As per the Indian Brand Equity Foundation report on the Indian Real Estate industry, Real Estate is India’s second largest employment generation sector after agriculture and contributes about 6.3 per cent to India’s gross domestic product (GDP). Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indian Real Estate is expected to touch US$ 25 billion in the next 10 years from its current US$ 4 billion while the sector’s projected annual revenues is expected to be US$ 180 billion by 2020. This enormous growth potential seems to have lured a good number of startups to the industry.
Web Design and User Experience Perspective:
Most of the startups in the space seem to have invested a lot of time and attention in Web Design and User Experience to differentiate themselves from the bigger and more established players.
Housing.com, for instance, has an excellent interface with the property-search button in the centre. The interface is map-based and all property-search results turn out as places on a map. It also has a Shortlist button enabling the user to shortlist options and come back to them later to take a final call. While they have scored well with their interface, what sets them back is the fact they have yet to garner a large number of listings, leaving the user with very few options to choose from.
PropTiger differentiates itself by providing a portfolio tracking tool which enables the end user to know the status of their property investment in terms of pricing, construction progress, project and locality updates, price trends and market talk, which is intended to help them decide the right time to sell their property.
HomeShikari, a TTK services company started in 2011 and currently operating only for properties in Bangalore, is trying to crack the real estate problem by shunning the brokerage model and embracing complete transparency. HomeShikari too allows the user to search for properties via a map-based interface and has worked on a neat ad-free website with a good user Experience.
RealtyCompass claims to be a consumer centric property portal focused on providing the consumer with the information of every new project in the city. Started in July this year and based out of Chennai with a presence in 4 cities in South India, they are looking to expand rapidly to 10 cities pan-India.
Metroplots, also started out of Chennai in 2009, has witnessed good success in 3 major markets of Chennai, Bangalore and NCR where it currently operates and is on an ambitious expansion spree to 20 more cities. They have a strong online interface which offers investors an array of options to choose from while looking for deals and have also created a proprietary SAAS tool called Sales Desk to enable builders & agents grow their business.
Social Media Strategy Perspective:
All startups in the space have been actively using social media platforms to build their brands and engage and acquire customers in an attempt to revamp the industry.
Facebook seems to be the favorite tool with all startups to interact with their customers and promote their services. Housing.co.in, now Housing.com has over 236,000 likes, Commonfloor over 115,000 while HomeShikari, RealtyCompass and PropTiger have about 25,000, 22,600 and 10,000 each.
Amongst the other platforms, Twitter seems to be used more than the rest with Commonfloor being the most active of this pack with over 6500 Tweets and 3500 followers. Metroplots with over 3000 tweets and Proptiger with over 2800 seem to be catching up.
The use of Google+ and LinkedIn as social media platforms is just beginning to catch up while YouTube as a marketing platform has not been used much by either of these startups, with PropTiger being the lone exception. PropTiger has begun uploading videos of the projects listed with them on YouTube and currently has over 40 videos.
With big players such as Magicbricks and 99acres already established in the space, these startups are taking their Web Design, User Experience and social marketing strategy seriously and working on capturing a big chunk of this growing market.
Are you taking your Web Design, User Experience and Social marketing strategy seriously? Call us for a discussion. in the meantime, read our comprehensive guide for digital marketing for real estate.
Scams, scandals and stings have become commonplace news in India lately. There’s a new one virtually every fortnight. The latest sting by Cobrapost, codenamed #OperationBlueVirus, exposes two dozen IT companies which put social media to nefarious use. The sting involved asking these companies to launch a branding exercise for a tainted politician and defame his opponent, even if it meant character assassination, which shockingly, none of the companies turned down. One company agreed to tear up the reputation of a fictitious company to shreds. Another agreed to launch a smear campaign against Cobrapost founder, Aniruddha Bahal, accusing him of not paying his employees, defrauding crores of rupees and being involved in a murder in a fictitious town. All this, despite being told who he was.
Some companies went further and offered disturbing “services” like making fake videos of political opponents in compromising positions go viral and spreading communal tension(one company even offered to plant bombs – real ones) to change the poll outcome. Worse, they claim to use tools that keep the calumnious content untraceable and leave no tell-tale signs.
Coming less than a month before four Indian states go to the polls, these stunning revelations seemingly vindicate the recent EC decision to bring social media campaigns under the code of conduct.
With some tweets making indirect suggestions that Narendra Modi could be a beneficiary to some of these services, this has further stirred the hornet’s nest and has #OperationBlueVirus trending on twitter.
The impact of this sting on the social media scenario in India remains to be seen. Given state elections round the corner and national elections in a few months, the demands for curbs and regulation over social media may get louder. Corporate India may sit up and take note since these “services” now exposed could very well be misused against them. And, unlike elections which come and go, their brands are evaluated on a continuous basis.
The sting has once again raised the age-old debate of technology being a boon or bane. The history of mankind is dotted with examples where great minds invented or discovered something intended to make life easier for everyone on the planet; but which eventually ended up being misused for violence, death and destruction. TNT was originally discovered in the 19th century for use as a yellow die but later began to be used as a potent explosive and is still in use until this day. Airplanes were invented to fulfill man’s dream to fly like a bird but ended up being used for destructive means as well. So were rockets; made to explore outer space but also used as ICBMs carrying nuclear warheads. History is replete with such examples but eventually it comes down not to the invention or the advancement but the hands it is in; much like the analogy of a knife in the hands of a murderer and a surgeon.
Technology has advanced at a rapid pace in the last two decades and social media has been heralded for giving common people a voice, the best example of which was seen during the Arab Spring. Large corporates and now, SMBs have effectively harnessed it to build their brands, engage customers and expand their customer base. US President Barrack Obama’s victories in both 2008 and 2012 were largely attributed to his digital and social media driven campaigns. These campaigns have been so successful that they have been dissected and analyzed by digital marketing agencies and enthusiasts the world over. It goes without saying, that social media, like any other technological advancement, used correctly, responsibly and ethically can be used to work wonders. Please share your comments here on what you feel about #socialmedia .
Google India has launched an ambitious initiative to empower women in India. This initiative aims to bring 50 million Indian women online by the end of 2014. On August 20th 2013, Mark Zuckerberg released a draft plan titled “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” that explained in depth how to make world more open and connected. Exactly three months later, now, Google India comes up with this commendable initiative to make women aware the benefits of Internet and how it could uplift their lives and their families.
The Digital Divide
As per the IAMAI report, the number of Internet users in India has reached 205 million this October. We are all set to overtake the United States as the second largest country in the world after China in online penetration. Yet, only 30% of the women users in India have access to Internet which is a stark contrast. Google aims to decrease this disparity by bringing 50 million women users online by the end of 2014. But, that is definitely not going to be a cakewalk taking into account the online penetration in rural India. In rural India, there were 68 million internet users in October and it is estimated to reach 72 million by December 2013, says the IAMAI report. Also, 40% of the internet users use community service centers and cyber cafes in rural India. This clearly indicates the lack of access points to surf the web in rural India.
About the initiative
‘Help Women Get Online’ is a website launched by Google to kick-start this campaign. Google has also planned for a mass media campaign including a TV commercial to promote its exclusively designed website. The website has a number of step-by-step guides on various topics including computer basics, internet skills, chat & email and watching videos online. Each topic has different chapters ranging from how to start and shut down your computer, how to create an e-mail account and of course, how to download Chrome. In addition, the website also offers contents on various interests of women such as childcare tips, household tips, beauty tips and cooking/recipes tips. It also provides assistance through toll free helpline at 1800-41-999-77. All learning materials and video tutorials are available both in Hindi and English.
The Partners
To accomplish the target, Google has joined hands with a number of partners like HUL, Johnson & Johnson, Axis Bank and Babyoye. For example, Shaadi.com is the partner to offer Relationship Tips. So, whenever someone clicks on Relationship Tips, they are bound to visit Shaadi.com which is nothing but more visibility for the partner’s website. Interestingly, Google also has a “Partner with us” option in the website to invite brands to partner with Google to provide internet access points across the country and help spread awareness about the campaign.
All we can do is educate the women in our family and our neighborhood about the basics of Internet. That would be one of the first steps to empower women and for an inclusive growth in the digital world.
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.
The day started with the long journey to SRM, situated in the outskirts of Chennai. "Aaruush" is SRM's techno-management fest (but they do have a pro show; mind you) and 'Unconference' is the event for which Vikas Chawla was invited to be one of the panelists. Down to SRM auditorium. We're warmly welcomed by the hospitality team and met one of the other panelists, Raghav Srinivas, an interesting persona with interests ranging from neural science to social media to philosophy. And in next few minutes, we're duly joined by the other panelists. One of them is a lawyer in High Court, Aruna Ganesh, who holds the credit for handling Chennai's first cyber crime case. And the other one is a fascinating person, J Walt, a professional who performs on virtual reality video concerts (also, he is the one doing the pro show). And, our own Vikas Chawla, a multi-faceted personality who is experienced in Marketing, Sales, HR and currently the Co-Founder of Social Beat. That's all about the diversified panelists.
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The screen goes up "UNCONFERENCE : Social Media - SOS or LOL" (You guys can always google SOS and find out what it is, I did that too). And the whole conference was moderated by a student called Arvind, who was articulate enough to put forth what the audience thought and kept the momentum going. For most of the time, the discussion was confined only to Facebook and other social media platforms were not exploited at all, let alone twitter.
The debate started off with the clichéd "How many of you check out Facebook the moment you wake up and before you go to bed" question, to which except the wall (not the Facebook wall) in the auditorium, everyone raised their hands. Let me quote few excerpts and anecdotes shared thereafter. Vikas said "Facebook says the most visited page of a user is their own profile." Raghav added the brain connection to this, "The impact of pre-frontal cortex plays a huge role in our subconscious thinking." Then, the discussion gradually moved on to the grey area - the legalities governing internet in India- which was neatly elucidated by Aruna Ganesh. Most of the audience was not aware of the IT Act 66A and the legal implications. Thanks to my Twitter TL during the most happening days, it didn't seem Greek and Roman to me at least. Aruna spoke in length various issues concerning the netizens and quoted few brilliant examples. For instance, she told "A person from Oman filed a complaint with the Chennai police stating that he was guaranteed employment by a party here. He submitted the e-mails sent to him by the employer. The cyber crime branch tracked the IP address to the complainant's personal laptop. Then came the shocking revelation that the complainee was found to be none other than his own son." J.Walt quipped on this bizarre act as "What a rotten kid! How messed up this family is." He pitched in good amount of humor time and again that left us all in splits.
The crux of the discussion and also the crucial takeaway was the IT Act 66A. Our ignorance on the law of the land governing social media was a grim reminder to all. Also, there was an interesting student in the audience who actually echoed everyone's feelings by saying "I post a really good and sensible status - 10 likes. And my girl shares it - 100 likes." And he also questioned why people are not taking responsibilities. Vikas made a quick reply saying "Responsibility has to come from within. You should be the change you wish to see in the world."
Unconference finally came to an end with various thoughts and conclusions consolidated and narrated perfectly by Arvind. So, who had the last laugh? Social Media :)
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.
Indian Jewellers are known to build an emotional connect with consumers. With the emergence of e-retailers for jewellery like Bluestone, Caratlane, offline jewellers have taken notice of the online potential and have been quickly ramping up their efforts to connect with the online consumer. Highly personalised jewellery stores like Gehna in Chennai now provide high quality experience to customers to discover unique jewellery designs or even let them customise their jewelery. In the infographic, we look at the efforts being made by some of the larger jewellers on the social media strategy.
In the next infographic, we shall cover in detail, the leading jewellers in South India and Chennai, and the best practices in their social media strategy.
Buying a home and talking about real estate prices is a popular topic over coffee. The Real Estate Industry in India, and Chennai in particular, is growing rapidly with new developments in the heart of the city and many suburbs becoming a part of the city. Developers and Aggregators provide a lot of information online to increase awareness of their new projects and help us make the right purchase decision. The above infographic provides information on the digital and social media activities of Indian Real Estate Developers, with a special focus on Chennai.
As the infographic points out, almost 49% of the companies are not leveraging the digital media to boost their business and hence loosing out a huge opportunity to leverage their offline business.
Some of the developers covered include Prestige Developers, Vijay Shanthi, BBCL, Ceebros and Akshaya. Watch out for the next infographic in the Real Estate Space, which will cover best practices in online media by Global Real Estate companies. You can also read our complete guide for digital marketing for real estate for more information.
When we were trying to understand the online travel industry, we struck across an interesting fact that 40% of the travellers worldwide who use social media sites for travel information (Source: Ticket Goose).
Below is the breakup of the % of respondents that use social media sites to research and plan their trips (as of January 2013:
While that is global data, when we explored a little further to see the data from a India (in specific Chennai) perspective, this is what we found from Ticket Goose:
Some interesting Online Travel Startups in India
Interestingly there are many online travel startups in specific niche's which are trying to enter the market. For instance, there have been a number of startups in the online bus travel space, like Ticket Goose, Ticket Karan and Travel Yaari while even established players like Makemytrip, Yatra and Ezeego1 are entering this space. Some industry sources also expect Cleartrip to also enter into online bus bookings.
Cleartrip recently launched Rail Search as online travel portals look beyond airlines as additional source of revenue. Cleartrip expects non airline revenues to go up to 20% this year. Even Make My Trip launched their “Holiday Plus” to create more engaging holiday packages rater than just air tickets and hotels.
Some of the other online travel portals that are worth visiting are
We hope you enjoy exploring these travel planning portals. We look forward to receiving your feedback on the post and infographic :)
