Social Media The Next Wave

Social Media is a place where everyone is free to express his view point, without any inhibition.FB has more than 65 million active users and the membership is increasing at impressive rate. This opens a plethora of opportunity for marketers as well as customer. The customer is more powerful and pampered in era or social media. She can broadcast or publish her view at very small investment or free. The companies like Dell are successfully using customer are input to design the new products, this phenomena is called reverse search. It’s quite a paradox that same technology which closed the doors for marketers has opened a gateway for opportunity for them. The invention of TiVo and DND list has made the life hell for outbound marketers at same time Web 2.0 created opportunities. In contrast to traditional media the leads generated through social media are more genuine and have higher conversion ratio.

~Vinaytosh Mishra

Digital Musketeer

www.digitalmusketeers.ning.com

Email Marketing trends in 2009

The year 2009 was great for Email marketing. Some of the major trends were ensuing:

1. Integrating email with social media
2. Optimizing auto responders and transactional email programs
3. Database segmentation strategies
4. Attracting high-quality subscribers from list-growth campaigns

In 2009 Email marketing attracted more interest of marketer .The budget was tight and marketers were shifting towards digital medium. The recession gave them time and reason to consider the digital options. The trends are likely to continue with Email marketing being at core of all digital marketing option augmented by Social Media Mobile, Marketing and Blogs.

~Vinaytosh

Tweet Your Way to Business Success:

If a medium is popular in audience, you have no option other than to embrace it .And same has happened .The internet marketing giant Google has decided to list tweets in its search engine. In my post, I will put six point agenda to explain the benefit of Tweeting for achieving some of business opportunities.

Tweeting Improves natural search:
You can promote the content and news using short URLs and even there are free tools to inform you about the “Click data”. Some marketers are even using Twitter as keyword research tool.

Consumer Behavior Analysis:
Since last six months, I am keenly observing the tweets of some thirty people as a part of some research work and the list contains minister, actress, marketers, journalist etc.The common trends, I have found the posts being direct from heart and not regulated. This very nature of twitter has landed some people in rather bizarre situations. But good news for consumer behavior researchers is, the user’s reluctance to be restrained .My suggestion: Listen...Listen and Listen…

Reputation management
Check whether consumers are talking about the company in a positive or negative light and respond appropriately. My take speak truth …otherwise they will find out.

Landing page/Touch point design
My brand my way!!
Respect customer’s sentiment s! Start mining conversations on social media outlets like Twitter/face book to develop new landing page designs.

Driving direct sales
If you get an order through twitter you save transactional cost, try to pass this benefit to customers. Use URL links in your tweets to get the traffic diverted to a landing page where you have call of actions waiting for the customer. Always remember, business of business is to generate profitable customers.

B2B lead generation
Have a dedicated team for Digital Media, use Twitter feed to update followers on:o Company newso Blog postso New whitepaper downloadso Monthly webinars

In the last but not least:Using a digital media is not difficult but it demands a lot of effort, planning and common sense. And that very common sense is most uncommon thing in this world.

~Vinaytosh Mishra

LinkedIn:Profile Organizer is really cool!

It is universally accepted fact that the relationship matters and hence LinkedIn is obvious choice for professional and managing and developing important new contacts is critical to your success as you navigate key career transitions. The product development team of LinkedIn has come up with Profile Organizer a really cool service using which keeping track of these contacts is about to get a whole lot easier.


With Profile Organizer you can now:

Save and organize profiles into folders of your choice
Add notes and contact information
See messages exchanged

Improve Search Visibility with Video

Having an organic link to a website is good, it have been better if there is better chance of conversion. According to sources the referrals to the site from YouTube convert at a 12% rate. The secret is not getting higher rankings -- it’s getting more organic links on the first search results page. Believe me organic leads have always better chance of getting converted.

Read through this post to find out the role that video plays in search strategy to pull in visitors and convert them at an incredible rate. The enormous conversion rate is built on trust, after the prospect watch four or five videos, you build more trust and confidence in their purchase. But the videos should be interesting as well as informative.

Strategy 1: Make videos relevant, useful, and tied to HTML content:

- The website should be an extensive resource on concrete, with pages of content-rich information.

- Relevant videos should be embedded into appropriate, keyword-rich pages.

- When a search engine finds a video, it will index its context on the page, which helps improve its rankings for target keywords.

Strategy 2: Support video creation with keyword research:

If you’ve already done the keyword research to guide your site’s design and content, you have a good idea of which types of videos you need to create, and how you should be naming and optimizing the videos.Every field in a video’s metadata (title, description, etc.) should use keywords that:

· Are being used on the page

· Is an accurate description of the video’s content?

· Don’t be too data-centric

Strategy 3. Make videos professional, short, and spot on:

The high conversion rate from YouTube referrals is due to the level of trust that the each video builds. The key elements are the professional quality of the production and information they provide. And since most visitors view several videos, that trust has a chance to solidify. According to researches most people watch video in bunches once they start watching.

- A five minute video is probably too long for most topics (cover only few attribute in one video make it crisp).Make sure that each video is concise enough to fully cover the topic, but short enough to make viewers want to watch the whole thing.

- Get insights from YouTube insight is an analytics tool provided by YouTube to account holders to monitor their videos’ performance.

-Editing Insight has a feature that enables users to monitor changes in the attention metric at different points. By using this feature, you can identify drops in the audience’s attention and edit the video accordingly in hopes of lifting attention.

Strategy 4: Think in bunches

The best strategy is to go very deep into a topic rather than covering many topics.
Having a large number of related videos also helps build trust with viewers, and helps drive them to the site and be more likely to convert.

Strategy 5: Brand carefully

Mention the brand graphically or verbally at beginning or end of video. Wise placement during video is also a good strategy but it should not obtrusive in viewer’s experience.

References used from :Marketing Sherpa Case Studies

Social Media Marketing for Beginers!!

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO. (Source Wikipedia)

Above Figure: Online Activity of Internet Users (%)

Source: Study carried out on 17,000 internet user from 29 countries by a renowned research firm.

From above figure it is evident that social media has emerged as powerful tools for expression and knowledge sharing. Our specialized SMO services can make a quantifiable difference to businesses-TG (Target Group) engagement, higher online visibility and positive PR.

Benefit for Clients:

1. Customer Engagement- Our experienced team will explore the various popular and emerging Social Media for our clients. With us you would be assured for your presence at various relevant communities and forums.

2. Positive PR-Product and service reputation management for our valuable clients

3. Higher Search Engine Ranking-Multiple search entries of user generated content

4. Traffic to website-User generated links, on content sharing platforms drive, traffic towards website

5. Branding-Customers association results in price premium and stickiness to products and services

Recommended Methodology: Six2Fix^TM

(The term and frame work is coined by Vinaytosh Mishra,Marketing Strategist)

Fig:Six2Fix Framework

No two business are same and neither their objectives. The metrics for measurement of social media are in nascent stage and the field lack standardization. There are plenty of players who claim to provide guaranteed result but we believe in transparency in relationships. We believe that a little bit of your co-operation combined with our expertise can deliver wonders for your business.

Have Faith!!

Trend is shifting in Favor of NCR

I have spent considerable time of last ten years of my life, in vacillating from one city to other. And frankly speaking I don’t like any metros or Tier -A city. If you ask about my choice of city to live in, I will recommend city like Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Lucknow and Chandigarh. But these cities are still way behind in term of employment opportunities. And that is reason behind metros like Delhi and Mumbai attracting a humongous inflow of migrants.

In my childhood days Mumbai was famous for cricket team, film studios, banking institutions, advertising agencies, manufacturing units in catchment area. Delhi was considered to be city of babus & politicians and was expected to remain a city ,showcasing the glory of Indian history.

In late 90’s the status quo started changing .The states like Haryana & U.P realized the potential of service industry and started developing their areas in proximity of Delhi ,and that gave birth to a phenomena called NCR.Who had imagined that the states predominantly known for their agriculture based economy will become the favored destination for outsourcing.

Relatively low cost of setting up an industry also boosted the fortune of these areas. In future, we will witness more and more financial institutions shifting to Gugaon, more IT companies opening their corporate offices in Gurgaon and Noida, more manufacturing units in Sonipat, Faridabad and Sahibabad.

Since, I am marketer by profession; I have deep interest in Advertising and Media. During my college days I used to think that “if I want to give myself a bigger canvas”, my destination should be Mumbai. But if we rely on an article recently published in ET-Brand Equity, almost all big names like O&M, Rediffusion, Dentsu or Wizcraft are doing their considerable business from NCR region.

We can easily spot the studios of news channels in Noida and Gurgaon. I cross three such studios, in my way to office, and that too in distance of two km only. The rising regionalism(against north Indians) in Mumbai and gradually increasing clout of regional movies (Bhojpuri &Punjabi)will eventually result in more and more film studios in Noida and Gurgaon.

In the last but not least ,I have firm believe that richer cities always do better in cricket and Delhi Daredevils has outperformed Mumbai Indians in last two version of IPL (the modern cricket).Evem U.P and Punjab are doing reasonably well in domestic cricket, in recent time.

Even though it is too early to predict, but there are clear indication that trend is shifting in favor of NCR.