Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

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Quora Quora!

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Do you use Quora? Should you use Quora? In the last couple of weeks, Quora has become the trendy pick as a breakout site for 2011. Traffic increased tremendously in December but then more than doubled again in early January, as per information released on Quora couple of weeks ago.

What’s the noise all about?

Quora is an online knowledge market, founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in January 2010, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers on many topics and allows users to collaborate on them.

Quora’s service allows users to ask questions and give answers. Additionally, users can comment on the questions and answers and “upvote” or “downvote” the answers. An “Answer Summary” can be created to reflect the consensus of the community. This summary is a wiki that can be edited by any registered user. Recently a blogging feature called Quora Posts has also been added.

Upvote and Downvote Option

Who is behind the noise?

Co-founded by Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s former CTO) and Charlie Cheever, it received funding from Benchmark Capital in March 2010, valuing the start-up at a rumored $86 million. Matt Cohler, a former Facebook executive, has taken a board seat at the company.

Co-founder Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever

Why so much of noise?

On December 26, 2010, Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist who earlier was at Microsoft and is known for his prominent blog Scobleizer, blogged ‘Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?’ This effectively endorsed the site as the next big thing.  PC Magazine, Techcrunch, TNW and FastCompany were amongst the many media outlets that quickly followed.  This, coupled with social graph on-boarding with Twitter, Facebook and email integration, lead to truly viral growth.

Pegged as a reverse blogging site rather than a simple Q&A site, Quora is trying hard to establish itself as an alternate to Yahoo Answers. According to the co-founders of the site, Quora is canvas waiting to be painted upon. “When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.”

What seems to be giving Quora the edge over other sites is the fact that each response has to be supplemented with the user’s real identity. This makes the answers that more authentic and believable. People say they feel smarter after they use Quora.

The magic of revealing the identity lies in something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time. The signal to noise ratio is extremely high. Quora is a great place to find answers about products from prominent people involved with them. It’s also a great place for those prominent people to disagree, publicly. And this gives it a clear advantage of being live and buzzing.

How is the noise being created?

Quora is solving the problem that Google’s been trying to solve forever – creating the database of intentions. The most important thing about searching is to have a properly framed search string that will lead the searcher to the desired result.

In most of the cases, this perfect question has already been framed and been answered. All one needs to do is find it. And that is exactly what Quora is doing. This cuts out the link web that google provides for a query, or avoid the mindless answers people post on Yahoo answer. And unlike Linkedin, where you may get a great answer, you are not restricted to how many questions you can ask or look for.

Has Quora found a voice in India?

Not yet. Though according to Google AdPlanner, Quora has 30,000 unique monthly users in India — around 8% of total Quora users. Most people who use Quora in India are just beginning to get a feel of how this unique platform works. But make no mistake, going by the rate at which Scribd became the place to research for information in India, Quora will soon be amongst the most popular research site. Just for reference, while researching for this article we came across this question on Quora: “What are the key differences in economic policy of China and India?” which had two responses. Suffice to say, this is a great starting point for any researcher.

Finding its footing in India

Quora could do to Google and Yahoo Answers what Facebook did to Orkut and MySpace, make Q&A sites more social and fun. Whether the noise and excitement survives post the initial euphoria will have to be seen. It’s early days but the concept could do well if the quality of the answers remains high and spam remains low.

To read more on Question and Answer site, check our previous post.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Media Research, Target Audience | No Comments »

Bloggerati of the Fortnight: Abhijit Bhaduri

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Blogging is something which anyone can take up. It is not limited to people who are very articulate or very    influential. Although, if you have a knack of using the right words, you will make a better connection with your readers and one such person is, Abhijit Bhaduri.

Mr. Bhaduri works as the Chief Learning Officer for the Wipro group. This Economics graduate from SRCC, New Delhi also has a degree in law and has done Post Graduation in Human Resources from Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur. A theater lover and an actor himself, Abhijit has written several books, hosted a radio show in US and is on the Advisory Board of Wharton’s prestigious program for Chief Learning Officers that is run by the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an advisor on Social Media usage for SHRM in India.

With a career that has seen him work with corporate giants such as Microsoft, PepsiCo, Colgate and Tata Steel, his writing is as distinct from corporate language as day is to night. His writing comes across as simple, elegant and nostalgic. Of course it helps that Abhijit is an accomplished cartoonist. His writing almost always paints the exact picture that you would associate with the words you are reading.

“When you have a snow storm brewing outside, being indoors next to the
fireside is the closest to Heaven one can get.”

So complete is his word illustration that it drives you to think what the result or the outcome of such an event would be. More importantly, it makes you want to experience the words in real life, experience the eventuality of the words.

“Raga Bhatiyar is a raga you listen to as you are still in bed,
in that half asleep half awake state. Almost like what the first day of the calendar feels like.
A little hazy as you still dwell on the last year gone by before you wonder what
lies ahead as the year unfolds.”

His writing is simple. His reactions even simpler. Not the one to shy away from calling a spade a spade, he can drive home the point in a manner most of us will struggle to explain. A classic technique of writing   for the man on the road works brilliantly.

“When he turned director in 2007 with Tare Zameen Par, he made the nation’s parents
feel guilty about living their dreams through their children.”

What works best with Abhijit’s writing is his ability to break complex things down to simplest communication blocks. Blocks which are easy to understand but very difficult to forget. It is this ability of the writer that leaves a lasting impression on his readers mind.

“We are continuously making choices and living with the consequences of making those choices. There are moments when we make a choice and a moment later wish that we could start again.”

The magic with Abhijit Bhaduri’s writing lies in his desire to live an experience and share it with others in the same way as he felt it. And that also makes him our first Bloggerati of the Fortnight.

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Posted in BOTF | 3 Comments »

The virtual world gets a new currency

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

It is often said that if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in terms of population behind China and India. For a country of this size, it is but natural to have a currency of its own. No wonder, Facebook Credits are fast becoming the dollar equivalent in the virtual world.

The new world economy

Facebook Credits are a virtual currency that users can use to buy virtual goods in many games and apps on the Facebook platform. Currently users can use Facebook Credits to purchase premium items in popular games and apps like CityVille, FarmVille, Cafe World, EA Sports FIFA Superstars etc.

The new banking system

You can purchase Facebook Credits using your credit card, PayPal, or a mobile phone. The Facebook Games Dashboards displays your available balance. You can directly purchase credits from the dashboards also. A lot of games also have the option to let you purchase directly.

The goal with Facebook Credits is to give people that use Facebook an easy, convenient and trusted way to buy premium items in games and applications, while creating unique opportunities for developers to build successful, sustainable businesses. Facebook Credits are now used in more than 200 games and applications on Facebook from more than 75 developers.

The global impact

What this means is, with more than 500,000 applications on Facebook, and millions of virtual goods within those applications (particularly games), applications have become an increasingly valuable part of the user experience. And Facebook Credits is the currency that makes purchasing these virtual items across applications possible in a fast and simple manner.

Generally it’s free to play the games on Facebook but users can get ahead if they pump in actual money to buy virtual goods. With 200 million people playing games on Facebook every month, according to the site’s own figures, it only takes a small proportion of paying customers to generate healthy revenue.

With the likes of Zynga, the biggest social game company and developers of Cityville and Farmville, signing to deal in Facebook Credits in their games, it has cemented Facebook Credits economic strength. Industry estimates say that Zynga has brought in between $500 million to $700 million in revenue this year from the sale of virtual goods. That is a lot of money spent in a virtual world. And if Zynga is to make Facebook Credits as its official currency for these games, Facebook Credits can soon become the desired currency world over.

Emerging Trend

This has already led to Facebook Credits debuting  in real world. Facebook began selling Facebook Credit gift cards at Target stores earlier this year, but with the holiday season approaching, it decided to land on the shelves of WalMart and Best Buy. Facebook Credits have been on store shelves from September 2010 and were ranked as one of the most desired holiday seasons gift.

Opportunity for engagement

With more and more people spending time on these games and purchasing virtual world gifts using the Facebook Credits, this could be good bait for brands to attract more fans to their pages. It is a given fact that a lot of people join brand pages for deals and offers. A lot of them join in order to win the contest run by these brands. While they are on these pages, these users are more active on the social games. With their favourite brands giving Facebook Credits as gifts for various contests that run on these brand pages will only make them more loyal fans of the page.

(source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/study-reveals-why-consumers-fan-facebook-pages/)

Not only that, with Facebook Credits easily becoming available for users, brands can look at adopting FB Credits as a viable ecommerce solution on Facebook. Though this system is not yet in place, a real world and a virtual world economy tie up cannot be ruled out. Knowing that a certain amount of FB Credits are worth a specific amount, the same conversion can be used to sell real products through Facebook.

The idea may sound radical but the growth of Facebook has lead to many changes in the brick and mortar structure of our society. More and more people are becoming citizens of the Facebook country. It is not just an imagination that soon there would be a virtual world with real transactions happening with Facebook Credits.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »

Answers to a successful Online Brand Relation

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

In today’s fast paced world, virtual social networking has always strengthened existing relationships, and continues to provide a foundation for border-less communities based on common areas of interest.

Some people like to share with others what they know. Some people like to learn by reading questions and answers. Q&A sites offer that kind of information from experts or from everyday people. Q&A sites have grown immensely in the last few years. People are, more than ever, turning to the internet to get quick information about any topic through these Q&A sites.

It’s kind of asking your neighbour, coworker or friend a question and getting a written answer. There are some questions that cannot be answered by even the best reference books or encyclopedias. They need a human expert that can understand a complex relationship.

Opportunity for Brands to be Human.

This provides a great opportunity for Brands to participate in conversation with people who are looking for information about products they manufacture or services they provide. Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions.

Brands are driving leads using Question and Answer forums like LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com. LinkedIn Answers dominates the category usage, claiming 59.2 percent of use for companies participating in at least one Q&A forum. Yahoo! Answers is a distant second at 37.1 percent.

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help Brands in the following ways:

  • Direct customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
  • Connect with people in the market, build reputation, and generate leads.
  • Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

Also, the Internet has a reputation for being shady. You need to let readers know why your answer is reputable and why you’re the right person to answer it. This gives Brands a greater credence and integrity to the response, and a higher likelihood for a recommendation or a vote up. It is this process of informing and educating the general audience that can help the brand establish “Thought Leadership.”

Who is listening to the Brand?

In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. Among those who use Q&A forums, 92 percent say they are at least somewhat useful with 25 percent claiming them to be “very useful.”

(Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com)

How do Brands use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

  1. Help others
  2. Build relationships
  3. Push your products and services while answering somebody’s question or request.

In Q&A sites, the starting point is that somebody asked the question that you’re answering.

Specifically you shoul:

  • Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
  • Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
  • Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.

Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In essence, the best practices is to be helpful first, don’t go in trumpeting your sales pitch and focus on long-term relationship building and benefits rather than seeing a sudden influx of leads. An answer should simply touch on all prominent points that deliver a comprehensive, well structured response to a question.

The best part of the Q&A sites is that, they are Search Engine Optimized. This helps in increasing the visibility of the brand. More importantly, it is a credible way of highlighting your product range without sounding like advertising. And finally, Q&A sites are helping Brands become more human. It has allowed a Brand to be the friend you turn to when you have a query. Objective Achieved!

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Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Target Audience, Windchimes Comm | 5 Comments »

Twitter to roll out official Analytics

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

With Twitter almost ready to launch its analytics service by the end of the year, the market is already abuzz about the impact it will have on the Social Media Marketing scene.

The social networking giant recently announced that it has roped in a select group of users to carry out the testing of the product. It is believed that as of now, Twitter will be keeping this product, free of cost for its 197 million users.

With Social Media Marketing gaining a substantial space in the overall marketing mix, such a tool, which can give insights to a brand’s online efforts will be of great benefit. Not only will it help in deriving the results of a campaign, it will also, and more importantly, help in realigning the SMM campaign.

Tracking the Campaign

Since its launch, Twitter has seen almost every brand using it for promotion activity. Simple #tag contests and customer support have become major online activities. Brands like Starbucks, Dell Computers and Ford motors have thousands of followers on line. Closer home, brands like MTV, NDTV and Kingfisher have successfully engaged thousands of people in the most entertaining manner.

But till now, all the brands were either clueless about where there campaign or SMM efforts were heading or they were paying huge sum of money for getting insights through third party vendors. With the launch of Twitter Analytics, that too, free of cost that is all set to change.

Now, the brands will know exactly which of their tweets has helped them get more followers. Which tweet has caused disgruntle and what topics gets the maximum retweets. Not only that, with analytics available, online reputation management also becomes easier.


At a glance

With the new tool, Brands will have data such as 6-hour bar graph to show mentions, follows, unfollows and retweets that the campaign has generated. Also, it allows you to categories and filter tweets into different groups such as “best,” “good” and ”all.”


The Impact

It is surprising that something that can help Brands so much should be offered at no cost. The rationale behind this seems to be that businesses are more likely to stick with Twitter if detailed statistics are made available to every user, helping them measure and improve upon the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and justify the effort needed to continually update a Twitter feed.

Also, though tracking social media is big business, the news that Twitter is set to enter the ring with a free product of its own may come as a bad news for third party providers.

It would be worth noting that while brands may not be able to make an exact impact on the sales figure through the tool, it will surely help them in becoming more in sync with their audience.

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Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

New Facebook Groups to define your social existance.

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Exclusivity was a promise that Facebook had started with. With the passage of time and with 500 million plus users, that exclusivity had somehow got lost. People were weary of bothering everyone they knew for queries that may not be relevant to most of them. To address this concern, Facebook launched the latest version of Groups.

Earlier people didn’t do much on groups but to post comments and view pictures or share videos. There was no direct communications amongst all the members of the group. Also, the administration of the group was in the hands of select few people, which was a powerful position because they could message the members directly. In short, the groups were not an integral part of the Facebook universe earlier.

With the latest version, that’s exactly what Facebook Groups has attempted to do, become as integral to Facebook as Facebook Pages. Amongst the few key changes that have happened, the most significant is that the administration of the group has moved from select few to every individual. This is done with a desire to develop groups as a real-world group where everyone is participating towards building something more productive. Now, each post sends a notification to all the group members unless the members opt out of the notification process. This rids the group member of the doubt about if their post has been noticed or not.

Click on the Image for enlarged view

The new version of Groups will also allow Group Chats that will enable real time IM conversations between the group members. This one tool has the potential of taking the Groups to the next level for business purpose. With real time communication possible, people and more importantly brands can engage in closed group surveys, focused group discussions and even internal communications. Also, the group mail facility makes it easier to communicate with the members when someone is away.

Click on the Image for enlarged view

Another little addition to Facebook groups is the Docs feature that allows the members to post “Docs” with minor amount of markups such as bold, italics and lists. The docs can be revised and each revision goes into the history, which users can navigate back through.

Click on the Image for enlarged view

With new Groups being released with a mobile interface and an Open Graph API, Facebook Groups will be accessible in all imaginable capacities, helping it reach more people in real time, thus making it more viable for business purposes.
What this means for businesses is that while Facebook Pages are useful for defining our commercial affiliations, Facebook Groups help define who we are socially. These would mean a more easy and more upfront interaction with the stakeholders, which can be leveraged to conduct Focused Group Discussions, Closed Group Surveys, addressing product complaints and even managing internal HR issues.

Between group chat, docs, and an eventual Groups developer platform, Facebook is aiming to become a more significant communications and collaboration platform. There’s no doubt that smaller organizations could find the new groups product to be extremely useful and with more customer support even the bigger ones will soon join the bandwagon.

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Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »

Six keep-in-minds while devising a social media strategy

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Having been in business development for a specialist social media agency for a fair amount of time, there are certain caveats we keep reminding clients of. This is probably because social media is unlike any other marketing medium including the sir-please-try-our-website-since-the-model-is-very-different, which is at the end of the day, just a different form of display advertising.

So six caveats I’d like to give clients, agencies and social media enthusiasts or planners are…

1. What’s so great about you anyway?

While a statement like that is suicide as far as an agency is concerned, reflect on what it means. What IS so great about your brand that would make people want to put off watching pirated IPL videos on YouTube, stop chatting on GTalk with an old friend, stop scouring social networking sites for random profiles to make ‘franship’ with… And come talk about your brand? Now that I’ve put this question in perspective, it doesn’t seem as offensive, does it?

Let me put it this way: Look around you and search for a brand you have no professional affiliation to. Why would you become a fan voluntarily of that brand? Your answer to this will help you answer what your own brand should be doing on social media.

2. Great, you’ve got your fans. Now what?

In the craze to have a ‘presence’ on Facebook, companies often resort to buying fans, using FB ads. That in itself is not an evil thing, but what a brand needs to be clear on is what to do with these fans. We’ve seen many fan pages which the marketing team of companies opened frenetically, paid a sufficient amount to get 500 fans, post a few current-campaign-related updates, and then, once the campaign and budgets are over, lies inactive. What happens of the fans? Think of it this way: fans have, on their own volition, chosen to become fans of a brand. Which is as good as a footfall. And just like a footfall, you can never ignore a fan of a fan page.

3. Not everything’s for everyone

Telling a brand manager that a blog is not right for his brand is like finally telling your girlfriend that you’re not the right person for her. OK, almost. But you know what I mean. The ease with which social media platforms can be activated leads many to believe that their brand should be everywhere. Wrong. A presence on Twitter, a blog or even a FB fan page is a long-term effort. If your brand is in it for the ‘wham bam, thank you ma’am’ equivalent on social media, a quick application and some FB ads is what you should be looking at.

4. Time lagega, boss!

It is unrealistic to expect something like 1000 followers, fans or subscribers to get to your page in one or two months. Social media growth should be organic and growth will be exponential in nature. Which means, the first few months may have very few people coming in. But after that it’s like compounding. Think of it this way. A personal blog starts off with five loyal readers coerced to reading it (the industry equivalent being co-workers and your agency!) before merit alone decides whether more people start coming in on their own. It’s pretty much the same thing for your fan page, corporate blog or Twitter page.

5. Can you pass the cricket score test?

I’ve mentioned this before. But it needs to emphasised again. People are online to surf porn, plant virtual strawberries, chat with friends, check the latest gossip, read their friends’ blogs and most importantly in India, check cricket scores. The Cricket Score Test is what I call the process of someone actually deviating from this schedule, distracted by something else. Why do I say this? Because this is the same guy you’re trying to convince to play your application. Or read your corporate blog on your latest AGM. Or follow your Twitter handle of 3 updates. You get my drift, I hope. Remember, buying out fans is the only shortcut you can take. Then what?

6. Never attempt policing

It’s a free, democratic medium. It’s open. People can say anything they want, there is no point trying to suppress them, you’re only going to get lots of backlash. Anyone who followed the Nestle episode will know what I’m talking about. For a quick guide on what NOT to do on a Facebook page, click here.
And so there you have it. A few keep-in-minds for social media. All points are fairly debatable (That was the intention, honestly) and I look forward to your feedback on the comments.

Oh, and I blog here.

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Posted in Social Media Marketing | 3 Comments »

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