A few days back came across a book reading session by an author at a nearby bookstore. The author turns out to be a Facebook friend and fellow blogger Amit Haralalka. Lately this is happening so often.
Another friend of mine Ankesh Kothari co-published Strategy Daddy sometime back. Its really surprising for me, cause for some reason I and probably others along with me tend to allot 'writing books' to other more older folk. Blogging is great... but actually writing a book.. naah!
Sahil Parikh, I have worked with at DeskAway recently published his book The Saas Edge and I have been seeing blogs and book reading sessions for the book all around the place! In fact I actually helped him with some data research for it!
So lately even I have been thinking of writing a book. For us bloggers its actually quite simple cause we can just blog it and then publish it. Saves all the tension of 'writing a book'!
Let me know if anyone can help me publish the book, I already have some ideas for it. ;)
Apart from that this is one more impact of social media where you start seeing so many other achievers that it inspires and actually makes you think 'hey maybe I can do that'! Its the same way I feel when I meet all those teen rockstars who have their companies going while they are yet in junior college!
Came across the lpad facebook page sometime back. Was struck by the interactions it had. Content was interesting and lot of responses by fans. Getting engagement on pages is tricky sometimes it comes quite swiftly at other times its tough. Reasons for it could be varied, and often require deep analysis.
So I spoke to Mohit Bansal, founder of lpad about the behind the scenes of their FB page,
What is your view on social media marketing for small companies and
startups. How do you think it helps lpad?
I think it is a must have for any business in B2C category, even if their customers are not there on facebook. I believe a successful marketing strategy would focus on staying on top of the customer's mind and thats exactly what facebook allow businesses to do.
For L-pad, facebook has not only allowed us to stay in touch with our existing fans/followers/friends but also allowed us to attract various startups/entrepreneurs to be part of this community.
We have straight leads from facebook too.
How did you go about having such a happening page on Facebook with
high engagement?
Thats a compliment for me. :)
Nothing special, just one update a day and read every comment. Strike conversations wherever there is a chance.
This is where he is just being modest. When I spoke to him he was a lot more forthcoming with his thoughts. He has spent quite some time understanding Facebook dynamics about technical aspects like Facebook page updates algorithm. Which updates are shown on fans wall etc...
Basically a good mix of,
1. relevant content
2. conversational
3. right target audience
Let me know which brands social media presence you think rocks!
The Facebooks Questions feature is amazing! It adds a totally new level of interactivity and virality to the social network.
It immediately reminded me of Quora which is mainly a QnA site. It allows asking questions on a page or personal profile also. This question goes out as a poll or ask a detailed question.
You can then message your friends to answer the questions something like Linkedin offers. (This is hugely viral for a FB page admin to use)
When replying to my friends question I can choose poll option and also give a detailed reply. 
I can then publish the answer over to my wall. Another good thing is that I can see all other questions (should we raise privacy concerns here?) when typing my own.
I thought this would be a simple feature but on exploring I think a lot of things can be done using it. What do you think of this feature?
Had this interesting conversation with @annkur and @unitechy about brand communities. I don't remember exactly how it started but basically I was differentiating between pure fan communities and brand managed communities.
It all starts since I became a part of this Wheel of Time community Its really rich with interactions and discussions. People are coming up with theories about the story and making graphic images of what characters might look like, even short movies. In short its like a brands 'wanted' social media presence, except that it is a fan community. TOR books or even the author don't really own it. Some time back when the 13th book got released there was this amazing offline-online game where people had to collect some clues left by the author which would open out chapter names of the upcoming book. Totally cool! So this is where there was an official representation of the brand integrating with the pure fan community. So it made me think about how social media approach would differ when working with these brands who already have established serious fan communities.
This would be applicable to brands which have serious, passionate fans like for eg: DC comics. So when movies are being released Iron Man, Thor and so on the brand can consider serious integrations with pure fan communities which are already present.
You can check out the discussion we guys had on twitter here, I think there was more to it but this is how much has been pulled out by the app,
http://twitter.theinfo.org/20406162138599424
Its a pretty fascinating area of thought. One aspect of social media is to Build communities, but when there is a serious community like this already live then it would be a different sort of ball game to bring about integrations and to align the brands official community such that both communities can go hand in hand.
Consistent work with a community brings about good increase in interactivity. This is a graph, around two months since we started work on a community facebook fan page. Small weekly contests were held, but at the core of the activity was consistent 4-5 status updates daily.
The responses were studied noting the format, content and other parameters of the updates that got better response.
After some time a certain content, format was preferred. Based on that we soon saw a jump in engagement. This jump is consistent and also resulted in more responses to updates which are not according to the previously preferred format and content. 
This is good... it answers the all important question raised about online activism. What is the impact of online activism on the actual cause?? Or is it often just all BS.
I can't talk more on how much the industry niche affects the social media campaign. Right from the platforms you choose, marketing ways, advertising options everything needs to be figured out based on the industry niche. I had written about companies looking at relevant social media case studies... no point going on about how some company used social media well when you have a completely different niche.
Sometime back I came across a twitter conversation between two social media marketing professionals about Facebook ads where one of them said their per fan cost was Rs. 5 while the other one said it was Rs. 20 (hinting that Rs 5 is too low and not possible). I just read the chat perplexed as neither is specifying their industry niche and I was sure that industry niche would matter!! At that point however I had little experience with Facebook ads.
Later I got a project where I started putting up ads and it was costing me a very huge Rs. 45 per fan overall!! I know that was really huge.. I tweaked the parameters as much as I could and made the fan page very interesting but couldn't make it lower. The thing was however, that I was very clear that I was targeting a very niche community for that particular fan page. There were comparatively smaller number of individuals for that community and CPC, CPM were high. So I kept mulling over it...
Recently I got another client for whom I am advertising and that is a huge niche.. its a local area in India and my per fan cost is Rs. 3 !! I mean seriously! Not only that, I spent only Rs 500 on adverts and got over 300 fans which are increasing on their own now that I have stopped the ads.
Though over here I wonder would it be better to get fans at Rs 5 by targeting huge niche which would then grow on its own when I put interesting content.. though it may not be RELEVANT people for the brand! These people would never really convert or use the brand at all (but they could refer it to their friends who may use it). Or is it better to get 10 times less fans but targeted niche at Rs 45. I think it would depend on whether you can make the fan page relevant for those IRRELEVANT people cause otherwise why would they join the page and also keep it valuable to the actual niche. What do you guys think, is there anyway of reducing fan acquisition of a very small niche brand??
While Facebook Project Titan takes everyone by storm.. Facebook has been bringing subtle changes in its features...
Friend requests
Before there were two options confirm or decline (or some such) now the second option has become 'Not Now' which means it doesn't get deleted it gets stored for later!
Deleting the friend request can only be done via clicking 'Not Now' and then quickly 'I don't know this person' in which case they wont be able to send you another req. The option disappears very quickly so if we miss it then the FR gets saved for later god knows when... and prolly will show up in an email reminder a month later!
Page Insights
Another small feature has been page insights which shows up after every post showing percentage of feedback. I really like this feature... overall FB insights are pretty good. They can be much better obviously but better than anything Twitter or Linkedin are providing!
I don't have much to say about Project titan cause I wonder how useful it would be. I don't see it replacing Gmail. Moreover it will be quite sometime before which we can trust Facebook security and privacy features ot really use it as an alternative email service. Though I haven't yet checked out the feature so will wait for that.
Mark Zuckerberg finally opens up about the privacy flak Facebook has been facing in the last many months. They have been making lot of privacy settings changes, keeping default settings as open for all and such stuff. Moreover a lot of bugs came up where private messages went to the wrong people, chats were displayed and other mad stuff.
"I know we've made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place, and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve."
Read More.
Its almost sad that for one of the leading social media networks, its parent company is so slow to socialize and be transparent! Hopefully though, we should be seeing improvements in the privacy settings and the companies policies.
It seems to be a very interesting event. I read the synopsis of their previous such event and that was pretty cool! Making a Facebook community hands on with the participants is a very good way of getting the peeps to get an idea of what social media is all about! Also the insights they have gained is very valuable.
This event is slated for 4th June, venue not yet decided. You can check it out here. Again there will be hands on Facebook communities creation and popularizing.
They are also doing a free webinar tomorrow so if you have time join in!
Social Networking and Gaming, my two passions combined and mixed with Stocks brings Empire Avenue! Anyone can sign up for free and create their own Stock, for themselves or in the name of their company! We can then aggregate our social presence like Twitter, Blog, Facebook to it, so people can see what we are doing online and figure whether to buy our stock and/or follow us.
So it has two way influence one is that our online activities on Twitter, Facebook help us in the game, and vice versa doing well in the game can get us visibility in our real, virtual lives! Cool!
I have 3 free invites to the game so if you are interested let me know in the comments or through the contact me link in the header of this blog!
EAVB_BAUGOOZMOH
One of the first things to figure out before we set up a community to manage for a brand is the content strategy. Usually it includes not in order of importance,
- Product updates
- Media coverage
- Other social platform integration i.e. promotion of blog posts if there is a company blog
- viral engagement
This 4th point, is where the creative aspect comes in, and it is the most important. In fact product updates and/or blog posts can be removed if there are too many updates as the community is not to be churning out press releases.
To figure the creative output, we need to form a content strategy as in what will be theme of the viral engagement. Will it be contest, quiz, viral content or some such.
To give you better idea here are few Facebook pages with some very different content strategies,
Chings
They were already sending out recipe videos but very sporadically after reaching 1 lakh fans I guess they decided to get some content strategy into place,
I am a lot into Chinese stuff - the language, Kung fu etc... but frankly I mean I know the brand name is Chings but do I have to learn history and geography of China from you??!! The quiz idea is fine but it should be more relevant to people.
Indian Panga League - Virgin Mobile
Its a new campaign recently started. They are simply churning out viral videos ads which revolve around the IPL theme! Nice one.
They also have a contest going on at their website.
Pantaloons
Strategy can also be to cover any offline events that the company might have. Like the Pantaloons - beauty for a cause contest! BTW these guys have also crossed the 1 lakh fans in a span of about 9 months!
What is your favorite brand on Social media and what is its content strategy?
Just a few days back I wrote about Chings Secret crossing 1 lakh fans making a record, close behind it was Fastrack, who has a few days ago also crossed 1 lakh and now has higher number of fans than Chings!
Their page has a lot more fan engagement going on. They have mentioned on their page that it took Fastrack about a year to reach this fan base, they had 5k fans in April 2009.
Chings also took about the same amount of time, they started their page in May 2009.
Fastrack is on Twitter with some 1000+ followers (better than Chings).
Its a much more happening fan page, with a strong target at youths. They have had contests which had a offline counterpart, quizzes and upcoming is something that might very well go viral,
Update due to comment: this is a viral that is over, so it does go to show that they have done a lot of engagement with the fans!
I have been doing quite some research now a days for various reasons, and I really feel this online world its just exploding. So much is happening virtually here, there and elsewhere! Yet, when it comes to monetizing there is still a dearth.
The Chings Secret Facebook Fan Page,
Started in May 2009.
On an average 5 to 6 status updates a month.
Content of Status Updates: Videos of interesting recipes, attractive advertisement posters, general updates
They have also sponsored a few college fests at BITS Pilani and IIT Techfest. The content that they are updating the page with is not that viral I feel. I think they have used email databases and/or some large offline campaign for their online communities.
Any thoughts?
Another trait is that their Twitter community has just 300 followers. Why?
Chris Brogan recently wrote a post Redrawing, where he mentions how corresponding and responding to every tweet, blog comment, email and message is too much for him and he will have to cut down. Well he is taking this step late :p cause I stopped doing that some time back. I do give it a lot of time, but there is an order of hierarchy to which I respond. I am going to give it out here, so you can make the best advantage of that :D If you do I might then have to change it though!
Email: I read everything, but replying to all is seriously difficult due to 'Inbox Overload'. This is still I think the best way to get in touch with me, anyone can send me an email from the Contact form (link on the header).
Twitter and Facebook: I respond to almost everything on these. I said 'almost' cause often there are lot of messages which perplex me, I don't know what to reply so I often stay mute.
Responding to Facebook messages has become easier after their new layout, before I did not reply to those promptly either.
Blog Comments: I read all of them, I may not reply sometimes cause I feel often these comments are not direct messages to ME. It is more for the article, so they will be useful for the next readers.
LinkedIN: Low response rate, in fact even now I know there are couple of messages waiting there for about a week. Couple of them are job offers, but sorry guys I barely sign into linkedIN, when I do I check out my Groups and such. I pretty much forget to reply, also I don't like the message replying user interface on LinkedIN.
IM: I remain invisible on Gchat and Facebook chat. Once in a while I open the gates and go visible with Pidgin...
This hierarchy of course, is Moot if the content of the message is very important or striking.
What about you people? Do you prioritize messages according to the medium you receive them from?
Read my new Maggi Recipe here and pls, pls vote. This is a fun contest happening on Facebook Living your Passion fan page. I actually dunno what the winner gets but you all know how I like sharing my maggi recipes with the world na? :p
You can like or comment here both get counted as vote.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=372769750627
A very interesting talk about what works on the Internet! As Alexis of Reddit explains any campaign needs to get the interest of people. Its not just about the cause or the gains at the end of the day. In fact it may not even be about your target audience!
Its about Being Social. People want to listen to stuff they are interested in.
Another example of such a campaign that I mentioned earlier is Stripey the Cub.
It started around the 1st of Feb and in a month it has close to 200,000 fans!! Stripey is something people find hard to resist!
Today morning I was greeted by a whole new, revamped version of Facebook. The layout of the home page was significantly changed! Not all my friends have the new version, it seems its being rolled out slowly. This is the new face of Facebook and its here to stay!
Some good stuff:
Friend Reqs, Messages and Notifications
All the three buttons are to the left top. Moreover if I click on them a drop down gives me lot of info to see what the new req. or message is from.
I really like this feature! Finally it becomes easier to answer my messages on Facebook.
News Feed: Top News and Recent News
Again a change in the news feed, I can now see it in two categories Top News and Recent News.
Photos and Videos
Much better way to see the photos and videos uploaded by my contacts.
You can see this new layout here.
....And, this may just be a beginning to a Titan Project by Facebook ;)
