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Virtual world, real deal

“Post it on the wall.”

The post isn’t credited and the wall isn’t built. Yet, somehow everyone wants to post their upheaval or a new update to their wall and share what’s on. The virtual world is getting real with the day. Studies have shown that users spend more than eight billion minutes on Facebook every day. But why the sudden rush? Because it is dynamic. It is where everyone is. And this has made social networking more sought after and more competitive.

But marketers have a new challenge with the growing popularity of ‘living online’. They have advertised and met customers on every ground base they could. They have ‘tweaked’ media to suit their products. But now, they need to ‘tweet’ to reach customers like never before. Yes, the stand up challenge is to use the new medium of ‘Social Networking’ to reach, meet and interact with customers in order to use this promotion tool to ultimately increase sales.

Today it isn’t enough to have a website of your company or product. Everyone has it. It was a competitive edge a decade or less back. But now, you need to talk, listen and interact with your customers. A visit to the websites of leading and upcoming brands shows how well they have linked their online presence with an extended channel of these social networking platforms by having fan pages. A fan page is the presence of the brand on such platforms with people registering themselves as fans and can closely interact with each other and the brand holders. This gives an outlet to vent out customer reviews and product bearings. A customer appreciation can go a long way influencing the fans who read it increasing its credibility and it can also serve as a base for customer grievance reprisal putting a favorable brand image. Buzzr also boasts of a fan page where an increased fan interaction is witnessed. How well a brand can reach its customers is truly put forth by the increasing number of fans and interaction levels.

The world is an oyster for a marketer. Today this statement stands incomplete because the unless the power and importance of social media marketing is understood, appreciated and put to use, brands and companies might lose out on the mad race to reach, gain and maintain a new customer. Facebook, Twitter and the entire host of all the social networking websites are the new playgrounds for brands and their marketing teams. The heat has already increased multi-fold in a very short span of time and definitely brands cannot afford to miss out on them because the increasing preference to be living online presents an opportunity to be with your customers more as a ‘living’ brand. The tweets are definitely getting spicier!

This article was originally posted on Enthrallmedia.com’s blog. Please leave any comments over there.

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By Puneet – May 18, 2010

Social or unsocial media

Source: www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

With almost half of the internet population more than Europe, Asia is the current Internet ruler. The above image clearly shows the amount of penetration of the internet in the Asian countries. Hence, it is only natural for businesses to increasingly target the untapped resources of the World Wide Web. With the onset of IT, marketing has been one of the premier functions of modern management to utilize the various surprises that IT has thrown its way.

As people log on to social networking sites, they are seeking relationships and that’s exactly what social media marketing gives them. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has challenged that within ten years the entire world will be on Facebook! When there is hardly 25% of the world’s population presently online, it is a herculean statement to say! And still, one can’t help but believe in him because if Facebook were a nation, it would be the fourth largest in the world! Yet that’s exactly what social media seeks-challenges. As people network, they seek ways to identify with brands and services that their networking endorses. Social media has three very important aspects viz.,

1)      Generating buzz to appeal to the public. PR remains a very important constituent.

2)      Harboring fans of a particular product/ service to interact with other fans of the same product/ service.

3)      Engaging users around conversations and communities.

According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau social media council “Social media isn’t just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it’s about brands having conversations.” Social media aims at building relations between the brands and the consumers in such a way that consumers increasingly identify ways to connect with the brand and its servers. Micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Social networking sites like Facebook, Professional networking sites like Linkedin are increasingly targeting untapped resources where the power of the internet has yet to penetrate. Content like posts in a blog, wall posts, scraps, tweets, audio/ video, etc. help to build a certain hype regarding something that stems from know-how and trust and influence decision making.

Thus, small businesses can make use of social media by showing and telling what they intend to. Social media makes conversations happen as it brings your consumers directly to you. Thus, as businesses empower their consumers and they feel powerful, they tend to trust the brand and the service provider. As blog posts, tweets, etc. are more impersonal in nature than formal communication, people tend to trust them more and they ultimately become endorsers for the same. People are more likely to trust their network rather than companies and that’s one aspect well utilized by social media.

Social Media is not a conventional tool, it is more fun and modern and that’s exactly why it works as people find more innovative way to connect and collaborate with companies. Facebook ads and twitter links catch more attention than the huge hoardings that are put up near busy flyovers. One of Marketing’s most important aspects is the third P (Place) as companies try to reach out to consumers where they are based and these days the consumer is online and so is the target market.

This article was originally posted on Enthrallmedia.com’s blog. Please leave any comments over there.

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By faraazkazi – April 5, 2010

May I have your permission please?

Ever missed that small tick-box that allows particular softwares being downloaded from the net onto your computer, to access your usage data? Have you ever read the entire three page long description of the ‘I Agree’ section when you register on a particular service offering’s website? Chances are you haven’t like the rest of the majority who don’t fancy wasting their time on such nuances. The repercussions of which can be a flood of e-mails in your inbox the very next day, the kind that mostly end up in your junk folder.

The communication mix that reaches out to today’s consumers is mostly cluttered and unorganized. The prime reason for this being the lack of innovation on the marketer’s front and the lack of time on the consumer’s side which leads to the marketer pushing everything hoping that something will work. Consumers have learnt to live with advertising and even ignore the bombardment of messages that they are exposed to daily. So, the interruption model doesn’t quite work.

Even as you watch that half an hour long favorite soap on your television, a minimum of ten minutes are taken by the advertisements that repeatedly try to appeal to you. While you are out on a picnic with your friends, you are supposedly hounded by phone calls from telemarketers who are trying to give you last minute offers for their products. Can you even recall three commercials you saw on television last night and even if you do can you associate them with the products they were marketing? The average individual will see more than one million messages in a year that works out to an average of almost three thousand per day. The irony of the situation is that when you can’t remember even three you saw last night, three thousand is a pretty distant location. As traditional media methods become more expensive and less effective, marketers are searching for new ways to develop their marketing methods.

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Welcome to the era of Permission Marketing, which as Seth Godin maintains is the exact opposite of traditional interruption marketing. It is no longer necessary to fight for individual attention by exposing them to a variety of messages that they would anyways end up confusing. Permission marketing lies on the foundation of relationship building which instead focuses on attracting individuals voluntarily and turning them into loyal consumers. Permission marketing has no scope for interruptions. Instead of pushing your communication towards your prospects, you do so to the ones who give you their permission to do so. As such the prospects are interested in a company’s products and would like to know more about it.

This article was originally posted on Enthrallmedia.com’s blog. Please leave any comments over there.

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By faraazkazi – March 19, 2010