How many days have you roamed in Mumbai to just check out various marriage halls in Andheri for your sister’s marriage or banquets halls in Mumbai for a grand party? Looking up venues for events can be a frustrating task that can go on for days searching for venues across the city and then narrowing down on the options based on your various parameters like pricing, facilities, size, etc. What if most of these details are given to you on a platter? Many venue-booking companies help you book your venues for a large variety of events-custom to your needs like marriage halls in Mumbai, conference rooms in Delhi to banquet halls in Chennai.
1. Reserv.Place
Based out of Chennai, Reserv.Place is a marketplace community that brings people & property owners together on the same platform. It allows you to list, discover and book your event venues online with the click of your computer or from a mobile phone - be it for a wedding, birthday or for your office party. With its world-class customer service and a growing community of trusted users, Reserv.Place deserves to be at the top of the list.
Based out of Mumbai, Build My Event is a premium one-stop destination for booking your venue for all kind of events. They connect event planners directly with the venue managers to help them book banquet halls, party halls and business venues in and around Mumbai. Their USP is quick response (24*7) and transparent pricing with no hidden costs involved.
Build My Event has also started actively promoting the website and services on social media. It is their interesting content strategy that stands out. The articles on their blog have content to really make you read one article after another – ranging from places to hangout if you want to meet a Bollywood star to Ideas for a perfect wedding. Such content not only engages the visitors to their website but also helps them showcase their expertise with articles like Best sea-facing venues in Mumbai, Tips to select an event venue, etc. Their “mumbai meri jaan” contest on social media was also a hit with more than 200 entries for the contest.
3. BigFDay
From Wedding Halls to Conference Rooms to Birthday Party Halls, BigFDay is a platform that lets you book venues with just a few clicks. Currently operating only in Chennai, BigFDay works with over 500+ venues and 100s of professionals in the event industry. Be it a wedding, birthday party, corporate event or just a night out with friends, BigFDay is the ideal platform to book venues.
4. Urban Restro
Urban Restro is an online booking platform ranging from wedding, cocktail party to conferences. Their USP is their website - good in terms of user experience and visual appeal. Currently, they are operational in 3 cities – Ahmedabad, Pune & Mumbai. They allow you to search and make free reservations with a click of a mouse. They are promoting their website on social media channels and have also started conducting food workshops & festivals across the city.
5. Just Dial
Justdial provides fast, reliable and comprehensive information to the users. Their main USP is their large database, apart from the large number of reviews. But they are limited to listings only, in most of the cases, and that somehow constrains their ability to explore this space. Further, considering the volume of reviews they have, filtering out spam reviews and calls have become a challenge for Justdial. They also have a mobile app, that offers information on the move.
The social media presence of the above websites are as shown below:
The next time you are in need of any help for venue booking for any event, be it banquet halls in Mumbai, resorts near Mumbai or marriage halls in Andheri, you know where to search for. These venue listing and booking companies have really made our life easy – from scouring through multiple venues in the sun, we can sit in the shade of our homes / office and get it done in a matter of minutes.
Note: Social Beat is currently working with Build My Event & Reserv.Place
The Aam Aadmi Party's Donation drive has always been in the news for all the right reasons - it's focus on clean money, complete transparency in the process and the use of innovative means and effective social media campaigns to raise funds (an excellent example of this being Arvind Kejriwal's recent tweet for cash which raised more than Rs. 80 lakh in 24 hours after the tweet).
In this Infographic, we analyze the AAP donation campaign - the average donation per donor, the donations received and the candidates receiving the highest donations.
Have you donated to the Aam Aadmi Party?
Clinics/ Hospitals are soon realizing the above trend and moving towards creating an online presence which helps them retain their existing patient base on one hand and broadening it on the other. The infographic above evaluates the current trends in online presence of clinics. Three categories of clinics- eye, dental and maternity were surveyed for the purpose. It shows that online booking is an important functionality enabled by most dental clinics; nearly 80%, also have a presence of Facebook. Key players in the maternity segment have maximum likes on their page from all the clinics surveyed. The average domain rank of eye clinics is the highest, implying better visibility on various search engines. The following are the three Key areas of focus in the digital strategy for clinics.
User Friendly website
Creating a website with the end-user and their pain points in mind is the first step to building a robust online presence. For example, one of the issues that patients face is to obtain doctor appointments, if this issue is addressed upfront by enabling online booking both the patients and clinics would benefit. Also, other functionalities like submitting patient queries can be enabled. An A/B tested website would ensure optimal use and low bounce rates.
Search Engine Optimization
With so many clinics competition for new visitor traffic online, having a website with both online and offline SEO will help drive new and targeted traffic to the website.
Social Media Presence
An impressive and interactive social media presence, is the best way to engage at an informal, yet at a high responsive mode with patients. While achieving brand awareness, reputation is built by sharing important/ useful information, responding to queries and interacting with patients regularly.
A large number of people still consider Google+ to be a ghost town, sparsely inhabited and sans activity – not worth investing time and effort to create and maintain a presence on. If you’re one of them, it’s time to give this thought some serious reconsideration.
In less than three years of its existence since its launch in the second half of 2011, Google+ has shown tremendous growth with the total number of registered users recently crossing the 1 billion mark and the number of active monthly users crossing 540 million. To gauge the growth in activity - 1.5 billion photos are uploaded every week and +1 is clicked more than 5 billion times a day. If these massive numbers are not reason enough for you to include G+ as part of your social media strategy, here are seven strong reasons why you must begin using Google+ as a business marketing tool.
1. It’s a Google product:
No other social network has the kind of web assets leverage that Google has. Think about it. Apart from being the world’s most used search network, Google owns one of the most popular browsers in Chrome, one of the most-used mobile Operating systems in Android, the largest video sharing website in YouTube, the world’s largest email service in Gmail, one of the most popular photo-editing platforms in Picasa, a versatile cloud-storage application in Google Drive and the most popular mapping service application in Google Maps. Google is the leader of the online world and is already using all its might to ensure Google+ gains popularity and acceptance. Apart from this, the use of Google+ also provides seamless integration with all other Google services.
2. Higher Search Rankings:
The boost to SEO is one of the biggest benefits of Google+. Almost all SEO experts will tell you that content on Google+ is indexed faster than other content across the web and any links on G+ positively impact SEO results. This is because unlike most other social platforms like Twitter, where all links are placed with a no follow tag, Google+ links are follow links and G+ pages are treated as web pages. This increases website visibility and accumulates Page Rank and thereby, by actively participating on Google+, you are increasing the visibility of your brand.
A recent scientific correlation Study by Moz to discover the qualities of web pages that have a strong association with ranking high in Google, shows that Google+ posts have multiple SEO benefits unlike other social platforms. The study also found a strong correlation between Google +1s and higher search rankings, clearly indicating that sharing content on Google + has the potential to influence search rankings in many ways.
3. Enhanced search results:
When a user searches for your Google+ optimized business online, the results show the most recent G+ post, the number of followers, profile name and image, any +1 recommendations from friends and Google map directions to the business. And, if the person searching is already following your business on G+, the brands content appears even more prominently in the search results.
Apart from the right hand space on the Search results page, where Google+ information currently shows up, Google is also experimenting with including recent posts, most relevant to the search query keyed in, in the Search results space itself. The example below shows a relevant Google+ post of a play school, displaying in the results for the Search query “play school in Velachery”.
4. Google+ Authorship:
Google Authorship includes the author’s photo and byline with the search snippet on search results pages. It is activated by linking the author’s Google+ profile to the website he is a contributor to, through an email address on that domain. Including the author’s credentials lends reliability and trustworthiness to the content and enhances ranking on Search Engine Results Pages(SERPs) while also improving click-through-rates, thereby increasing the reach of your content and traffic to your site.
5. Unfiltered Updates:
Unlike Facebook, which constantly tweaks its Edgerank algorithm to decide which of your updates will be seen by your fans, updates on Google+ are currently unfiltered and chances of your updates reaching your fan-base are higher on Google+ than Facebook. Also, unlike Facebook, whose primary source of revenue is Ads, Google’s primary source of revenue comes from search advertising and it presently does not need to force users to pay to gain visibility on Google+.
6. Google+ Ads:
The above does not mean that Google will never attempt to monetize Google+ through ads. Google is already testing paid +Post ads for Google+ content and apart from Google’s experience with Adwords expected to make the Ads a great product, the possible game changer would be access to the whole of the Google Display Network through Google+ Ads.
7. Google+ Hangouts:
Hangouts are probably the best and most important feature of Google+. Think of it as a free webinar tool where you can include upto 9 participants and automatically broadcast live to your Google+ page as well as your YouTube Channel. Hangouts are an excellent means of communicating with clients and potential clients to educate them about a product/service and share ideas and case studies.
The world’s second largest social network is here to stay. So, get on it, establish your presence and learn how you can use it effectively to grow your brand. The proverbial early bird always gets the worm and being early to Google’s party is sure to have its benefits in the long-term.
There is no magic wand to predict what 2014 will bring for us. There will definitely be innovations in digital marketing and communication. Predicting trends is a fun exercise nevertheless and here is our take on key trends we can expect to witness in the new year.
Political Parties will invest significantly in Social Media
With the upcoming Lok Sabha elections and the emergence of the AAM Aadmi Party, we can expect significant investment of time and marketing spends on social media. Gujarat CM Narendra Modi is already one of the most popular Twitter celebrities with over 30 Lakh Followers and newly elected Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has nearly 10 Lakh followers. The action in the online political space is bound to heat up.
2014 to be the year of the Mobile Web
Mobile Commerce has long-held promise in India, but looks like 2014 will be the year when the promise turns into reality. Large ecommerce websites like MakeMytrip, Flipkart and Myntra are seeing ~15%-20% of the transactions coming through mobile already. If you run a business, it’s the right time to think through a mobile strategy (just building an app won’t do!) and ensure that your customers can transact with you through their mobiles.
Improved User Experiences
In a bid to optimize websites for search engines, many websites had poor user experiences. With refined tastes of the Indian consumers, we are seeing even decade only businesses like Makemytrip.com go in for a fresh and lean User Experience. 2014 will see increased usage of tools like A/B Testing of the website, Heatmaps and consumer studies to get the User Experience right.
Social Media moves from Push to Talk
Many businesses have been using social media like a TV Channel. The story has been - keep pushing messages and spending on Advertisements to get your voice heard. Going forward, brands will need to create content which engages in conversations with users – else, brands can except to get lost in the sea of content being produced online.
Clear ROI on Digital Investments
Many Brands started investing seriously in digital marketing only in 2013. In 2014, brands will expect to see clear ROI for the digital investments. We can expect granular tracking of what’s working and what hasn’t, with a shift to online channels which have a higher ROI.
Would be great to hear from you on which trends you agree with and disagree with – please share your thoughts in the comments.
eBay, India’s largest eCommerce marketplace, recently unveiled India’s first Online Business Index, a research report on Indian eCommerce businesses, covering both domestic and retail export entrepreneurs. The report has been compiled using a survey from over 700 of eBay India’s top sellers, who are truly passionate about the potential of ecommerce in their lives.
As 2013 draws to a close, this report gives a good insight into the major trends that have developed in the sector over the past year, the challenges it faces and the future outlook for the industry as we head into 2014.
TRENDS:
What sells most:
Electronics seem to be the most sought after goods in the online domestic market with Mobiles, Laptops & Tablets and gadget accessories making up a large quantum of sales followed by Home Décor and jewellery items.
Multi-Channel strategy:
While a majority (53%) of domestic and retail export entrepreneurs only sell online and do not have an offline presence, the remaining have adopted a multi-pronged strategy using eBay, their offline stores, own websites, other online marketplaces and their social media presence to sell their merchandise.
Confidence in E-commerce:
The major reason why the majority of domestic and retail export entrepreneurs only sell online
& do not have an offline business is that they do not need an offline store. Other reasons include the prohibitive cost of retail property rent, other costs, and the flexibility in schedule that an online store offers.
Why sell Online:
Online entrepreneurs, both domestic and export, are excited about the potential of Indian eCommerce and want to gain their share of the growing market. The ability to reach a much greater number of potential customers, better profitability, flexibility with work hours and operating from home are the other reasons which motivate the sellers to sell online.
Profitability:
Savvy entrepreneurs find sales from eBay are the most profitable given the low transaction fees and that they are charged only as they successfully sell.
Healthy growth rates:
eBay entrepreneurs are overall seeing healthy eCommerce growth rates with over 36 percent of domestic sellers stating a 20 percent YoY growth rate and over 24 percent stating a 21 percent to 40 percent YoY growth rate.
eBay retail export entrepreneurs are also seeing healthy eCommerce growth rates with over 36 percent of exporters stating a 20 percent YoY growth rate and over 30 percent stating a 21 percent-40 percent YoY growth rate.
15% of domestic entrepreneurs have stated a growth rate of over 100%
Employment generation:
In terms of employment opportunities, domestic sellers and retail exporters, on an average, employ approximately 4.8 and 5.3 full time staff respectively. This number is projected to increase to 5.2 and 6.1 full time staff over the next year.
CHALLENGES:
The chief challenges that domestic retailers see which they feel could limit their growth are:
• The state of the Indian Economy
• Courier Costs
• Exchange Rates
Exporters on the other hand see these challenges ahead:
• Competition from international retailers and sellers
• Major Indian retailers moving to an online offering
• Cost of Supplies
FUTURE OUTLOOK
Optimism:
With 77 million Indians now visiting online shopping websites every month (Comscore) & IAMAI projecting the online shopping industry will grow to $1.8 Billion, the high levels of optimism isn’t without good reason. 89% of domestic online sellers feel optimistic about the year ahead while 3 in 5 are “very optimistic”.
Mobile Commerce:
Both domestic as well as Retail entrepreneurs are excited about the potential of mobile
commerce see it playing a very important role in their future business growth. The reason they see a role for mobile commerce in their future business strategy is that they see mobile internet coverage improving, giving more customers access to mobile commerce and hence increasing their ability to attract new customers. They plan to invest in mobile commerce in multiple ways, by leveraging eBay as a channel since it invests heavily in mobile commerce, by optimizing their online content for mobile & by marketing to customers via mobile channels.
Mobile e-commerce isn’t without its challenges. Slow mobile internet speed combined with higher costs of access and unreliable mobile internet coverage, lack of knowledge about mobile commerce and high investing costs across different mobile platforms are the major factors that these sellers see which could pose limitations to them maximizing the benefits from this sector.
Logistics:
Logistics are a major part of the ecommerce industry shipping parcels form the sellers to the consumers and also impact the seller’s bottomlines. Ebay’s sellers want their logistics partners to come up with more competitive shipping rates, faster shipping times and greater flexibility of Pick-Up service
Get the pulse of India’s growing e-commerce industry. Read this interesting and informative report here.
It’s one of those lazy Sundays. You’re surfing e-commerce sites for those lovely pair of shoes you’ve always wanted. You find them! You can’t resist placing the order. Less than thirty minutes later, you hear that familiar buzzing noise outside your door. You’re overjoyed – you’re shoes have already arrived, drone-delivered. Sounds like a scene from a Science fiction movie? Not really. And, you can go ahead and pinch yourself too, because is this is no dream either. Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos has revealed yesterday that they are developing a drone-based delivery system called Amazon Prime Air, the goal of which is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones.
As soon as your order is placed, it is packed in record time in one of Amazon’s 96 massive warehouses worldwide, also known as fulfillment centers - each about 1.2 million square feet in area – the size of 20 football fields! These will then be put on a delivery carousel from where they will be picked up by the drones – eight rotor helicopters which Bezos calls an “octocopter." These will then be instructed to deliver at designated GPS co-ordinates. They will be able to deliver within a 10 km radius and safely carry about 5 pounds in weight, which as per Bezos, accounts for about 86 percent of the items Amazon delivers.
This delivery system could account for massive reductions in Carbon emissions by reducing the number of delivery trucks doing the rounds. Further, they use electric motors which make them even greener.
However, for those of you expecting to be drone-delivered your orders tomorrow, Bezos says it will take a few, maybe four or five, years. The project is still on the anvil in Amazon’s next-generation R&D lab and has just about entered the experimental stage. In an interview to CBS’s 60 minutes, Bezos said the company is still working on redundancies and reliabilities and the systems required to ensure that mishaps like the drone landing on somebody’s head while they’re walking around the neighborhood don’t happen. Get a sneak peek of Amazon Prime Air in the video below.
Apart from this, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations currently prohibit use of drones for commercial purposes. However, these are expected to change when a new set of rules for unmanned aircraft come into place by 2015. Security implications will have to be considered too. But Bezos is optimistic, telling 60 minutes, “Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it's going to be a lot of fun.”
Amazon is a pioneer in the field of e-commerce and has been the poster boy of e-commerce success ever since its inception almost two decades ago. Known for its innovative ways and attempts to streamline their processes and ensure the best service, this new innovation from the Amazon stable comes as no surprise. Also, coming within just a few days of Operation Blue Virus exposing the misuse of Social Media for nefarious reasons; drones, earlier synonymous with attacks causing death and destruction, now being used to make life easier and more convenient just goes to reiterate the fact that any technological advancement, used correctly, responsibly and ethically can be used to work wonders.
The Indo-French Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s southern chapter organized a seminar on “Social Networks - Find a new and profitable way to enhance your brand equity, consumer loyalty and your sales" today at The Leela Palace, Chennai.
Suneil Chawla, the Co-Founder of Social Beat and Alexandre Dorso, the Production Manager of KRDS conducted the seminar and moderated the panel discussion which had interesting insights and facts on various Social Media platforms.
Social Media is the buzz word driving brands across the world. With countless number of tools available to monitor, manage and analyze the social media activity of your fans, you might feel like wandering in a forest. In this article, we present you the hand-picked apps that are tailor-made for social media analysts and content marketers.
Also, we have been endlessly reading articles and research columns on either “SEO is dead” or “Is SEO dead?” from reputed writers. On the other hand, the myriad number of apps to optimize and efficiently use SEO is being launched day in and day out. SEO is not dead, at least for now.
When Gmail is opened, the most boring part on your screen is the right hand side panel. How about changing it into an interactive social media profile of the person to whom you want to send mail? That’s exactly how Rapportive works. As you type the e-mail ID of the person in the “To” field, you can see the recipient’s social media profiles in the right hand side panel of your screen.
Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. It is head and shoulders above any other Gmail add-in and a must-have for marketers. If you want more reasons to substantiate the efficiency of Rapportive, here is one – Paul Buchheit, the creator of GMAIL has been funding this start-up.
Do you believe in Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote “Time is money”? If yes, Boomerang is all yours. It is the best time management app available for Gmail.
You can schedule your emails for a future date, create a reminder for a mail to pop up on top of the inbox just before you leave for a movie (to take print-out of the ticket) or a meeting (to recollect the agenda) and the best feature about Boomerang is that it alerts you when someone doesn’t respond to your email after a specific timeframe (you can set that). No better app offers response tracking as good as Boomerang.
As I write this, Yoast has been downloaded over 6.4 million times and the rating out of 5 stands at 4.7, which is extraordinary by any yardstick. If you could choose only one WordPress plug-in for your website, the first would be from Yoast and so would the second. This one sets the standard.
Open Graph tags and managing Google Authorship are the two best features of Yoast. The former helps the posts from your website look appealing when someone shares it across Facebook or Twitter and the latter reduces your effort significantly to complete Google authorship. Get it right away.
It’s an easy A/B testing and analytics tool to help you move toward success in your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) efforts. See if you have mulled over these questions.
While working on new designs for your website’s landing page, have you ever had hunches about how the visitors will welcome the effort? Will the new-look show way to an uptick in site traffic? What would be the conversion rate?
Optimizely answers all the above questions in a simple manner one could comprehend.
Gravity Forms site says “Over half a million wordpress sites use Gravity Forms." That’s a testament to its productivity. With Gravity Forms, you can create complex and powerful contact forms for your website without any fuss.
It provides a simple drag and drop feature to create and customize forms with conditional logic fields. As the name suggests, Gravity Forms doesn’t stop with just support, order and contact forms creation. It also allows launching quick surveys and creating polls instantaneously. Site-building is no more a drudging task when you have Gravity Forms.
It is one of the best task management web apps available. Its best features include nested lists, tagging keywords (for better compilation) and implementation of brainstorming. Even when writing this article, it’s become inevitable for me to switch tabs to reach out to WorkFlowy to recall my thought-process. The UI is neat, quick and responsive enough for one to engage.
Be it note-making, jotting a list of ideas for your blog or planning an event, WorkFlowy makes your job easier than never before. It works offline too for iOS users. If you master a few keyboard shortcuts, task management is a cakewalk forever.
Trello is basically a more optimized version of WorkFlowy, taking list-making to the next level. It is the best and easy-to-use project management app available. If you want to collaborate with your team members for a particular project and assign specific tasks to everyone, Trello is the answer.
Trello is all about boards, lists and cards. You can organize your projects in boards, assign and organize topics in lists and arrange individual tasks in the lists as cards. You can add check lists, assign due dates and also attach PDF files up to 10MB in the attachment tab. Make it your default project management app for better collaboration with the team.
It is probably the best online image editing tool available for content creators and designers. If you’re ignorant about Adobe Photoshop, it is the go-to tool to design images in an effortless manner. It is chocked up with various image editing options and manipulation tools to create images on the go.
It comes with three versions – Pixlr Omatic, Pixlr Express and Pixlr Editor – in which Pixlr Editor is nothing but photoshop made easy. Pixlr Express offers amazing image adjustments, filters, overlay and borders all in an easy-to-navigate interface which makes it the best among the three.
It is a real-time social media search and analysis web tool. It brings together the content generated across the web in an orderly fashion. It divides your keyword search into four categories namely strength, passion, sentiment and reach.
Strength is measured using the phrase mentions and sentiment is assessed using the ratio between positive to negative mentions. Reach is the most crucial feature since it measures the ratio between the number of unique users to the total number of mentions. it is the best tool to analyze your brands’ social media activity.
Google's acquisition of 'Where 2 Technologies' will go down in history as one of the remarkable leaps in data visualization. What started as a simple C++ program almost a decade back has turned everyone of us into cartographers in our own right, thanks to Google's extraordinary vision.
With Google Maps Engine, one can create customized maps with their own references and collate your areas of interest before planning a vacation. You can also upload data source in excel formats to visualize the same on maps, share organized maps with your friends and compare the maps that you have already created. To conclude, Google Maps Engine has made cartography easier and lively for everyday users.
South India has been the biggest region for gold consumption in the country for many years now. Purchasing gold continues to be a tradition and is considered as the safest investment for people. Chennai, Coimbatore, Kochi and Thrissur together account for nearly 20 % of the annual gold demand. Jewellers are utilizing this opportunity and expanding their foothold in South by opening more showrooms and leveraging their social media presence to engage with the consumers.
At the moment only Facebook is significantly used to promote new products, to carry out festival contests and to interact with the consumers. Kalyan Jewellers – 209,000 likes, Joyalukkas – 66,000 likes and Jos Alukkas – 51,000 likes are among the largest contributors on Facebook. Even the big players are yet to explore other networking tools like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, Google Plus and LinkedIN. Gehna with 30+ fans and Malabar Gold with 350+ followers are one of the few jewellers using Google Plus and LinkedIN to build a strong network of customers. Joyalukkas, GRT and Jos Alukkas upload videos (though, not frequently) in their YouTube channels to cater to their 700+ subscribers.
E-Commerce is another area that is picking up with jewelry houses and increasingly we see many showcasing and selling online. Online presence is supporting offline purchasing in a big way , with social media and digital marketing being the greater influencers on customers.
