Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

One of the most valued asset of an organization is the brand. Recent literature in branding points to the brand playing the role of a social actor capable of forming intimate relationships with its customers. One of the biggest challenges for a brand is in building loyalty (or reducing infidelity). Organizations globally spend billions of dollars annually in building a stronger brand. However most brands  do not take a stance, do not polarize.

Facebook reached 1 billion unique users using its service in a day for the first time on 24th August. To put things in perspective, one in seven persons on Earth used Facebook (or only 85.7% of planet earth did not use Facebook). While 14.3% used Facebook on 24th August, it is important to note that over 65% of world's population brush their teeth from Colgate every day.

Indian Social Media is full of young people who are chilling out and having a gala time. To put this in a more serious way here are some numbers

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.

Social media can provide a solution platform for businesses that aren't doing well. Not because it is cheap! Not because it is a magic wand! Take this case - What do you do when you are in a financial crisis? What do you do as a person when you are unemployed? You borrow money from a close friend or take help from your family. You take help from people who like you and care about you. These are the ones that have spent sufficient time with you. Drawing on this analogy, an ailing business can use social media to build a community around its truly loyal fans. These are the ones that still like or care about the brand. The ones that did not like the brand left it. These loyal fans have to be engaged and social media presents one such platform. It is important to note that it is still a platform, not the game. The game of engagement is a different story. Engagement is based on the culture that exists within your brand, something you have fostered over the years or someth...

Coders should not try to be marketers. They are not Steve Jobs! Brands spent a dime collecting fans on Facebook. Now they are spending more money on "engaging" them. But is it helping the brand? I did two sets of qualitative studies to understand brand communication participation on Facebook. One was approximately an year back and the other concluded last month and both lead to similar results. Surprisingly most of the respondents I interviewed could NOT remember even five Facebook pages they had "liked". But yes they did remember they had liked "a couple" of pages on Facebook. I am here restricting my discussion to Facebook and Facebook pages in particular. Some of my propositions after my study were Brand Communities or brand fan pages on internet are not affecting brand awareness for the un-involved consumer. Brand communities are not impacting brand loyalty to the un-involved consumers. Brand communities are not impacting purchase intenti...