic. I look at the cases of two people to verify this effect. Rahul Dravid was trending on twitter. People were wishing him "happy birthday". Although I don't really nderstand the use of doing so, people still wished him. This trend was correlated with search traffic of  Rahul Dravid. Same was the case with Arnab Goswami who was trending on twitter. His search volume was very high. Blue line represents recent interest in topic measured by search volume in last 7 days, whereas the red line represents an average interest in the topic during the last three months One possible reason for this can be the increasing curiosity due to a trending topic. Rahul Dravid's birthday is comparatively a more trivial issue, which leads to a lower rise in curiosity (see figure above). Arnab Gos...

An unlikely messenger has become the message - Arnab Goswami! His firebrand approach and ability to vocally gun down politicians makes people watch the Times Now News Hour in a hope that things will change. In the beautifully articulated words of Swapan Dasgupta, " On air he becomes a voice of indignation, anger and even insolence. These are qualities which the little man doesn’t possess in abundance. He wants to kick the errant netas. Since he can’t, he is happy for Arnab do it for him. " While this hope has increased TRPs of Times Now News Hour debate, it has also lead to an almost three day continuous trending of Arnab Goswami . Here is a list of tweets that were really funny.  Once Rajnikanth taught a baby to talk...that baby was named Arnab Goswami! Arnab Goswami might probably be the only guy in the world to fight with his wife and win. Apparently the Indian Army has decided to deploy its deadliest weapon yet code named Arnab Goswami ;) If Arnab Gos...

Common wisdom says that venting out reduces frustration. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs help us achieve the same. While what normally starts as a "venting out" experience, I suspect is turning out to be an anguish enhancer. When I look at trending topics on twitter all what I see is a world of "Hate". Small pieces of hate messages turn out to be a big collective bunch of hate. Take the case of Delhi gang rape and some ill-minded comments of politicians and spiritual gurus. What started as scattered bickering remarks against a comment made by "Asaram" has now become a full fledged ball of rage. This rage was "non-directional", had no agenda and was oriented towards sarcasm and wit. While Delhi gang rape highlights poor governance, societal problems and problems of law and order, venting out on a forum that accumulates the frustration by many such people only adds to the low well-being. It is time we use some discretion and post messages that...

Is it the irritating YouTube video ad? Advertisers Are Still Missing the Mark With Online Video -  http:// goo.gl/mRT7a     # Marketing   # Branding Plugging in to the Social-Media Revolution. It is getting competitive in the digital world!  http:// goo.gl/I52vg     # Marketing   # Branding The emergence health conscious consumer. McDonald's Monthly Sales Fall for First Time in Nine Years  http:// goo.gl/bBTbn     # Marketing Marketing matters only if you have good product. Romney Outspent Obama but Couldn't Out-Advertise him or WIN  http:// goo.gl/MyZQ5   # Marketing Can we put a number on relationships and people? The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence -  http:// goo.gl/ayTjC     # Branding

It started with a simple tweet by Nokia.  Breakfast in New York on a big day for us! Today we dine on Jellybeans: twitter.com/nokia/status/2… — Nokia (@nokia) September 5, 2012 It wasn't going to be that simple considering the unveiling of Nokia Lumia 920 with the next phase of Windows phone comes a day after Apple announced  its next-gen iPhone event on 12th Sept. 2012. It clearly seemed like a big day. Nokia's social media blitz was on. With the campaign slowly building up, the blitz initially seemed to have lost steam with people questioning the lack of announcement dates and price points for the phone. Also rumors  due to a couple of claimed leaks about the phone were flooding the social media space. An interesting take away is the lack of control brands today have on social media. Controlling the brand narrative is important to make sure consumers get to hear brand's version of the story. With this being touted as a "boom or bust" event for Nokia...

Are you tired of using Social Networking Sites? Do you feel that joining a new Social Networking Site like Google + will not add value to you, but only waste your time? Man is a social animal. The successful development of virtual communities that tapped into this social aspect of human beings took the world by storm. The collective power of entities such as Facebook is so huge that it can topple governments like it did in Egypt or build one like it did for Barack Obama. But have we got too much of Social Media? There is a segment of people on social networking sites that is simply sick and tired of Facebook and Twitter. In a recent conversation with a friend he was of the opinion that " People are too Facebook oriented ". Their conversation end with - " And now this goes on Facebook...Please click a pic for Facebook... Their life begins and ends with it. As if their entire existence depends on it or as if their life's goal had just been Facebook-ed. " But,...

The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.~ Plato . Service industry is characterized by an intangible experience and the lack of standardization sometimes leaves many of us unsatisfied. The airline industry is an example of "pure service". There is nothing tangible about the whole journey from searching for an airline, to buying a ticket, getting a boarding pass to getting your luggage back. As Plato says, man's service in intolerable. We are critical, judgmental and impatient while seeking the services of another man. So as a service provider, if a customer vents out a poor experience to a third party, it would end up in poor word-of-mouth and result in lost customers. The low-cost airline industry especially is plagued by this problem since "the low cost" is managed through a "rough" experience given to the customer. Since "low cost" means "high volumes", the sheer volume of "word-of-mouth" is quite hig...

A recent study by Nielsen in U.K. found that twitter users violated the Pareto 80/20 principle, which states that 20% of the users account for 80% of the activity. Infact most social networking sites violate the 80/20 rule. Some of them are far above its expectations and some far below. For Twitter, 7% of the users account for 79% of its activity. For Facebook, 52% of its users account for 98% of its activity. That probably explains the returns on these two social networking sites. A Twitter follow on an average generates $2 and a tweet generates $5 whereas a Facebook like is worth $8 and a Facebook share is worth $14. This dichotomy is perhaps the result of the nature of these two sites.The difference can be seen due different levels of control exercised, degree of self presentation and the type of disclosure on both of them. Although twitter's overlapping nature of service makes it neither a complete social networking site nor a blog. Its ideal nature for celebrities (shown in h...