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The business of social media – Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about how Facebook and Twitter should be used for business purposes, and today, I will share information on how LinkedIn and Youtube should be used. Hope it helps.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn has fewer but more active users as compared to Twitter. It is the ultimate in professional social network. Today, 80 per cent of companies in the US are using social media to recruit, out of which 95 per cent use LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is more than just a place for your resume. For professionals, it means connecting to those who you’ve worked with, expanding your network to connect with people in a similar profession, having people recommend your work, optimizing your profile, adding links to your portfolio, blog or Twitter, and finding the right answers to work-related questions from experts in your network. It also means being part of subject-specific groups, interacting within the group to further build your network, finding jobs in your field (the greatness that LinkedIn is, it finds and suggests jobs based on your profile) and basically have a network that manages your professional profile and helps you in your job search.

For companies and HR departments, it means exposing their brand/organization to the professional world, finding the best match for available positions within their company, building a community, finding potential suppliers and staying on top of the recruitment and branding game.

What helped LinkedIn be such a strictly professional network is its watertight 'connections' criteria. You can only add someone you personally know, or you will need to be introduced by a shared contact.

Businesses can upgrade to business and pro accounts by paying a monthly fee to avail of even better services, while individuals can do the same to be more searchable on LinkedIn.

What’s more, LinkedIn helps businesses generate leads, win clients and make deals. Could there be anything more you could ask for?

Youtube:

Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. It is a video hosting platform that has more than 100 million videos viewed each day, out of which ten million are unique visitors. While you may think how it will help you run a software business when most people are watching music videos of the latest Lady Gaga release, here’s how:

1) You can create a presentation of your software and upload it to Youtube. Promote the same through your other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

2) You can give a product demo

3) You can create a video of answers to the most frequently asked questions and send the link to your users/customers on Facebook and Twitter

4) You can use the video to drive traffic to your website by displaying company information in every video including name, URL, phone number and email address.

5) You can embed videos to your blog

6) You can promote an event, be creative with the video, break a few rules, train employees, show your clients about a latest development in your product, post customer video testimonials to add to your credibility, take customers and clients on your office tour, and even post interviews with experts to add credibility to your product.

And making and uploading a video is easier than you think, read this article for more tips to get the best out of your business on Youtube

So that’s about it for the bigwigs in social networks and how they can help in money-making and client/customer reach.

Hope you find this useful for the next time you plan a social media campaign for your brand.

Later, my besties.

#socialmedia #businessandsocialmedia #socialmediaforbusiness #socialnetowrksforbusiness #corporatesocialmedia

The business of Social Media - Part one

By now, you must have figured my obsession with social media. Truth is, I better be obsessed with a technological advancement that is only growing bigger and better by the day, and creeping into almost all professions slowly but surely.

Most people today are familiar with the different purposes of social networks, what each is best for and what benefits you can derive from each. Today, I am prodding in a bit deeper, exploring the business-y side of each, and explaining how they fit into the scheme of things for brands and businesses.

1) Facebook:

It’s easier to start with the biggest. Perhaps the best thing to have happened to the world in this century, Facebook quickly rose to heights of popularity no brand could imagine. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US and there are almost 60 million status updates from around the world on a single day.

Generally used by people to keep in touch with friends, Facebook is fast taking over as a social network that is profitable for businesses and can help brands earn popularity and have a greater ROI. Besides the usual picture, link or video sharing, Facebook has ads that can help you connect with existing and potential customers, narrow your audience by location, age and interests, test simple image and text-based ads, promote your brand, website or Facebook page, increase the ad’s influence by using the power of ‘like’, build a community around your business, control your budget, and finally track your progress.

You can even set up brand pages and groups that have discussion forums, share useful articles and links to presentations and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, install appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile, post your newsletter subscription information, market your products by posting discounts and package deals, join industry networks and alumni groups related to your business, post upcoming events or webinars, conferences and other programs and in short be awesome on Facebook, dialoguing with all your contacts/customers.

Here are some great facts about this behemoth.

2) Twitter:

Almost another form of text-messaging, Twitter is the fastest-growing web brand that uses micro-blogging for macro-profit! The challenge is to crunch the best and most useful information for your customer in 140 characters (with space, buddies), using a shortened URL. Companies and brands can use Twitter effectively to handle customer questions, concerns and complaints, refute rumours, garner support for a cause, spread the word (and hopefully be a trending topic), and basically just update customers (followers) about what you’re working on.

Hashtags (#) are very important to Twitter as they make your tweets searchable not only on Twitter but also on Google indexing. Using a shortened URL helps to keep a track and monitor on how many followers retweeted (simply reposted your content or tweet) or clicked on your link.

The trick is to remain extremely active on Twitter (at least 15 tweets a day, but no more than 25), use the right hash tags and post content that is of relevance to your followers.

Another important thing to do is to listen – listen to what is being said about not just your brand but also the competitor’s, acknowledge and then respond appropriately. Remember, it is not always about getting the maximum number of followers, it is about getting a small but crucial group that is engaged in your brand and helps you serve better.

You will be surprised how many apps and software are out there to help you increase your Twitter following, auto schedule your tweets, track and analyze the progress you’re making and tools that will help you earn more followers. A simple Google search should be enough.

Here are two other articles that will help you be better on Twitter.

Phew! That’s a lot of information for today folks, I will continue with LinkedIn and Youtube tomorrow.

#socialmedia #socialmediaforbusiness #corporatesocialmedia

Social media and screams

Did I ever mention that I am a huge horror movie fan? So much so, that I know most horror movies starting from the 70s to until now. And you do know I am a self-proclaimed social media geek. So I thought why not write about how the two got together and made their first baby.

We all know that Paranormal Activity was a super low budget movie, made using a handycam and amateur actors and edited as a home video. And there was absolutely no advertising budget. With a production budget of $10,000, Paranormal Activity may never have made it to movie halls. When Paramount received the movie, they thought changing the concept of the movie to suit a theatrical environment would be unjust. And thus, the director of the movie and Paramount pictures set about getting audiences involved in promoting the film – through the wonderful, wonderful channels of social media of course.

So here’s what they came up with:

Objective: To create a pre-release experience that let people associate with the film in an organic way and promote it to other movie goers.

Strategy: Let the audience be the participants that drum up more excitement and anticipation for the film which would have otherwise been impossible to achieve in a pre-social media world. In other words, the audience would do the bulk of the work to market the movie and demand its theatrical release.

The solution: A campaign on popular networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Eventful that had the ability of going viral, a blog and a microsite.

The process:

1) Instead of red carpet premiere parties, the movie had a midnight premiere in college campuses where young, web-savvy students formed the audience.

2) Student reactions while watching the film were recorded and these clips replaced promo clips, forming the core of the campaign, and were simultaneously released across all networks. These were the very videos that went viral.

3) Reviews were of actual viewers rather than movie critics. And these reviews flooded other college campuses and community zones instead of newspapers or billboards. Each piece of content released had a social sharing element to it, so spreading the word was as easy as a click.

4) Activity on Twitter slows down late at night. But that is exactly when Paranormal Activity could most get into viewers' psyche by releasing newer dope on the film. This suggested that Paranormal Activity movie watchers were having trouble sleeping in the night. Subsequently, Paranormal Activity was the longest trending topic on Twitter for a movie.

5) Bank on what people can’t have, so the demand rises is the strategy they used. By building hype around the scarcity of distribution rights, the movie started with a limited release at unusual places — 13 theatres on or near college campuses. They then let fans decide where the film would roll out next, through a site on Eventful where fans could "demand" a screening and prove their interest in seeing the film.

The result : A highly successful consumer-generated marketing campaign, Paranormal Activity was demanded by over a million people, thus a nationwide release was scheduled. Paranormal Activity had more viewers than Saw on its opening weekend. The movie grossed over $107,000,000 at the box office and an additional $16,000,000 on DVD and fans, who had worked to promote the film, had their names added to the film's credits. About 150,000 of those names now appear at the end of the film.

Conclusion: What worked for the movie was ‘the power of community’ and reiterating the message ‘consumer is king’ by letting the audience take control of the movie’s distribution strategy. Building a rapport with potential movie goers, by allowing their friends and family to decide if a movie is worth watching or not, instead of bombarding people with direct marketing and traditional advertising also proved advantageous. Customization of campaigns and tweaking them to meet area-specific demands was another great way of handling the whole process.

Other movies that have had tremendous pre-release social media success attributing to screen success are Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows and X-Men (I can only remember two off the top of my head).

But while I truly believe it is essential to have all the right elements that demand a social media success or viral campaign, it is also the concept in itself that is responsible for arousing social media interest leading to success. The general public these days responds better to gore, shock, horror, violence and otherwise socially-unacceptable acts – which is one reason why I think a movie like ‘Titanic’ would have been a real dud on social media.

Are there any such movies you can think of that could have pulled it or sucked at it on social media?

#moviesandsocialmedia #socialmedia #paranormalactivity #horrormovies

How not to be monomaniacal

It is a typical case of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side. You can call me a woman who struggles to keep an identity, only to find I am attracted to another one, all too soon.

As a kid, I had fancy notions about a career. I hated numbers, but I still somehow thought I could escape the clutches of Math to be an aeronautical engineer. At an age when I hardly understood the meaning of the title, let alone the job it would bring, I wanted to be a cosmonaut. Doctor or teacher was almost like a fall-back career option. “When everything else fails,” I thought to myself, “I can always go back and study to be a doctor or teacher.”

I was never diagnosed with any level of attention deficit syndrome, but my mother always wondered how I sat through the six hours at school. While other kids rode the bicycle to fetch things for their mother from the supermarket, I ran like a hyperactive, almost neurotic kid.

I loved to keep my mind occupied. On days I didn’t have much to do, I sat by the mirror and talked to myself. Of course, soliloquy is an art. And I have mastered it. Anyhow, I came to dread the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ for I never had a definite answer and I was afraid the teacher would find out I made a profession up in my mind just before my turn to answer the question.

I felt lost, distraught, and deprived of a sense of direction. And so I began reading and writing a lot. Like, a lot. That’s when I began discovering my love for words, and the bibliophile inside me. As I read books on diverse topics, I began discovering my love for music, movies, fashion, technology and interior decoration. And today, I’m in a career that would let me string all of my interests together. Public Relations. Then came social media, and now I’m rediscovering my passions using social media, communications and public relations.

And here’s how I think you can avoid being a mono-subject expert and explore your interests in varied areas that can eventually translate in a true career and a job that you will love.

Flex your muscles:

If you haven’t yet figured out what you want to do in life, don’t fret, instead flex. Be like the grasshopper; use your metaphorical feelers to explore your surroundings. Change professions – there’s nothing wrong with that. Reading about various subject matters is a good start. And then, put it into practice. For example, if you are an accountant who likes to be around nature, use your weekends to raise a garden. Learn about a new plant, or read about the best way to rear a cactus (or any other plant of your choice). Visit your local nursery or a park. You will be thrilled how much knowledge you can gain in a single day. Eventually, you can be a nursery owner yourself or a part time botanist who tutors students.

Add your tuppence (two pence/cents):

Scientists don’t always talk about discoveries and inventions when they meet with people, friends and family. Be the well-rounded speaker of the group. It has much value to everyone. And you don’t have to be an expert in the subject to share your experiences or have an input to a conversation. If you don’t know where to begin, start with talking about the latest book you read, or the last movie you saw and why you think it worked/did not work for you. Maybe, even talk about your favourite cuisine or your next hiking trip.

Learn the ropes:

Do not be all talks and no show. Know what you’re talking about or getting into. Research your specific interests as much as possible. If you like rock music, you are bound to want to know more about the different bands, artist names, concerts, sub-genres of rock, and likewise. What you can gain from knowing all these, you ask. Why, you can start a blog about rock music, and get others interested in learning more about the topic through your blog. Who knows, you may become influential enough to write a review of a new rock band or the last concert you attended and get paid for it.

Be a real person:

And by that I mean, keep doing the normal things you always do. Laugh, be nervous at times, have friends, eat heartily (and drink too), learn a new recipe and have a life. Read a joke, go to the beach, windowshop, try a different cuisine, have a random chat with someone on the subway and most importantly, have something to contribute to the society.

***

At the end of it, you should pursue the one thing that makes your heart beat faster...the rest will just follow

#monomaniac #beanexpert #hownottosuck

Six things your employer or your HR won’t tell you

Now, you may have the best job ever, but there’s always something your employer or human resources department doesn’t want you to know. Not that they are conspiring against you, it just so happens that you are not important enough to know what lies beneath. And while I am scouring the internet to look for best ways to impress a potential employer, I am also trying to build on what I should, or in this case, shouldn’t do, to keep my job. So, here goes:

1) We don’t stop at just ‘Googling’ your name

The HR department is the perfect sleuth in a corporate environment. And while it is certain that your name will be Googled for a background check, it is almost doubly certain that potential employers, especially the big-wigs of the industry go far and beyond to ensure you have a clean track record in cyberspace. Social media stalking may be the norm, but companies now-a-days also deploy progressive online monitoring platforms to dig deeper and yank the skeletons out of your closet. After all, what goes on the internet stays there forever. Now, where have I heard that before?

Tip: Google you name and see what comes up. If you are surprised, your employer is less than impressed. Find a way to take the unwanted and unfavourable information down. If you can’t, have a solid explanation for how it went there in the first place. If you can’t absolutely wiggle out of it, turn the disadvantageous situation into a lesson learnt with a positive outcome.

2) We don’t care about your job as much as ours

Unless your immediate reporting boss is the owner of the company you work at, your boss is an employee too. And so are the HR guys. In which case, everyone is scrambling to keep their jobs. So, don’t expect the boss or HR to read your mind and arrange for a training session to help you deal with that new company software more effectively. If you need help, training or support, it’s YOUR DUTY to let them know. And well in advance. Not before a client presentation.

Tip: Always be proactive. There is nothing wrong with asking questions. Even the silly ones. For your boss was once where you’re now, and he knows exactly how to get the job done. All you need to do is ASK.

3) You are promoted because you’re doing so well in your current position

Sad but true, your best career move isn’t always in the best interest of the company. So while you may be ready to jump two steps up the corporate ladder, make sure your boss thinks the same way about you. For, if you kick ass at your current position, chances are the employer prefers you to stay exactly where you are.

Tip: Before broaching the topic of promotion, pause and think. Assess your skill; match it to the next position’s profile. Have answers to questions like ‘why should you take a leap when the current position brings out the best in you?’ Finally, have a persuasive pitch that reflects your eagerness and your capability.

4) Your personal life is cutting into the time you should be devoting to us

Beware, all your activity, on the internet as well as time spent eating, being on the phone, texting, chatting with a co-worker, using the restroom or just plain smoke breaks are monitored. Far worse, your internet time on non-professional activity is most likely documented. So while you think you can sneak in a quick IM or linger by the coffee machine a little longer without anyone noticing, remember there’s always someone watching. ALWAYS.

Tip: Allot a time of the day, say a part of your lunch hour, to check your personal social networks. If the company disallows its use, refrain completely. Keep a tab on the breaks you’re taking and their duration. Have a stopwatch on your computer to monitor your break time. Whatever you do, DO NOT let the total not-ready time go beyond 20 minutes in a given day.

5) Your keenness annoys the hell out of us

Agreed, it is good to be interested in everything that is related to your job and ask the right questions. But there’s difference between being a keener and going overboard with your eagerness. No one has that extra time during the day to listen to how awesome the company can be with your great suggestions or how you would like to learn the latest version of Photoshop so you can design your website. Seriously, you’re no better than the slacker in the office corner if you are overtly enthusiastic all the time.

Tip: Keep it professional. If you must, ask only close-ended questions and stop at one or two. Do not start a trail. As far as possible, avoid questions that aren’t directly related to the job at hand, altogether.

6) We don’t like that you’re dating a co-worker

Another truth. Especially if you are fairly recent in the company, and anything less than six months is considered recent. Many companies disallow dating co-workers (really, they exist), but if you ever find yourself dating one in a company that allows them, keep it barely visible and under the surface. Be upfront, do not lie, but at the same time, do not let it lax your work load. Public display of affection is strictly a no-no. And mushy talks and hand-holding are considered PDAs.

Tip: Do not park yourselves next to each other. It is bound to disrupt the work environment. Talk only during the break. Be cautious about what you discuss during the breaks with your partner. There’s always someone eavesdropping. Do not NOT SHOW at work on the same day.

#retainajob #keepmyjob #employeremployeerelationship

I'm still partial to advertising

Sometimes, it is not easy to find your calling. And careers can be tricky things.

In my span of four years as a writer, the phase I enjoyed most was that of a copywriter. I loved what it did to me. I loved reading through advertising archives, spending time on the internet looking for award-winning copy, researching great campaigns and most importantly, admiring good copy. I simply adored flipping through the Lürzers archive.

Soon, I wanted to be doing more with my words, maybe not write as much, maybe talk a little more. And so, I switched to Corporate Communications and Public Relations. Although, I am happy to be doing what I am, my mind drifts back to the time I spent in advertising and almost involuntarily I find myself researching ads again and revisiting copy+art bookmarks. I have to admit, I still have a soft-corner for advertising and to this date I dig good copy. I love the messages a good ad copy can contain, and how the words can speak at you and influence your decision or create a lasting brand impression..

One such campaign I truly feel did a great job at establishing the opposite of a wise notion around the world was Diesel's "Be Stupid" campaign. It is a campaign that pushes people to take risks and move beyond what is accepted or normal and sensible. Here are some print ads I was so compelled to share with you all. Hope you enjoy the copy as much as I did. I especially enjoy the fine balance the pictures strike and perfectly complement the words.

#Advertising #PRandadvertising #Dieselcampaign #bestupid

A little girl in a tall man's world

Minimal Stress. Yeah, that's what it feels like to be a little girl in a tall man's world. I feel favoured when I am offered a seat in the subway. Or when the door is held open.

As a foreigner in a white land and as a petite package, I have many advantages, but just as many disadvantages. It is not easy being different, but what's even worse is being the same as everyone else.

I wonder what the big guys would feel when I takeover as the CEO of a company. Will the door still be held open? Yes, this time a chair will be pulled out too.

The rest, as they say, is the future!!

#growingup #anewcountry #communicator

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