Social media platforms might seem like the newest way of doing business, but if you look back people have been socially networking since the dawn of civilization, way before social media sites. It was basically printed marketing materials that businesses used to connect to their customers. Well, this practice is still on but with an aggressive inclusion of Social Media Marketing too. Few newspaper brands have taken a step to embrace social media to enhance their newspaper’s content and increase revenue. With a few excellent ideas and strategic steps newspapers can employ social media to create a journey for readers & consumers rather than just a linear reading experience.

What is spoken about here is the ‘hard to define’ nature of emotional connection of brands. How brand managers can think of ways to strengthen the connection between their brand and the target market. Also a light is thrown upon what some of the reputed brands have done with the emotion of content & tone. Moving further the statistics in this context bring in some awareness to this element too.

If marketing is a pie, then content marketing is definitely the bigger slice of it. Most of the brand managers, marketers, companies and/or sectors would agree with this statement. Content marketing is indeed the most appealing trend of this year. If done right, it can create wonders to leading to traffic and driving sales. The key to this is to have a plan, a plan to target effectively & grab your target audience’s attention. There is no doubt about the fact that social media & mobile marketing have also showcased content to be supreme. Brands therefore, are now creating original content to engage customers. If B2B sector is taken into consideration, here the brands foster content usage by positioning company as a thought leader to the customers, producing demand.

Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamlan when asked how does he heightens the frightful experience in his films, replied that it was about evoking the basic human emotion – fear of unknown. It’s this fear of unknown which creates panic in terror situations like the one witnessed in Mumbai. And knowledge (information in this case) is the antidote to it. It is important that while on one hand we have National Security Guards planning a detailed and thorough rescue operation, the communications wing (don’t know if anything like this exists currently) of the government provides correct and timely information to common man.

While watching the brutal and cowardly acts of the terrorists on TV and Internet, I strongly felt that social media could have been put to better use by the official agencies. It is as much important to give out news to people as it is to evict those terrorists especially when people from all over the world have been held hostage. Mind you, by giving out news, I am not even for a second hinting at giving out NSG’s operational details!!

This blog post has stemmed from the interesting discussion that my earlier post generated ‘Is advertising on Facebook called Social Media Marketing?” Mostly all agreed that while advertising on Facebook helped the marketer focus to the right target audience, it was still advertising.

Social Media Marketing on the other hand implicitly calls for user participation and building dialogue. Both of which remain absent with Facebook advertising form of communication. To me if there is one thing that segregates social media from others is the use of word ‘Audience’.