April 2008
Marketers, get ready for the social networks?
Marketers are continually hopping onto social media marketing as a perfectly productive means of reaching out to more and more people. Even if they are not able to measure the numbers yet, they are keen on using this tool as an effective means of creating the right buzz about themselves
In an innovative big to promote itself, Aquafina created a contest on video networking website MySpace for users to create a winning video. The reward was a trip to none-other-than the Sundance Film Festival. The brand has profiled itself on MySpace since 2006, filling in with podcasts and film festival updates. This was one of their most innovative and effective ways to reach out to the film community. The influence that social media marketing of this kind provides cannot be met with a single line ad.
Closer home, a recent instance is the promotion of Bollywood [s1] film Tashan on Facebook, YouTube and Orkut. Promoters of the film have created a community specific to the film. On Facebook, it runs with the tagline, “Don’t worry about who you are, just carry your Tashan in your heart.” The film got popular even before it was released and the reader profile perfectly complimented the audience the film required.
Social media marketing can be a tricky game. If your existence on the web is simply a platform for your company, you might want to get involved with B2B media marketing that allows you to access the communities you specifically want to target. You can access this on networks like ITtoolbox or LinkedIn.
On the other hand, you can involve more publicly by hosting podcasts, webcasts and blogs for your brand on the numerous social networking websites with their readership of anything like a million. Since people are talking about you anyway, you might as well don the discussion hat and play along. It will only benefit your brand. Cincom Systems, a global software company, has made available a series of online educational & promotional videos, podcasts and screencasts, on the social media sites YouTube, Ning and Facebook. The famous bollywood actor Amitabh Bachan, Aamir Khan and other are hooked to blogging. Marketing experts like Dale Wolf runs the perfect customer experience management (www.perfectcem.com) blog, Steve Kayser’s Expert Access newsletter has managed to achieve a phenomenal global subscription base of nearly 141,000 subscribers. These examples truly accentuate the importance of the next generation tools for marketers.
For those who have still not recognized the perfectly simple and productive marketing tool that social media provides, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee. There is no challenging the tremendous traffic that a good posting can attract. These will be people who can add to your business and a lot of them will be ones who will keep coming back to your website.
Thanks to Web 2.0 you can use this master of a marketer to attract more links to your website or the company. The idea is to create a posting or an advertisement that connects to the user on the website you are choosing to harness. Added to this is the low cost advantage that all of us are eventually happy to employ. Search engines also pick up websites that receive natural links from known domain names. These are some first hand advantages of social media marketing that many of us are meaning to ignore so very far into its development.
It’s easy to assume that most of the traffic generated thus will not be productive. But a trend that has been noticed is that while initially you might see a spurt of visitors, the numbers will stabilize soon after. And this will be the number to reckon with. It could be clients, customers, partners, potential partners,. All of whom need to be on your list. It is also not presumptuous to say that a lot of the secondary traffic that visits your website could be people interested in what you provide.
Simply advertising on Web 2.0 is an efficient means of attracting traffic to your website. Because the number of users is so high on this case, it adds to the traffic you will eventually attract. Again, the only trick is to make it available to your target audience because the click, as we all know, is only a flick of a second.
While the profits of such marketing do not add up immediately or even evidently, it will generate a linkage on the web that will support your business through mentions, connects and recommendations. Social media marketing perfectly compliments your other forms of marketing. It can even be a support system for you as this is one means of communication that has no time span or recurring costs involved.
Another term touted with as much ease as social media marketing these days is ‘social media optimization’. With this, brands aim to alter their website such that it makes it easily searchable and receives more mention on blogs and podcasts etc. Adding a blog to your own website is a greater way of going about it. If your website is static, it will get more dynamic with regular updates and with several links connecting to anything that you post.
Social media marketing can therefore be a great means to promote your site through social media networks as well as within 3D worlds like Second Life and There.com.
Instead of randomly rushing through this sea of information, marketers prefer to build on a specific idea for brand awareness and then encourage brand attention and feedback with increased albeit more casual visibility. What cautions them is the user feedback that can also be negative. But one cannot forget that users in this case also become contributors and when the product is good, gladly act as ambassadors. As more threads are attached to your name, viral marketing picks up at an unprecedented pace. And this is where the crux of the game lies.
Marketers are therefore now busy fine tuning themselves to the new needs of this growing media that cannot be ignored. Social media marketing is far removed from traditional concepts of marketing. This makes it a more challenging medium but one that can be most effective in the medium to long run.
Intellectuals are still pondering over measurements that most correctly define the reach of this new media. There are four broad measures identified so far—audience, content tracking, online media analysis and online market research. Whatever the measurements and whatever its reach, opinion is unanimous for social media marketing. There seems to be nothing like it in the near future.
By Shiraz Datta, a blogger & a marketer at Cincom Systems India. www.shirazdatta.com
[s1]The Indian Film Industry like Hollywood
Posted by Shiraz Datta on April 25, 2008 at 01:35 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
An Outlook - Call Centre Software Market
The market for call centre software is only expanding. This because companies realize that keeping in constant contact with customers will help them enjoy a steady growth. According to the Everest Research Institute, the market for contact centre outsourcing has grown rapidly to a US$55 billion opportunity. And if a Frost and Sullivan research is to be believed, the call centre outsourcing market is set to reach $27.5 billion in 2013, up from $20.7 billion in 2006. Business Insight opines that Indian Agents Positioning is projected to rise over the next five years, from just fewer than 180,000 in 2004 to nearly 365,000 by 2009.
Having mentioned such wonderful projections, the contact center projects are also likely to feel the impact of recent “temporary” recession. On the other hand, contact center technology remains the best lever for extracting more value from employees and make better use of customer data.
The need for innovation remains, and attempts are constantly on to extend the reach of customer contact and to make it more and more affordable. Few reports suggests that while service has been a key differentiator for a number of companies, how the organization manages and maintains its customer relationships will be of even more important if an organization is to remain solvent and competitive. Hence continuous and sustainable innovation would be required from technology provider.
The idea is not only to drive sales but also to evolve a lasting customer relationship that works for a longer duration with better results. It starts from getting the right calls to evolving the appropriate responses that are required to meet the client’s needs. It would be imperative for call centre to
- improve customer satisfaction levels, thus enabling companies to increase lifetime customer value;
- increase revenue generation by providing business users with the customer information necessary to make relevant offers to each customer; and
- enable companies to cut costs through advancements in operational efficiency.
Contact center and communications technology vendors are well placed to assist organizations in building the customer-centric enterprise. Traditional contact center outsourcing markets are maturing in their adoption of these services. However, newer industries like retail, manufacturing, power, etc appear poised to engage these technologies like never before. According to few reports the largest single emerging vertical investor in outsourcing services through 2012 will be the travel and hospitality sector with next largest portion to be energies and utilities. Hence there might be temporary slower rate of growth however I do see the future promising, provided organization can bring value to its customer and its customer’s customer.
Posted by Shiraz Datta on April 10, 2008 at 01:14 AM in Business Growth | Permalink
Are you Listening !
Just recently I saw a Indian movie - tare zameen par(http://taarezameenpar.com/) about what we are doing to our kids in the age of cut throat competition. Well I should say that sometimes I do wonder that why I have to see a movie when almost more than half the world population has already seen it. I guess I will blame it to my laziness or my laggardness.
Nevertheless I must advocate for this film, it was true spectacle. Few days ago I posted a referred note on my site about how good the movie was and also how important it is for us to start changing the way we foster our children or at least make an attempt in doing so. From an Indian prospective it is really tough and even I don’t shy in saying that it is getting tougher day by day for our children. With over 700 suicides committed by school children, languished by studies, exams, peer pressure, etc. within last one year, are we talking studies, schools or are we talking war?
I wonder that my school days was tough, but when I see today’s studies I feel lucky. Given the situation of today’s “unwanted” competition in schools, I could have not even managed to complete or pass it.
“What is our parents role”, “what teachers are doing”, “man what a peer pressure”, “this is a wrong system” and so on. These are just words. No teacher or parent or society will change unless we “cumulatively” make an attempt or an effort in doing so. By opining this, no means I am trying to discount the power of one. We have great examples like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and many more. Coming back to the point, now it’s a high time that we should do something for our kids. Let them blossom the way they like. I know by saying this you may wonder what about our values that we all want to give to our kids, and the aspirations of “my kid will become a.........”.
Just think for a moment that by “my kid will become a..........”, aren’t we making our kids into donkeys that will take the burden of our aspirations. Or should I reiterate what Aamir Khan (the hero) said “if you are so much into competition then breed horses not kids”.
It will be a long way till I may start to understand of what needs to be done. But I think I can say one thing and that is “listen”. Listen to your kids, what they want to say, how they feel, what they want or want to become, etc, etc.
I know I am asking a very tough thing here, aren’t I.
We listen, or rather “try” to listen to our colleagues, wife/husband, mother/father, news, commentary, bosses, even people like me writing blogs at midnight, and NOW I am asking you to listen to your kids.
I am not an expert in child psychology and by no means have an intention to become one. But as a marketer, I notice people around me, on the roads, in the shops, in numerous organizations; no one seems to be listening. Bosses are not listening to their team; team is not listening to their boss, sales are not listening to what their customer needs, etc., etc.
People just want to either do what they want to do or blindly follow others. No questions asked. With all the possible tools for communication are we listening?
While there are organizations that listen to what employees want; sales listen to what customer wants; marketers listen to what market wants; parent listen to what their children wants; teacher listens to what their students wants, and these are the organizations, people, parents, teachers, shops that stand out and makes a difference.
Isn’t it. Just think about your last good experience when you went to a shop, a restaurant, for a client meeting, teacher you liked the most, barber you regularly go to, etc.
Isn’t they all were listening………….Just think about it……and LISTEN !!!
Have a Good Weekend.
Posted by Shiraz Datta on April 3, 2008 at 02:59 PM in Business Growth | Permalink
