Social Media is Humane.

There was a time when the online marketers used to assume number of people visiting the site was directly proportional to the leads generated to the conversion/ fulfilment and so on and so forth to arrive at a ROI model.
Social Media is about people. It’s more” Humane” in its very own character and thus transcends beyond words like user, customers, buyers, eshoppers etc.
Let’s just call them – “Hu-sers” (Humane + users) .Simple. These are the people who care to come to your site, go through, ask information and so on. The idea is to make them talk about us, refer us and create repeat visits.
How can we make this happen? The answer is when we stop treating them as mere” clicks” or “Hits”

Imagine a site which is just brochure ware and mundane. We expect them to come in by numbers and show off that Alexa ranking and the traffic numbers in the next brand review meeting.

I think we can add quite a number of modules around just “brochureware” bit of the site.

* How about a provision for Bookmarks – you can’t expect them to refer if there is no mechanism to refer.

* How about creating more visible online properties that talk about the brand – pictures, videos, advertorials, reviews not just talking about your brand but creating a passion & a cult for the brand.

* How about diverting and attracting traffic to various Online Properties around the brand – reviews by existing customers can be optimized and linked to the site or a link from the website to the company blog. We can also let users know that the brand exists on networking sites and you can be a part of that cult.

* How about just thinking beyond that Monthly Website Traffic Analysis Report . Don’t we pay in M&A for the Brand Repute? How about the one which is Online?

Social Media is Evergreen

I think it is recession proof too. It is an ongoing, ever increasing, omnipresent, 365 days – campaign to bring in people and make them associate to the brand.
Very soon, I am sure Social Media will be Mainstream. Just like other Online Media Campaigns

Social Networking Sites Grew 93% Since 2006.With 40 million active users in the US, social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and is poised to play a vital role in the current economic downturn, according to a trend report from Netpop Research LLC, that also predicts a related increase in social media advertising opportunities

Social Media is Open , Transparent & Mutual

In every sense, including culture & technology – Social means Open
You cannot control the feedback, emotions & sentiments that come through in the form of comments. You cannot control an irate customer or a mob mentality. Thus, its quite important what tone would you set up even before you try floating your official page. Laying down the unwritten laws is the first thing before you hit Facebook.

On the other hand use of Technology in terms of incorporating the elements of Open Web Integration is the key to facilitate Convergence. Twitter for example has hundreds of applications through which you can engage with your fan base. Thus they do not necessarily have to register with you to talk to you on exclusive basis or vice versa. Using Facebook & Twitter connect in most of the campaigns both on social media & microsite allows the most organic form of Viral. How do we do all this > you may ask? Well , that’s exactly where we come into picture.

Its Organic (The Whole is better than sum of Parts )
Everybody knows how the end result is impact – which is a sum of various things like numbers, Twits, RTs, Comments, Likes, Bookmarked and so on and so forth. Well, there is only one to achieve this is by understanding the very nature of the activity.

“You cannot shove it down through their throat. If they like it , they will come”

I think the best parameter to judge the wholesomeness of the brand is to look at their organic numbers and the buzz, viral & referral generated by the users on their own. Thats the single most heavy weight
Well, by all means there are number of ways where you can report the augmented results. You know when they say – If you can’t make it ; fake it

The Legacy of “Search” was laid by Google when it made the search engine. Only a few permutations and combinations are known to the marketers and through this everyone wants to push the other one to be on the top

But, I guess the rules change in Real Time when you talk to Real People for Real

In recent times I was amazed at the kind of fake numbers game that many agencies resort to, to justify the money they charge for social media marketing. All SMM professionals would know the cheap tricks that an agency can employ to make the client feel “happy”, however most self respecting social media agencies would rather be sacked than resort to such tactics.

I am of course assuming that this post is being read by an unsuspecting client who was thrilled with the few hundred followers on twitter overnight with the “twitter default profile image” – so here’s your reality check. If you are social media professional I hope you will not resort to any of the below tactics. After all cheating cant get you long term clients, so better not try. In this part I shall delve on Twitter (hope to cover Facebook in a following post)

To illustrate this let me take the real world case study of Uninor (mobile services) on Twitter

Twitter Alert 1 – Followers with no profile image

If you are seriously on Twitter, and I mean seriously you will have spent enough time selecting your profile image. Now imagine if your brand page has a lot of followers who would rather be birds in different colours what would it say about them? If you did count 89 of 358 followers did not have a profile picture.

Twitter Alert 2 – Followers with no activity

Ok so lets take the above example screengrab furtherand look at the profiles of AMALKALRA and raviteja032. AMALKALRA has no tweets follows only Uninor! raviteja032 is even better with no tweets and only following Uninor! Now ask yourself what your brand needs to do to get such die hard followers who are not interested in anything else in the world.

Twitter Alert 3 – Followers who create accounts very close to each other

Taking the same example above it transpires that AMALKALRA and raviteja032 created Twitter accounts within a day of each other (we are not saying they can’t be genuine Uninor fanatics but… )

That’s it for this part, we will carry on the series of what to watch out for when the report card comes in each month.