Economy of Social - Social Media Tips, Marketing and Business

Instagram is increasingly becoming a favorite platforms for Brands globally to engage with their customers. It's importance can be gauged by the fact that it is the world's largest mobile ad network. Instagram now has a community of over 500 million users liking over 4.2 billion photos and sharing over 95 million pictures daily. The format of Instagram makes it a great medium for visual story telling.

A lot of people will encourage you to get a Google certification to build a career in Digital Marketing. In my experience as a digital marketing professional, I've rarely seen a certification by Google as a criteria for hiring managers. I was reading through a few answers on a Quora thread about the importance of getting a Google certification (Adwords, Analytics etc.) for building a career in digital marketing. Almost 90% of people said that it was important.

"If the photo is legitimate, it seems to have worked like a charm."  Source: instagram.com/kimkardashian This was the final comment of a post on the daily beast on the subject of a naked selfie by Kim Kardashian on Instagram. For those living under a rock, on 7th March, Kim Kardashian barely a few weeks after giving birth to her second child posted an innocuous comment " When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL " with a picture that got the internet drooling.

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?

Email marketing can be the trickiest thing in the online marketing jigsaw. Most promotional emails end up as being marked as read or spam. No one cares! Well because most of the time, the ones sending it through a database also don't care.

I've heard a few marketeers say, "These ads are meant for TV and thus won't work for digital" . Fact - An ad that won't work well on digital will also not work well on TV. People have rejected it. TV Advertising is a very challenging space. You have an extremely limited amount of very costly time to engage with your consumer and communicate your message. If the consumer does not like your ad on TV, she's going to skip the same ad/content on social media as well. The vice-versa is also true. If she likes your ad on social media, she's definitely going to give your ad on TV a second look.

It's a lonely time for the brand. In a world where clutter is increasing by the day a lot of marketers are focusing on call to action driven marketing. With the knowledge that a consumer's attention span is decreasing more marketers are trying to bombard consumers with messages that have a clear call to action i.e. "Come try my brand (as soon as possible)". Even more visible are conversations where practitioners try to distinguish between marketing activities as branding activities and sales activities. Why? Do strong brands don't sell? Why would a strong brand not sell? If the objective of your business is sale and revenue, why invest at all in a branding activity?

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?

Social Media marketing and strategy is quite often focused on the content and story telling by brands on the channels owned by them. In reality a brand's channel and content may not even be checked or consumed by 99% of those who follow. Most of marketing efforts at times end up in shaping brand generated content, which quite often does not reach the audience or gets lost in clutter. A heavy focus on brand generated content in a social media strategy can make it in-effective. An important aspect of social media is user generated content. In the entire space of user generated content, influencers dominate content consumed by users. These are quite often active social media users who create more content and disseminate it through channels such as their blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Influencers also tend to demonstrate expertise in a particular area, which leads to community built around them and the content they create and share.

Social Media to a great extent has become a reflection of our offline lives. Although most of us are curating an identity on the social web, its elements contain a shade of our real self. Our expressions on social media are shaped to a good extent by our offline experiences. One of these experiences is our rendezvous with Television.

Pepsi's high voltage campaign during IPL-6 has been the subject of much debate. It has even been linked to the resignation of Manu Anand , the Chairman of Pepsi India in June, 2013. To really understand the dynamics of Pepsi and its arch rival Coca-Cola, I did a study at Drizzlin Media to understand the performance of both these brands in the first half of 2013 (Findings below).

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

It's insecurity that is always chasing you and standing in the way of your dreams. ~Vin Diesel 

Social Media is magic. Social Media marketers are magicians. And we live in an era of scientific reasoning!

S Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila may have failed a cricket worshiping nation, but have they undone the big bucks of marketers riding on IPL? There is no doubt that the Indian Premier League is about the money first and the cricket later. But has the money brought into it by splurging brands been undone by the perils of big money?

There have been a lot of discussions around sentiment analysis and metrics about brands on the internet. To address this area, there are a lot of companies that have designed software that help brands figure out sentiment and other related things in real time. With fancy interfaces that look no less like a NASA control panel, these packages aggregate what people are talking in real time, process it and make sense out of it. All this enables brands to figure out their online sentiment and the profile of engaged netizens. What it does not tell brands is the culture. The big problem with a sentiment metric is that it takes the social out of social media.

Facebook has tweaked its News Feed algorithm that basically displays the activity of your friends and subscriptions. To those who have seen a decline in activity or the number of likes and comments on their posts, there is a surprise. Nick Bilton , a popular journalist made merry of the subscription feature that was introduced on Facebook which allowed people to see others public activity streams without being Friends. Many other journalists and celebrities like Nick made good use of this feature and promoted their content and activity on Facebook. Like in all happy tales, there was a climax.

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.

A few suggestions on the reasons behind the success of Brand Gangnam!