Salute to Mumbai – Sustained the Blasts with True Spirit and Judicious Use of Technology, Social Media

Mumbai is back in action today despite yesterday’s serial bomb blasts. Schools are open, shops are functional, locals are running and people are already in offices. Mumbai and its people have shown that nothing can stop them - again this time.

Yesterday after the blasts, I preferred being on Twitter and Facebook rather than watching the senseless coverage on various TV channels. I am amazed and proud to see the way people used social media and technology yesterday. Rather than spreading ridiculous rumors and discussing who was behind the attacks and why the attacks could have happened, the netizens chose to use social media for a better cause. 

Twitter was flooded with messages about the blasts. The latest news were posted through #mumbaiblasts hashtag whereas the tweets about help were tagged with #here2help and #heretohelp. Those who needed help tagged their message with #needhelp. Twitter was also used to share hospital numbers, blood requirements or cab availabilities.

Hat’s off to the person who thought of creating a Google Spreadsheet of all the help numbers and details regarding help in terms of stay, food, ride or even help in passing on the messages. Who says there is no discipline in India? The open-to-all document was full of relevant information without a single incorrect detail.  

Facebook status updates passed on similar information about latest news and help numbers/ details. Many Facebook pages which have a large fan following decided to use that fan following to spread relevant information and help details.

Radio Jockey offered to air live messages for those who could not be contacted.

I received messages to just update the Blackberry messenger status to notify where I am and if I am safe or not. Amazing! So much thought in using the technology to ensure that the mobile network is not blocked with unnecessary calls.

I think I am too small to praise those who have shown the courage and strength to sustain such attacks. I can just salute the Mumbaikars and the netizens! 

Social Media for Product Companies

Let’s accept it – social media is changing the way we live today. So if you believe that your products are going to change people’s life for good, you need to be closer to your audience through social media.

Let us take up three popular social media platforms and see how those can be used for your products business. 

Facebook: More than 700 million people are on Facebook and that’s a very significant number itself. You can use Facebook as a very powerful platform for:

• Educating People: This is especially very useful if your product is innovative, based on some ground-breaking idea, involves concept selling and requires explaining some new concepts.
• Generating Feedback: Got a new version of the product? Ask the users about their views. You can also gather feedback about specific features, customer support, an advertising campaign or even your ads. Since the feedback comes right from the existing or potential users of your product, it is a very valid which can immensely help you in your product development, technical support as well as marketing and sales.
• Knowledge Sharing: Share useful tips, knowledge-base articles, cool short-cuts and tricks for effective use of your product. This will not only keep the fans engaged but also provide great value to the users.  
• Customer Support: Want to be closer to your product users? Allow them to post their questions and queries on Facebook. If possible, provide immediate answers or route the query to customer support team/ support forum.

Twitter: Twitter is a perfect broadcasting medium to convey your message to a large user-base.  Use Twitter for:

• Announcement: Announce new release, new product, deals, special offers, webinars and collateral release like white paper or ebook. Twitter has tremendous potential of reaching out to a large audience in a very short period. Remember to use appropriate hashtags to get maximum reach.
• Knowledge Sharing: Share interesting news, articles, your own blog posts, news items and establish your thought leadership.
• Customer Support: Many companies like Comcast, HomeDepot are effectively using Twitter for providing customer support. But make sure that your support staff is extremely well trained to provide real-time, online support on social media.

YouTube: Online video marketing is growing, and it’s growing very fast. If you have not yet included it in your marketing strategy, it’s high time that you take it seriously. YouTube, with more than 2 billion views per day, undoubtedly holds a prime spot in your social media tools list. 

Here are the types of videos you can upload on YouTube:

• Product Videos: Upload your product demos, how to videos and videos explaining critical features. This is sure to get appreciation from your product users. For new users, it’s so much easier to look at the audio-visual format than read plain text to understand the product.
• Technical Support Videos: Provide videos for most frequently asked technical questions like installation/ un-installation of the product, activation or even using a popular feature. This will surely reduce the load on the technical support team.
• Conference Speeches: Is someone from your company speaking at some conference? Record the speech and upload it for those who missed it. This will be great in establishing your thought leadership.
• Customer Testimonials: Go beyond textual testimonials. Have videos of customer testimonials. If one picture is worth 1000 words, one video could be worth a million words :-)

So get ready with your social media strategy and get maximum from it. Remember, don’t start with “how to increase sales through social media” but see “how to engage and converse with your audience through social media”. After all, conversation comes before conversion. Sales will be an obvious byproduct if you have engaged audience.

This article was first published on Technorati at:  http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/social-media-for-product-companies

10-Point Checklist for Successful Webinars

Webinar has evolved as very powerful marketing and sales tool. It is one of the best ways to establish your thought leadership, create your brand, generate highly qualified sales leads and up-sell to existing customers. All this is possible provided the webinar is promoted, marketed and conducted well.

Some reasons why webinars are more popular:

• Wider reach – More people can attend because it can be attended from anywhere
• Convenience – People can attend it without disturbing their schedule
• Affordability - Drastically reduce the travel cost and time
• Post Event availability – Since webinar can be recorded, it can be used later on for personal review or rerun for the people who missed it during real-time 

To make your webinars successful, here is a 10-point checklist:

1. Webinar Topic and Objectives: Refrain yourself from choosing a dull and common topic. Choose a catchy and latest topic which can make people feel like attending the webinar. Clearly define the objectives and details on what the webinar going to cover.
2. Webinar invitation: Draft the invitation carefully and provide accurate information about the webinar. This can include: bio of the presenter, time, duration of the webinar, what the webinar is going to cover (preferably described in bulleted list) and who can benefit from the webinar.
3. Pre-Webinar Promotion: Choose the right time to start the webinar promotion and advertising. Starting the promotion too early may make people forget why they signed up for the webinar and promoting it too late might not give them enough time to sign up since they already might have things planned in their schedule. Generally 2 weeks before the webinar is a good time to start the promotion. Use various methods like emails, social media to promote the webinar. Rather than doing all the promotion on a particular day, plan the activity over a period.  
4. Reminders: Send out at least 2 reminders to the registrants before the webinar. Do mention the webinar details briefly in the reminder.
5. Dry Runs: Ensure that you conduct at least 2 dry runs (the more the better) before the webinar. Check the presentation loading, speaker’s timing, co-ordination, graphics loading time etc to make sure that everything is working fine. If required, tweak the graphics, presentation.
6. Keep Presentations Short: People invest less time in webinar than a  physical event so the attention span tends to be shorter. It is better to keep the presentation short and crisp to reduce the attendee drop out during the webinar.
7. Webinar Delivery: Practice, practice and practice the webinar. Never ever read the webinar speech. You lose out on the connection with the audience.
8. Interactivity: You CANNOT keep the webinars one-way. You have to make them interactive. Use the tools like chat, polls (mostly available with the webinar platforms) effectively to engage the audience and communicate with them.
9. Webinar Recording:  If you are conducting an exclusive webinar, it is a good practice to record it. Typically 50% of those who register attend the actual webinar. It is a good to record the session and send a link of the recording to those who missed it. This ensures that you reach out to the audience who could not attend your webinar.
10. Multi-Channel Follow up: Don’t just hand over the webinar lead to the sales person. Your post-webinar follow up needs to be a well planned strategy through multi-channel communication such as emails, snail mail, phone calls, social media etc. These ensure that the leads are engaged, interest is increased and you are in front of them for a longer duration.

So be well prepared and well planned for your next webinar to make it a great success!

Are you Socially Shy?

Over past many years, I am involved in social media marketing for quite a few well known brands. It started with some exploration, then learning while trying out new things and then getting phenomenal success through innovative campaigns.

Through my recent interactions with various organizations, especially small and medium size ones, I saw that business owners are convinced about the effect and use of social media but the problem starts when they start with the implementation. “Are you Socially Shy?” is a book for such business owners.

Of course the social media platforms are extremely easy to use and can get you started in no time. But to use them effectively, you really need to use these for few days, explore and understand – says the experience of Vishal Mehta, co-author of this eBook. Vishal, CEO of IDYeah Creations, has extensively used social media for his business.

That’s when we thought that we should create a consolidated resource which offers not only the basics of these platforms but also offers some practical tips on its usag. And the result is the eBoook “Are you Socially Shy?”

This book is for those who are looking to start with their social media efforts, who are looking for some proven tips of getting success with social media, want to know how others have used it successfully and learn from that.

Hope you enjoy the eBook. Your  feedback and comments are welcome at http://areyousociallyshy.blogspot.com !

The book is available online at a humble price on LULU and IDYeah Store.

Making Your Facebook Fan Page a Success

Whenever organizations think of joining the bandwagon of Facebook marketing, the first thing they come up with is "we want to create a Facebook page and have lots of fans for that page". 

But, the more crucial points are how to attract fans to the page or how to engage them and how to measure the success or failure of the page.

Let us touch base on both these points in this post.

Attracting fans to the page:

Following are some of the ways to attract more users to your fan page:

1. Make the page attractive and informative: Create an appealing page with good display picture, complete and authentic information about your business, product and services. Include photos, videos and events on the page. Provide something which is exclusive for Facebook users (such as free trial of your product or a free consultation). A well completed page attracts more users because that allows the users to make a more informed decision about 'liking' your page.

2. Cross promotion: Promote the fan page extensively wherever possible – on your website, Twitter, YouTube account, LinkedIn, email signatures, company newsletters etc. With such cross promotion, more and more people will know about the page and there are more chances that people will 'Like' it.

3. Campaigns: Promotion of the page through emails or mobile campaigns. You can always club these campaigns with some contests or promotions on your page to get better results.

4. Facebook Ads: Facebook ads give you very good results for attracting fans to your page. Make sure that you monitor the ads very closely and tweak them often based on the kind of results you get. Include nice pictures in your ad and provide compelling reason to people for liking your page.

5. Contests and Promotions: Contests, sweepstakes and promotions (with some good prizes) help you go viral in terms of your Facebook marketing efforts. Make the contests easy to participate, give nice prizes and give users reasons to spread the word about the contest on your page.

Of course all these ways can fail if you do not have good content on your page to engage the users.

Only promotion about your product or services is a strict NO. Share interesting content, news and educate the audience – in short, offer value. Facebook can act as a very strong platform for you to establish yourself as an expert in your area of business. You can also ask questions and get valuable feedback from the users – they will offer very honest opinion.

Measuring Engagement of Fans on Facebook Page:

It is very important to keep the fans engaged with the page. The engagement can be measured very effectively through the 'Insights' provided by Facebook.

1. Fan base growth or decline: Facebook shows you how the fan base of your page is shaping up – check out if and how it is increasing by tracking the 'New Likes'. You can track these weekly or monthly, depending on your needs and goals. Try and co-relate these with other campaigns which you are running.

2. Active fan base: Only numbers don't matter much. You need an engaged and active fan base. You can see how active the fan base is by checking out the kind of interactions you had for each of your post. The 'Interactions' report shows the engagement of your fans (in terms of commenting, liking or sharing) vis-à-vis the number of times each of your post was displayed on the wall of the fans. This is a very valuable insight to check how engaged the fans are with the page and how much value they are finding in the content which you have shared.

3. Likes and Comments: Keep track of the 'Likes' and 'Comments' happening for the wall posts. Monitor the kind of posts for which you receive more interaction. This can help you decide your strategy about the kind of posts you would like to have.

Apart from 'Insights', there are also tools various tools, which allow you to check the grade, engagement and value of your page. But remember that the objectives of your page and your strategy define the matrices of success/ failure of your page and those are way beyond the numbers or grades. These can act just as pointers for you but not the concluding points. So needless to add, measure the results vis-à-vis your goals.

This article first appeared on Technorati at: http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/making-your-facebook-fan-page-a/

Entrepreneurship and Marketing Lessons Learnt from Goli Vada Pav

Last week I attended a very invigorating session by Venkatesh Iyer (Venky as he is fondly called) of Goli Vada Pav organized by TiE. While the session title was “My Story to Entrepreneurship”, the actual session was much more than that.

The passion with which Venky spoke demonstrated how much can be achieved if you just have true belief in the idea about which you truly passionate. Venky spoke about entrepreneurship, beliefs, passion and marketing.

After thoroughly enjoying the interactive talk, I jotted some key takeaways. 

Thought these would be really valuable for those who are passionate about some idea and want to make it big - because Goli’s story is all about that:

1.     Premium Sells:  Before Goli Vada Pav, people were used to eating vada pav at much lesser cost than what Goli charges it. Goli charges premium for the quality it provides – the quality is in the menu, the ambience, the service and everything. Once the consumers see the quality, they are ready to pay premium for that. Be convinced about the quality you provide and you won’t ever have to ‘justify’ high price.

2.      Don’t give up on the idea: Goli failed twice, with the same idea, for different reasons. But Venky and his team did not give up on the idea thinking that it is not working out. Only when you believe in an idea, you can sustain multiple failures and never blame the idea. You look out for the solutions which will actually solve the problems.

3.    Keep it simple: Complex things might sound good in books but keep things simple when it comes to actual implementation. This applies to everything – right from talent acquisition, training, franchisee setup, branding, promotion – just about everything !

4.   Effective branding and promotion only requires currency of creativity: Venky narrated some incidences about how he used railway announcement system or TiE event for branding and promotion of Goli. None of these were paid. All these just needed the currency of creativity. Venky’s blog also is an excellent piece of writing demonstrating how a very creatively written blog can attract attention of the right crowd.

5.      Piggybacking works: Goli used the technique piggybacking very effectively – Be it the usage of brand (as Venky calls it) of Vada Pav or the famous dialogue of movie Sholay (toh aaj goli kha…) or in the franchisees setup.

6.   Speak consumers' language: I was amazed to see how Goli speaks consumers’ language. The consistency can be seen in: brand name, brand mascot, Facebook page name, blog language, ambience at the Goli center, pictures on the site, cartoons – just about everything!  

I left the room with a mixed feeling of inspiration, awe and respect for passion and with a definite plan to visit Goli Vada Pav center – more for experiencing the passion turned into reality.

Cheers to Goli !! 

Social Media ROI – Measuring the Quantitative and Qualitative Results

I was recently invited to speak on Social Media at the Startup Saturday Event in Pune.

During my interactions with various organizations and people, I realized that while many people do agree that social media is powerful and should be used for marketing; lot of them are concerned about the ROI and the measurement of the same. This made me choose “Social Media ROI – Why, What and How?” as the topic for the speaker session.

Here is an excerpt of what was covered in the session.



As a first step, we need to acknowledge that social media a combination of psychology, sociology and technology. So while defining the social media strategy for your company/ brand, you need to be extremely cautious about ALL these aspects.

The next thing is the approach which is taken while planning the social media campaigns. The ideal approach is: 

1. Define Goal
2. Identify Tools
3. Decide Approach
4. Execute

Many of the social media campaigns do not yield the desired results because many companies and brands directly jump to execution without going through the first three steps.

Companies need to first define as to what exactly they would like to achieve from their social media campaign – is it customer feedback, user engagement, leads or sales. Once the goal is defined, companies need to choose the right tools. For example: Although Twitter and Facebook are the popular social media platforms, there is no point in being on Facebook if your target audience hangs out on MySpace! Once the tools are identified, get a clear consensus on the approach and tone of your communication. And then the final step is execution.

Assuming that you followed all the steps and have started with your social media campaign, the next question comes to mind is – how do I calculate the Return on Investment (ROI). While considering the ROI, you need to decide what exactly you want to measure? Because social media has got “media” which has quantitative measurement matrices and “social” which has qualitative measurement matrices. By quantitative measurement matrices, I mean number of leads or increase in sales/ revenue. By qualitative measurement matrices, I mean interaction, feedback, loyalty, passion and brand awareness.

Here are some examples which describe how companies have got both, qualitative as well as quantitative ROI through social media.

ROI Examples - QUANTITATIVE

1. Southwest Airlines: Southwest Airlines attributes more than $1 million in additional ticket sales to its presence on Twitter.
2. Marriott: Marriott has made more than $5 million in bookings from people who clicked through to the reservation page from Marriott's blog.
3. Dell: Dell Outlet made more than $6.5M sale through its Twitter presence.
4. Lenevo: Lenovo attributed a 20% reduction in call center activity to use of a community website for answers.
5. Naked Pizza: 68.60% of total dollar sales for Naked Pizza came from customers who said they are “calling from twitter”. 
6. Blendtec: Increased sales 5x by running the humorous "Will it Blend" Videos on YouTube.

ROI Examples - QUALITATIVE

1. Starbucks: Generated lot of new product ideas by asking users what want from Starbucks.
2. TurboTax: TurboTax started a Twitter campaign to respond and answer questions during key tax season. This helped them in establishing themselves as experts in their field whom the users could trust for opinion.
3. Kogi Korean BBQ: Uses Twitter to let the customers know where the truck was and when it would be in their neighborhood. This made the customers happy and of course more number of customers for Kogi.
4. Comcast: Provides customer support on Twitter which has got it more satisfied customers who are happy to receive instant online support
5. Home Depot: Appreciates technical support employees on Twitter - Whoever provides the support through support tags the tweet with his/ her name. Customers love this because they exactly know who is supporting them and the employees’ moral is boosted with such public appreciation!

So, in a nutshell, for a successful social media campaign:

- DEFINE what you want to measure

- DEFINE your message and tone

- DECIDE your approach

- SELECT appropriate tools

- EXECUTE with diligence and consistency

If you have any more examples of successful social media campaigns, do share those as comments!

Building Pre-Launch Buzz – Mix of Creativity, Diligence and Focus

While launching a new product, many miss out on pre-launch buzz, that is creating buzz about the product and making people interested in it even before the product is launched. The concept of pre-launch buzz is not new. Film industry has been using it for many years.  The purpose of pre-launch buzz is to create desire, need and excitement for the product in the market. With this, when the product becomes available, it starts selling like hot cake.

The best way to use the pre-launch phase is to warm up the market, your prospects, your customers. Use this time to engage with the market, look for feedback, ask questions, address objections, conduct surveys and answer questions.

I believe that for the pre-launch buzz to be successful, it needs to have a right mix of creativity, diligence and focus.

Creativity: Pre-launch buzz creation definitely requires a lot of creativity. Rather than going by the regularly mentioned things like putting up a teaser, offering a whitepaper etc, you need to identify what will appeal to your audience, what will excite them and what will make them talking about your product/ service? Of course, this requires a thorough understanding of your market, research of your target group, your competition (if any), detailed understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and so on.

Focus: What do you want to achieve from your pre-launch buzz creation campaign?  What exactly do you mean by creating buzz? Yes, the end result is to get more customers or users for your product, but that need not be the sole objective of your campaign. You need to widen the scope and achieve more than that. As mentioned above, some of it could be getting some insights through surveys, handling objections, establishing your thought leadership in the market and so on.

Diligence: The reason I have included this factor here is because the pre-launch is a delicate and sensitive phase in your product lifecycle. It could make or break the product. The right kind of buzz can make the product very successful while a poorly executed pre-launch campaign can make the product introduced with a negative impression. So spend some good, quality time in planning and executing your pre-launch buzz campaign. Spend dedicated time in managing the campaigns and monitor the responses carefully.

I recently came across an interesting pre-launch buzz campaign. This company, IDYeah Labs, has not yet revealed what it is planning to launch but has just introduced a contest asking its Facebook fans to guess what it is up to? Certainly an interesting and welcome effort of using social media (only) for creating the buzz. Let us wait and watch how it works out for the company.

Have you come across any pre-launch buzz campaign which really appealed to you?

Cricket World Cup 2011 Advertising: Which One Caught Your Attention?

All the conversations these days are revolving around the Cricket World Cup. Many a times, I am a silent observer and few times an active participant in such conversations around who will win the match, who played better, how a catch should have been taken or how it was missed and so on. As a marketer, I heard many conversations as to which company is doing well in terms of its branding and promotion and which could have done better.

Surprisingly, as a consumer, I don't hear many conversions revolving around which brand has got some great deal, which is my preferred drink while watching the match, which watch will I wear this cricket season or which pizza I will order when India plays.

Although the consumers are not consciously taking any decisions about choosing any particular brand, companies are spending heftily on branding and advertising during this Cricket season. Because these ads and campaigns are unconsciously playing a very important role in making the consumers choose a particular brand.

Companies now are choosing multiple options like TV channels, websites, social media, SMS, email, videos etc to reach out to consumers. But, in this clutter, it has become harder to get the required attention and mindset of consumer. It is no surprise that brands are coming up with innovative and catchy ways for making their presence felt.

As a consumer, following few campaigns caught my attention:

1. Amul: Amul butter has tied up with Netherlands team. The Dutch team is sporting Amul logos on their jerseys. “Why not India team”, because “It is not available” comes the response from Amul. This is being treated as a very smart move by Amul because it has already generated a lot of buzz!
2. LG Mobile: LG has set up a ‘LG mobile army’ where it is recruiting 2,500 cadets from 38 cities to cheer inside stadiums.
3. Lays Flavor World Cup 2011: I liked the way Lays generated the curiosity and buzz even ahead of the World Cup and slowly unveiled its six new flavors. It won’t be a surprise to see Lay’s revenue going up with these ads
4. Brands on Social Media: Many brands such as Pizza Hut, Adidas, Smith and Jones, KFC are promoting deals through social media channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Good use of social media I would say.

Are there any campaigns which caught your attention as a consumer?

Taking Marketing Contribution Beyond Marketing Department

Most of the times, marketing is a separate department in the organizations. There is a ‘marketing team’ which handles all the aspects such branding, positioning, pricing etc. Well, it probably worked well in past when there were only handful ways of reaching out to users. However, with the new age of social media, don’t you think the definition of marketing has expanded to blogging, managing customer comments, reviews, creating and managing social media presence, analyzing results and all such things? Marketing has become a lot about conversation.

I believe that a lot of people in the company – outside the marketing department - can very well participate in this conversation with the users of your products and services.

How? Imagine this:

• Your engineers writing a blog article about the latest technology which your company has mastered
• Your support engineer providing responses to user queries on your online community and resolving issues – beyond email, phone or chat support
• Your technical engineer creating a video on using a particular feature in your product and posting it on YouTube
• Your sales teams posting interesting, informative and educative presentations on presentation sharing websites
• Your content writer gathering inputs about a latest paradigm by participating in discussion forums
• Your technical architect writing a post about a latest, cutting-edge technology and inviting comments from other tech-savvy people around

The list can just go on. So what’s happening here? Variety of people and not just the marketing team are contributing in creating an image, a brand about the company by utilizing their knowledge. Isn’t it great? What more can you expect when the best and experts are in action!

Well, I am convinced on this because I have tried this. Do you think it’s time for you to take a leap in this direction?