e Magus

Literally, the writing was on the wall for quite sometime now. Facebook has officially announced that they will limit the organic reach for posts on Facebook Pages. This means you pay, if you want your posts to be seen by more people, even if they are your fans. For more, read here While it is not end of the road for the brands to increase organic engagement with their audience through Facebook page, it surely puts a spanner to the works on how they will have to spend monies on Facebook advertising. Let’s be honest, most people would not like to interact with the brand on day to day basis, let alone visit the brand page regularly. So such a limitation might actually work in the brands favour, albeit with monies involved. What smart brand managers would need to do is, to increase the relevance of the post and then promote the same. One big difference this new rule from Facebook will make is, brands who have been focusing on increasing likes through paid advertising and...

Here I want to talk about, why people use social media & what brands can learn from that A brand is nothing but individual thoughts of a collective set of people. And, people are,well, people :) Which means, in real world,  brands in many ways behave the way people do. Same is behaviour when it comes to social media too People get on to social media platforms, especially networking platforms, to connect and converse with people. They love to share stories, occasions, and have a general good time catching up. Isn’t this the purpose, why we all landed up on Facebook and Twitter initially?  But somewhere down the road, as we tend to become more (social) media savvy, our focus shifts from engagement with people we know to acquisition. Our inherent desire on social media, becomes that of acquiring more followers, fans, or increasing the connections (as in LinkedIn).  Call it ‘heard’ mentality. It is more important that how many hears you rather th...

E very Brand out there on social media wants huge number of people or fans following them. Even then analytics talking about brand page popularity in social media - decides it on their reach and followers. A quick look on their Facebook page or Twitter profile shows how many Million followers/fans they have (source: www.socialbakers.com ) Image 1 Facebook Best Brands (global)   Image 2 Twitter Best Brands (global) One obvious column that most miss are how few people the brands are actually following (in Image 2) Traditionally, brands have been built like the way great Empires were built in the past. It is the length, breadth, and the populace they cover that matter. Similarly, one important aspect of any marketing campaign is “REACH”. And, Hey! did it ever occur that we call the marketing activities as ‘campaigns’ - as in Military operations, and its etymology is rooted in the Latin word - Campus/Campia, meaning wide open fields  Since, Milit...

L ast week Adage ( www.adage.com ) came out with a news article stating that Coca-Cola Company study finds no sales impact (lift) from online chatter (For more details you could read the article here http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coca-cola-sees-sales-impact-online-buzz-digital-display-effective-tv/240409/ The article goes on to detail the study and the client input that Online advertising do work, and that social media plays a crucial role...However, some interesting pointers from the article: Can you link sales objective (especially short term) with social media, especially when it comes to FMCG or CPG? I say, plain stupid to even try and spend time seeking such results. This can only be successful, if there is social media led tactical campaigns to drive sales... Overall sales depends on the time, distribution, space (shelf), competition activities, price, etc What should your social media objectives be? No silver bullet here. But for a FMCG or CPG brand; it should be m...

W ith great power comes great responsibility, said Voltaire. Well you can also attribute its popularity to Spiderman's uncle too :) When Technology gave us, the general public, the great power of Social Media, we didn't become more responsible, only more frivolous The aftermath of the Hyderabad bomb blasts which took place on Feb 21st saw a slew of Facebook updates and Tweets in my network ranging from benign to malicious. More dangerous were the purportedly expert opinions without proper basis. The same could be seen on popular blogs/websites too which treads on conspiracy theories. This lead me to think, why do people create such conspiracy theories and why it is popular among social media The crux of conspiracy theories lies in the 2 primal human traits - Fear and Greed. Fear helped us survive and greed helped us to evolve as human beings. Most conspiracy theories are based on Greed - Money or Power, and the culprits are usually, Corpo...

Most people think that we are not ourselves, when we are online. True? True. While we tend to fake most of what we say or do in the online space, especially in Social Media platforms – we somehow are more real than we would be in real life. Most of our actions and utterances in real life depend on our immediate environs. The impact of where we are, whom we are with, and about whom we talk; all impacts on what we do and say. For example: saying ‘No’ face to face to a friend is harder than typing ‘No’ on a chat window, email, or even a tweet According to John Suler, the ‘online disinhibition effect’ can be further divided into benign and toxic disinhibition (The Pyscology of Cyberspace – The Online Disinhibition http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html ). Suler goes on to talk about six prime factors that influences the way we behave in the online space 1)    You don’t know me (Dissociative Anonymity) 2)    You Can’t see ...

One good thing about writing about future trends is that no one has been there. If you are wrong, nobody notices; and if you are right, you could tom-tom about it, saying, ‘I said so…’ So, here I go with my 4 safe bets for the year:: 1) Facebook will become more Google 2) Google will become more Facebook 3) Year of engagement (likeable and shareable) 4) Convergence – One content, many formats Facebook will become more Google: Even today, advertisement revenues happen to be lifeline for most online platforms. The success of the Google PPC campaigns is based on the ability to place preferred advertisement, with high relevancy. This Google business model hinges on its algorithm. Be it the ubiquitous search results or their adwords, it all is possible because of the logic that is build basis the data. Advertising on Facebook has so far been on the basis of the user profile. But, unlike the profile, which becomes mostly static (as most people do not update it after creating it)…....

Some of my thoughts on Why this kolaveri di phenomenon. With over 24 Million views on the original video, (plus an equal number of views on the various versions of it)this have become a true viral/meme case-study from India. No more reference to the Microsoft-Pankaj Udhas 'viral' or any of those 'foreign' case studies. Added to it are dedicated Facebook pages and millions of search results trying to bask in the glory of WTKD (including this blog :D) If one looks in deep, this song had all the makings for becoming a viral success. Any digital marketer could learn from the success of WTKD song. Here are some of the recipes that went into making this an success: Simplicity: A song with least common denominator English words regularly used by the youth with couple of simple vernacular words... the song has the universality of nursery rhymes like, Twinkle, Twinkle Little star.... or a Johnny, Johnny, Yes Papa.. With no music knowledge required, little wonder anybody ...

If people are shifting time from watching television to Facebooking, it has nothing got to do with social interactions and keeping in touch with their network… it is just that they get to replay what they are used to seeing on the television. Mostly I feel, Facebook is nothing but television in a new avatar. Like in television you have various channels and programmes that are categorized into various genres. Similarly you’ll find people in your network who fall into such genres Here are a dozen of media archetypes, I’m sure, you’ll find in your Facebook network too The Newsreader: Breaking News!!! You heard it first here! Be it Qantas grounding their entire fleet worldwide…or the local Metallica concert getting cancelled. They want to the first to make a mention of it. No point of view, or any other description; just the headlines and link to the source news website. Usually, such people have their twitter feeds connected to their Facebook Updates. These types are one of the most ...

Facebook is just not about connecting people who work, study, and live around them. The impact of Facebook is much more than just connecting, or killing time, or increase in data/Internet usage. The best yardstick to understand the importance of Facebook is that every marketer wants Facebook as part of their marketing plan. Trust marketers to know what works and what is impactful or not :-) Broadly, the impact of Facebook on the users and the society can be categorized into 3 types - Material, Behavioural, and Cultural Material: The material impact of Facebook is all about increased consumption and buying. There is an artificial need that is created by the Facebook offerings in terms of its default features or the popular third party applications. Couple of popular consumption/buying pattern that I see amongst my friends on Facebook is in terms of purchase of Cameras (especially high end cameras) and the increase in travel. While there could be various reasons for the increased ...

One of the main characteristic of any mass media is its ability to impact the society. Be it the newspapers, television or radio, each had played its part, in terms of changing views and shaping the society. In the recent past, there have been many news articles about the impact of social media in the civil society movements… Be it Coffee Party in America, The elections in Iran, the civil movements in Tunisia, Egypt (#Twitterrevolution) and other Arab countries...or, closer home, the Team Anna’s anti corruption movement in India…. Social media usage has become an important tactic in terms of spreading awareness and mobilizing support. The question is - has social media come of age? If you look at the history of mass media… it has always been associated with politics. In fact, it is referred to as “fourth estate”, the other 3 being Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Traditional mass media was and has been controlled by a few (Just imagine, more than 90% of mass media consumed ...

The online would have enough and more dope on Brand Positioning; So, I'd not go into the detailing of what is positioning, and how it can be achieved? I will also not talk about the Importance of Positioning but would try and give some examples of some brand names you are familiar with and interact on day to day basis in the online space. Couple of days back, I was talking to a brand manager who was mentioning how the online platforms are only best suited for tactical purposes. He went onto mention that maybe in future "positioning" would not be a marketing focus, and "being tactical" would be the marketing strategy of the day. I argued, on the importance of positioning, and had taken couple of examples from the Internet space and said if online companies are focusing on positioning, then 'positioning' is and will be crucial aspect of marketing. While there is a grain of truth in saying that in future "being tactical" would be important…since n...

This can be part – 2 of my earlier blog on how technology affects human behaviour. Couple of things that has come to my notice in the past few days made me think… is the popular technology more of a communication enabler or disabler? A colleague of mine has recently been to Singapore for holidays. An interesting observation, he mentioned, was that how people seem to be in their own world – the ear phones plugged, listening to their ipods, mobile phones, etc… or they were busy fidgeting with their mobile phones, either playing games or watching some video on the phone/ipod. They seem to be in their own world as if they have created an invisible wall around them. Another is a report that was mentioning about the increase of mobile VAS. Currently the mobile VAS contributes to 12% (in India) of the revenue. While text (SMS) seems to be the major revenue generator in VAS services, contribution from other VAS sources like – Music downloads, Ringtones, Caller Ring Back Tone (CRBT), screensav...

An interesting news article that came out a few weeks back has got me thinking…. Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share. See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally? The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009). On a different note, a person usually visits ...

2010 has started off with a lot of promise when it comes to digital marketing. I have seen a sea shift in terms of the clients pro-actively seeking digital marketing ideas and solutions from the agencies. Some reasons for the same could be: - The user base of internet has grown to an extent, it can be called as a mass media. Reports say that the Internet users in the country is over 71 Million - The traditional news mediums (TV and Print) are quoting from twitters and blogs that has increased the awareness of these platforms. Quotes (nay tweets) from popular personalities (nay tweeps) are the source of information and content for many of the newspapers and TV channels… What iamsrk is saying, or the recent tweets from iplt20 (Lalit Modi) and shashitharoor has made twitter a household name.. - A phenomenon called Facebook has spread like a pandemic. In today’s world – People have started taking up professions which most will never plan to do in their real life – Farming, Cooking, Mob…et...

I had got this interesting article from WebProNews... More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That's why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result: - Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans - 59,000 people published the story to their news feed - Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds - In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to: - Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property) - Add depth to Bing's personality - Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other. - Yield passionate or emot...

No one will argue the fact that we all live in a networked world. You connected to me, connected to another, and another, and to the whole world. True? Well, not quite. Take a detailed look into this networked world; you will find that it is a chain of islands, with spaces between each other…. It is islands of online communities, groups, niche networks, etc… You realize that this online world (especially the social networking) is not one big homogeneous society, but a collection of different types of groups. But looking at our past we know that human advancement has been on basis of creating a homogeneous society… From being a small group of hunters and gatherers, to forming large communities, building villages, city states, empires, and to nation states of today… Now that we have the technology and the medium to create this homogeneous society, even if it is online, why do we shy from doing so? If we look back at the start of the Internet – it was a repository of information that can ...

As we approach the end of another year, there would be multitudes of new people who would have joined some social networking site or other. Well, there are dime and dozen reasons for the success of Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, etc…. but is there any common thread or insight that binds the success of these SNS sites? We humans spend most of our waking hours in building and maintaining ‘relationship’. This behavior is embedded in our genes. The activity of ‘grooming’ in primates, a human child crying for attention, the activities we, as adults, do in our day to day life – like the friendly greeting to colleagues, the discussion over cup of coffee, meeting the client deadlines too :) - All these actions is related to building and maintaining relationships. One of the core objective of building and maintaining relationships is to create an opinion about oneself in others mind. The way we talk, what we speak, the way we dress, the way we walk, all communic...

The Yahoo! ad campaign in India is on for about 4 months... (Its You campaign)... I was wondering how successful this campaign has been in terms of increase in users of Yahoo! India, and also in terms of visitors to the site... While I have no authentic data on the above, a quick glance into Google Trends for Yahoo India website gives a very sorry picture.. The chart shows a steady decline in the Unique visitors to the Yahoo website since starting of 2009... While one thing to note is that Google Trends do not consider sub-domain, and will only be tracking the TLD (Top Level Domain).. it still is not a good sign for Yahoo! This resonates with my thoughts that Internet Time is a limited resource for the users in India... The growth in usage of social networking sites is cannibalizing into the usage of other Internet websites.. A Google trend chart (given below) on Facebook & Twitter would confirm its rising popularity. While I wait for authentic source of information - I would go wi...

Are we at a cusp of media upheaval? Are we soon going to see a war betting the old (traditional) media vs. new (Online) media?? Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the World Media Summit in Beijing, was mentioning that Search Engines and other content aggregators need to pay for any news reports or articles they currently take for free He said “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content”. A Media Mogul whose company owns newspapers, other publications and TV channels across the globe, his view comes as ominous. He was particularly harsh on Search Engine like Google, Yahoo! And other websites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook While Mr. Murdoch and other media companies are right that there is a price for the content they create. As content owners they need to be compensated for exploitation of the original content for commercial purpose. Having started my career with a media company, I have been taught and now know that there is nothing ...