Priyanka Writing
Generally I use 3rd party apps for Twitter and so hardly ever login via the website to work on the account settings part. Today was setting up a client profile and I saw that the backend of the Twitter Account is looking so much more sophisticated now!
Twitter Archive
This is interesting, not sure when they made it available! Have just requested my archives, lets how it works.. 🙂
Tailor Twitter Based on Recent Website Visits!
This is the feature that most intrigued me! It has some interesting offshoots. Firstly a site with a Twitter widget lets Twitter track the users even if they are logged in via their Twitter account – that is a lot of data they are collecting, its almost scary! Secondly, it could help boost virality of content on Twitter if Discover tab results are chosen based on website visit etc… I want to follow and see what they do with this feature!
Email Notifications
Since sometime Twitter has been sending me all those quite irritating emails.. especially because I get them for every random Twitter account I made at some point in time. Yea I have at least 3 I am getting emails for! They are providing quite comprehensive options to choose which emails we would like! Cool!
Mark media as sensitive
Facebook should seriously have this feature because it displays the photos upfront. So many times it happens that people in my timelines are promoting some cause and they will just share very sensitive and gruesome images! Having some way to mark/bar sensitive information would be very helpful!
And the ‘Delete all location information’ – totally appreciate this feature!
Now just looking forward to some Insights/Analytics & Schedule your Post feature! 🙂
I will take two recent popular campaigns in India as examples,
Honeybunny Ad by Idea
This one:Â http://youtu.be/8HxMymQAVJs
Their goal: advertise their pan-India network coverage – I am not sure they achieved this goal, I myself couldn’t relate the ad and network availability!
Goal achieved: Brand publicity – with “1 million visits on their ad page during the first nine days of the campaign’s launch – credit” they have definitely got major brand publicity!
The ads went viral! The ads were hugely accepted by people, they loved it or hated it but they responded to it!
What is surprising to note here is that the Idea social media properties haven’t really done much around the ad campaign at all. In fact the Idea Facebook Page does not even mention ‘honey bunny’ once despite a lot of posts on Valentine’s Day! You would think that they would want to build on the “viral Honey Bunny song” – “brand Idea” connect!
Cafe Coffee Day – Sitdown Campaign
This one:Â http://youtu.be/G6BF4KLl2hQ
Their goal: Introduce the ‘cafe culture’ to Indian youth <– I think they achieve this goal and more…
This ad particularly didn’t appeal to me so much so as to go ‘viral’ but it is definitely intriguing especially with the messaging and the use of social media within the ad! They show a lot of youngsters making the sitdown campaign viral via social media in the ad itself!
What I really want to point out are the #sitdown activities done online apart from the ad…
1. Website – sitdown.in is a clever and simple use of an Facebook app to enable fans to create their own sitdowns. They also have some ‘record your sitdown video’ option… Interesting activities though not too popular. The sitdown FB app has some 55 users and the videos don’t seem to load at all!
2. Twitter Contests – #sitdownquestions – just to mention here that I have issues with the way they are managing their twitter. They retweet so many of their fan tweets that it spams my timeline… and I don’t like the theme of their contests they are overdone and too frivolous!
3 Youtube – they have number of smaller ad clips which all together have got close to 60,000 views
4. Facebook – apart from the aforementioned sitdown app there is nothing! Which is odd!
5. Pinterest – They have promoted it on sitdown website, but there is no sitdown content here. Again Odd!
This campaign is actually quite good in terms of the message and the concept! If only they would have gotten the various activities on different platforms to sync it would have made a lot more sense and could possibly have been much more happening phenomenon… almost a brand movement!!
This reminds me of another campaign called ‘Love your Helpdesk’ by Zendesk in 2009. They have closed it now, but at the time it was quite cool and they had the message pretty pat. It was the same across the campaign site, Facebook page & Twitter (https://twitter.com/LYHD)…this was also the time when everything was not ad promoted and people still considering organic, word of mouth publicity the main attraction of social media. The numbers were usually smaller but the ROI was often much higher percentage!
My purpose to showcase the above case-studies is to say that with social media we can create a movement with the right level of branding, loyal community and targeted activities! I don’t think the Sitdown campaign does that but I would say that they have attempted it.
I would personally prefer to create a brand movement than a ‘viral’ campaign because I feel it is more dependable! Here are some differences between the two…
Do share any thoughts that come to your mind! 🙂
It is late for a 2013 post but I have been thinking about this for a while and have been busy implementing it so…. 😉
Whatever form of marketing brands choose the core idea behind it is to ‘increase business’. What I want to do this year is to focus on this end ROI more than anything else for brands I work with.
Generally at DigiWhirl we follow the typical simplified thought process shown below,
our social media marketing efforts lead to increase in brand awareness leading to brand loyalty/recognition and then brand demand. In order to generate significant brand demand for our clients, we first need to build brand loyalty. This takes quite a bit of time! We consider 6 months as minimum time required to build decent brand loyalty in fans (measured via levels of quality engagement with brand).
I am looking at ways to improve the content strategy and make it a lot more adaptable for business generation! I am working on some such campaigns and will share more once I get some results. One example to explain what I am thinking is,
Content Strategy that encourages fan generated content
usually we bring this in later on in the community engagement because it requires more involvement from fans. If we were to introduce this earlier on then it would be that much easier to move to next step where we encourage fans to share their brand related pictures thus leading to actual business
Brand tie-ups
Another idea is brand tie-ups with brands who have similar target groups earlier on itself. The challenge however is finding such brands who are also starting out on social media. If they are more popular they probably won’t want to tie up with us!
This way when I measure the success of social media activities after a few months I don’t want to look at only engagement numbers but also actual business increase! This would also be very useful for startups – in fact it is when working with startups that I feel that its important to bring in clear ‘increase in business’ metric into ROI calculation because otherwise they can hardly afford to be on social media!
Keeping startups in mind it is also often easier to measure an increase in business clearly because the total business numbers are low and can be managed manually. So usually in social media activities there is always an aspect of business generation but what I am thinking of now is go about implementing much more specific biz increasing campaigns. This includes figuring out ways to measure this increase and getting the client to do many back end things to ensure the campaign functions smoothly.
A while since the first entrepreneur spotlight post, here I bring you my brother, Kashyap Dalal of Inkfruit! (Applause!!)
I asked him a bunch of questions and below are his replies. I pestered him a lot to give me some masala, some inside scoop but sadly he claimed that there wasn’t any such thing.. we aren’t believing that no way.. haahha but sadly I only have simple, seedha saadha answers here!
On a serious note, I have seen my brother slog quite a lot behind Inkfruit and finally they got a huge funding, became a success and a big company. Currently they have about 200+ employees!
Business: Crowdsourced Design Tees (and now other products as well), Inkfruit
What led you to prefer the idea of starting your own company as opposed to a job?
I just thought that after a while working in a job would become boring. Most things are system driven and its more difficult to create huge value. Starting up seemed like an exciting challenge to take up. I guess it was about finding self satisfaction in doing something that fewer people were doing – it wasn’t “expected” of me.
What would you like to say to anyone who is considering taking the plunge into starting up?
if u r thinking about starting up, u r part of half of the people in a job. Get started n then we’ll talk.
How important is it and how can a startup create a distinct brand?
Every bussiness has to become a brand. Those who don’t close down. Even a xerox shop builds a brand by being known for either its cost, or its quality or its service etc. So the brand built is not necessarily a swanky logo with a long customer promise – its just basic TRUST built thru consistently delivery over a period of time.
Success secrets?
No success secrets as such. Just work hard, be ethical, get good people into your team, always try to delight customers, look for honest feedback (entrepreneurs are usually blind to flaws in their idea) and hope to get Lucky.
Yesterday one post popped out on my Facebook page. The moment I saw it I went ooooh… the colors, the quality, the oomph in it was startling. It was the Nokia page post shown below,
I am sure the oomph factor I am referring to is clear. The update along with the photo was also very good : “Opa Lumia Style”
1. The picture is hot and happening – bright colors and great quality
2. Update refers to a popular ongoing theme – the viral music track Gangnam Style
3. It promotes the brand. The photo promotes the Lumia mobile camera makes it much more relevant and valuable for the brand
This is one of the better posts from the page and a significantly higher engagement rate can be seen with more comments, likes and shares than the other posts!
A good, professional quality photograph can really give brand updates the edge they require to stand out in peoples cluttered timeline. I noticed a similar ‘popping’ update when a social entrepreneurship venture I have been following for a while got a volunteer photographer on board. All of a sudden the honey they were selling took on a most ethereal look! 🙂
When thinking about using photos, one of the foremost industries which you think of would be travel and tourism! Some brands are doing a great job with some out of the box pictures to promote the place. Two mentions Dubai and Australia! I am sure there are more…
One simple way for fun B2C brands to bring in a photo element to their social marketing efforts is by doing a classic series of product pictures in different locations or with diff messages. It is being done well by Starbucks…
Lastly a special mention to Lego.. they have been coming up with great photo updates for ages now….
As you can see Lego is promoting their Instagram feed with this great photo! This is another advantage of having a photo series for a brand – use various photo platforms Pinterest, Instagram to create a following! I have been following Starbucks for a while on Instagram and even though all their photos have a Starbucks cup in them.. I find them entertaining and never pushy marketing!
It is sad that a lot of big brands simply don’t aspire for truly good quality! Nokia itself, while the above mentioned update was really good, why aren’t their other pictures as good? I think it is worth spending on a professional photographer and having a strong photo element to a brand content strategy. For startups they can hire a freshy but a really good one at that!
