The problem with explaining social media strategies to clients, or at least one of the problems is that they think they have understood it when they haven't. Its happened twice now, once with a client and one where I had pitched a few ideas to a company.
Both decided they understood what I was saying and liked the idea. In one of the cases I was planning to live tweet at a event, which is a great way to get the company/account popular with others into the same stuff. Liking this idea the guy says okay so before the big event we have this small event happening why don't you live tweet from there also! Now its actually not a bad idea except that since the account was very new it barely had any followers so it wouldn't lead to much visibility as no one maybe checking that hash tag. I explained all that.. and yet did a bit of live tweeting and as expected it didn't get much response at all.
What I was not expecting is that on the basis of this, he decided live tweeting at that big event from where another 50 people would be tweeting wouldn't be useful either and decided not to go with it.
Similarly sometime back I had given a few ideas to a company who liked it while the deal didn't get finalised they did do something on the lines of an idea I had given. However they obviously did not get what the concept was and mis-managed it, so now its a pretty pointless move for them. In fact might even get them some criticism. After this they may think my idea wouldn't work... but they didn't have a clue what they were doing!
So I have realised that its better to be a little close mouthed about many social media tactics cause the client may misunderstand and worse mis-implement them!
The thing about Twitter that I keep trying to explain to people,
People being,
the ones who go like "but why do you want to put something on Twitter? Is it cause you don't have any friends... blah blah... "
and
the ones who go like,
"Twitter is definitely a great way to keep posting all day long about my company" and
the ones who just act surprised when I tell them
"Oh ya I found that out on Twitter... I am going to meet some twitter friends.... I will check that on Twitter".... and so on
So the thing I keep trying to explain is that when everyone is tweeting the little quirks that people have which can't or don't actually get shared with anyone comes across and it creates a little pool of quirky people who have now shared their quirks with each other. The quirk that drew this matter across to me was tweeple making up words!
So in my circle of friends I am probably the only geek who actually makes words..
Sorrible: It was so horrible that I am sorry to be part of it or I am so sorry that it was so horrible :D
Assholy: Don't have to explain this one.
Now imagine my surprise when I see tweets like this,
:) Twitter is fun!
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!
Managing many twitter accounts... one thing I have realized whether it is lead generation, conversing or building followers it all boils down to every individual tweet... whether that one tweet is interesting enough to gain a reply, spike the persons curiosity or even get them to follow.
Its all about those 140 characters.
No, I am not exaggerating, cause I have seen it in so many different situations and platforms. The same message wrapped in a different way - lose the 'pitching attitude' from it or become that tad bit informal and all of a sudden there is a real JUMP in how successful it is.
Crucial to take the time and pay attention to the conversation, how you are forming your words and then your sentences. After we take that much care.. it boils down to the listener/reader...
As listeners we need to give people a chance, cause they may be bad with simple semantics.. so look beyond the words at the aura :D (sorry that was a joke... the joke is that I don't really know how we can look beyond the words... I mean its damn tough to gauge a persons 'heart' or real intentions at least for me..)
What do you think guys and girls... ever seen this when socializing over new media?
Now a days whenever I introduce myself to people (who are internet active) I always add my twitter handle. Initially I thought it was weird as many people barely know Twitter. On thinking further, I find one benefit of telling the Twitter handle is that it gives a clear connect to me. Like if they wanna talk more etc.. we can always connect on Twitter. Its really the only way I can actually be in contact with people I meet for a short time.
Also this sort of brings internet savvy people closer to Twitter. So more people to do masti with :) (Muhahahah)
Actually the deeper reason is that my introduction feels more complete when I add a Twitter handle (a point of contact with me) cause frankly I cannot say 4-5 lines and sum myself up! I have stuff happening in many different aspects of myself.
This new media gives us tools to be in touch with a lot of contacts without making it to time or resource consuming may as well use it.
If you are just reading this blog post and don't have a blog or Twitter of your own, well sorry to say you are just a VUP then! VUP = Very Unimportant Person!
Many companies are offering some facilities to its customers when they are the "Blog/Twitter VIPs"
VIP
I just have to tweet about some problem with my ICICI, Airtel or Vodafone (and probably some other brands I am not aware of yet) accounts and they will contact me on Twitter. I have personally used this facility of ICICI bank, where I DM them my phone number and a customer rep calls me and solves whatever my queries are. Before I have gone to the bank and spoken to customers reps on the phone and its just not so simple!
My first such experience of VIP treatment happened with a non profit, humanitarian organization. I had a bad time there when I was volunteering and talking about it to the admin did not help at all. It was all a pain. I even spent time and money flying there just to understand what went wrong but to no avail. I come back and blog about my experiences and Voila - I get called by one of the admin. (Read more)
Facility for the Online Junta
On the flip side however, I can see this also as a facility, I mean its damn convenient for me to simply tweet to a company when I am facing some problems. In fact I recently saw that HDFC bank is also on Twitter so will probably open my second account in this bank over an SBI.
Social Media
A lot of social media guys are considering this customer service given via Twitter/Blogs as very good usage of social media. I think that for brands which are hugely offline like all those mentioned above ICICI, Airtel, Vodafone... they need to have an awesome customer service for all the people not just the Online ones.
All of a sudden due to this social media boom, companies are getting really scared of bad publicity and thus trying to fix that. Do they realize that the bad publicity would happen offline too?
What do you think of this customer service being given by major brands across the world??
Recently been configuring Twitter lists for a client, after couple of months of compiling the list I am amazed at how powerful it can be!
Following the right people on the list you can get all news of the industry/niche, personal thoughts of thought leaders in the niche and lot of other interesting stuff!
In fact I now find the Twitter list comprehensive enough to consider not following Google alerts for the industry keywords. Google alerts most of the time send in a lot of junk and repetitive links of article directories and some such along with the few good links. While I guess on Twitter all the good links get tweeted!
Try it out:
First have a specific topic you want to follow.
Then follow all the relevant people who are related to that field. You need to work and really snuff out the good people and list them.
Bunch of tools are available that provide automatic tweeting of any feed updates. (Hootsuite, Buzzom, SocialOomph) They provide options of doing it every 2,3,4,6,8,12 or 24 hours. The problem with these is that if I put in many feeds for a 8hr or 12 hr updation. All those feed updates are pushed out at the same freakin minute!!
It spams users. A feature which allows us to input a spacing time is needed. Like 15 or 30 minutes between each update. Currently I can safely put two feeds one for 8hrs and another for 12 hrs they would be tweeted together only rarely so I can avoid sudden flux of tweets.
These automated tweets are pretty good for company accounts. For my company DigiWhirl, updates are mainly automated. I already have my personal Twitter, so it didn't seem to make sense (mostly time wise) for me to have a very active one for my company. Every once in a while I do tweet custom stuff though.
That reminds me I am planning to experiment with those automatic follow/unfollow twitter clients. Where I can automatically follow all those following me and unfollow any unfollowers. I wanna see what results I get.
For people who want like 20k or 30k followers in couple of months I think that might be only option.
Some time back Twitter introduced the promoted tweets which I am sorry I could not cover on this blog. Today there was a trending surprise! Disney's Toy Story 3 is a promoted trending topic!
Quite cool, I think!
I really like the fact that the 'promoted' is very obvious so there is no ethical issues where a paid tweet appears like its organic. It is a good integration of an advertisement into the twitter culture. To put it in @chin80's tweet,
What do you think about these new Twitter promoted ads?
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
How important is automated content generation in Social Media? I have seen many twitter profiles who have many automated feeds in their twitter. These are not bots, they are actually popular twitter people who for some reason are tweeting a lot of autofeeds! These tweeps often have over 10,000 followers. Moreover these feeds are not their own blogs or sites!
I myself was trying out such feeds, but did not see much ROI in it, so have removed them as of now. Used moderately I find that such RSS updates are useful, as they reduce the need for content generation when managing accounts especially for companies.
Mashable recently had an article stating that on Google Buzz, 89% of the content is autogenerated! Thats a pretty huge figure!
Most of this automation is from Twitter sync where tweets of the individual get buzzed also. It also includes RSS of blogs, newspapers etc... I have very promptly stopped following anyone who has synced their twitter with buzz! I anyway would follow them on twitter.
I myself have synced this blog to my Buzz, Twitter and Facebook. That I feel is useful since I often forget to update the networks individually.
What do you think about auto generated content? What are your thoughts on your twitter or buzz contacts sending out feeds?
Just pinged @mehulved on Twitter to find out whats up with India's biggest cycling network as Ning becomes paid only. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this cyclists network is currently based on Ning.
It became an interesting talk about Ning migration ideas, take a look, (the tweets without a profile shot are mine)
So I guess you can ping @mehulved or @iphonefresh if you also have a Ning account and wanna migrate.
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?
A few of us have started Twitter chats on Business Productivity every Thursday. The first chat was yesterday, the topic was Email Overload. Lot of people shared their tips, tricks on how they manage their emails. It was pretty good! I got to learn quite a bit of stuff!
| | sahilparikh: | I normally check my mail only a few times in the day. Reply to the most important first. Don't treat emails as your tasklist #simpli5 |
| guglanisam: | Whenever I find my self sending same reply to many mails I create "canned response" (gmail feature). It works like magic #simpli5 | |
| | deskaway: | Interesting article on how to manage an overwhelmed Inbox http://ow.ly/1qKbm #simpli5 |
| priyankawriting: | didnt know abt this! RT @guglanisam: Whenever I send same reply to many mails I create "canned response" (gmail feature). #simpli5 | |
| sahilparikh: | @guglanisam I color some labels in red to mark imp mails so that I don't have to scan all emails #simpli5 | |
| priyankawriting: | Also scan unread emails and delete all spammy ones that inevitably make way to my inbox (why god, why!!) #simpli5 |
| mrjain: | @priyankawriting I use filters and anything in my inbox is automatically my to-do list #simpli5 #simpli5 | |
| raghavsoni: | @sahilparikh I create filters 2 mark all imp. mails related 2 clients to folders like - Action(Immediate) , Someday (At ease) #simpli5 |
Read the entire chat transcript
We plan to have these chats every Thursday from 7pm to 8pm IST. So do join in! For more info and notifications about topics for coming week please follow @simpli5
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?
Lately I have been doing a number of experiments, currently they are all on Twitter, maybe they will move to other platforms later on. I also came across an article about Twitter Quantity Experiment on WWD,
Since the experiment, I’ve returned to my pre-experiment tweet average. Since upping my tweet quantity didn’t appear to have any value, there’s no reason to bombard my followers with more tweets. Read More.
So increased tweeting didn't have much effect to the authors popularity on Twitter. A similar one that I am doing currently is posting automated updates on my personal twitter. I have seen so many people do this, these are people who have like tens of thousand followers. So I was wondering how this helps, so I configured some feed updates.
Currently I have 5 auto updates that are sent out once a day.
Difference: A few posts get retweeted, a few people told me to STOP with the feeds and thats about it. The twitter followers anyway keep increasing at a slow but steady pace, I don't think that has picked up.
I also have a few other experiments going on, will tell you about that in other posts. Since social media is new and upcoming what works and what doesn't is still all blurry. No clear answers are available. This is why experimenting makes sense.
One tip: Take a look at social media case studies of similar companies or individuals to see what they are doing, and what works for them. This kinda gives a reference scale. Comparing to a different niche will not be valid.
When I told my parents that actress Gul Panag often tweets about her dog Milo and has even created a twitter account for him (@super_milo) they didn't know whether to laugh or to think its insane!
Well a recent study on Trendspotters actually finds out that 'dogs' are more tweeted about than dads, sisters, brothers, girlfriends, daughters and other relatives!
Only 'friends' and Moms are tweeted of more than Dogs!
How much do you and your friends tweet about pets?
Twitter spam has been going around since the last week. Initially it was a virus that caused such messages,
Today I received these from couple of people I follow... the URL is a banned one.
Some of the things we can do:
- inform the people who have spammed us about their account being infected.
- change our password
- remove permission to 3rd party apps.
Was just listening to the live feed of the Invisible Children standout outside a senator Coburn's office. This senator is holding up a bill to end war in Uganda, which is the longest running war in Africa.
Read more about this here.
[Invisible Children are a bunch of people working towards stopping war in Africa and helping child soldiers, who are just abducted and made to fight]
One of their ideas to get celebrities to talk about their cause, is called Twitter Bomb. They basically ask all the live stream viewers to send out a tweet about the cause (including #coburnsayyes and the website URL) to one particular celebrity at the same time. :D
I think its pretty cool!
