Anuradha Nair and Sunil Elango from Social Beat attended the GDayX event organized by Google Business Group - Chennai last month. The event which was held in Hindustan University, Padur included inspiring sessions, business presentations, a panel discussion and an unconference on latest trends in digital marketing and internet technologies from various speakers including Sunil Rao, the country head of Google Outreach programs. The conclave had a good mix of entrepreneurs, social media experts, SEO professionals and web developers. Below is a partial list of key takeaways from the day-long conclave.
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 added a new dimension to data visualization few months back by introducing an animated and colorful interface for real-time hot searches. Google’s passion for effective utilization of data has been evident in its other services as well. When it launched customizable Google Maps for users, it took data visualization to the next level. The real-time search can be customized by choosing the number of rows and columns in the ‘Grid Box’ on the top left side of the page as you can see in the image below. We can select either a particular country or ‘All Regions’ in the bottom left of the page to narrow our search options.
With this captivating interface to search for real-time ‘hot trends’, Google has proved yet again that it is ambitious to offer more sophisticated ways of using data in future. As of now, it offers search results for 13 countries including India. Check out the sample real-time search for 25*25 for All Regions below.
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 :)
In this digital age, almost all companies want to have a digital strategy but either they do not know how to leverage the digital medium to boost their business or they do not have the required expertise to effectively handle it. After all, digital marketing does not just involve launching a website or creating a facebook page, rather it requires a deeper knowledge of the specific industry in which the company is operating and what channels can leveraged for that particular industry and most importantly, how the online initiatives can be integrated with a company’s overall marketing strategy to boost their businesses significantly.
To get a better understanding of how businesses are leveraging their digital strategy, we carried out a survey amongst 50 companies across industry verticals across the country. The findings were interesting and we have given you summary of it here. You can also download the full Social Beat Digital Marketing Report 2013.
Currently, around 76% of the companies are using social media in one form or the other to leverage their businesses. Moreover, 91% felt that social media has a huge role to play in his/her industry. This shows that there is only a very minuscule percentage who believe that social media does not have a role to play in their industry.
Social media is a great way to build communities around the brand. This is clearly reflected by the survey results where by the respondents felt that brand awareness, customer engagement & generating leads for business seems to be the top-3 objectives of the social media. So, it is definitely a multi-pronged strategy. Initially the focus should be on building the critical mass in terms of number of fans/followers. Now, it is not just about likes and shares for companies, it is also about converting them into tangible benefits for the company, i.e. sales and revenues. But once you have the communities around your brand, you can easily leverage it to your advantage.
Facebook & YouTube seems to be the most preferred channel but Twitter & LinkedIn is also very quickly catching up in India. Facebook and YouTube are visual-driven channels thereby providing great opportunity for B2C companies to target the end-consumers who want visual content.
The quick rise of YouTube as a medium for digital marketing emphasizes the importance of seeing for believing. 2010-2012 period saw the rise of pictures as the prominent medium but the now the focus has changed to videos. Thus, it would not be out-of-place to say that it is evolving from look-n-feel towards a watch-n-feel experience.
Among the B2B companies, LinkedIn and Twitter seems to have a headway. LinkedIn’s relevance among the B2B marketers is not surprising because it is one of the best places to get business leads, create groups based on industry verticals or topics and engage people. Also, getting your employees active on LinkedIn, grow their networks and their active participation in various industry forums can be a great way to impact business relationships through the entire funnel.
Twitter again has attracted the CEOs, top managers & busy professionals. It is a very useful medium for business marketers because of its targeted marketing capabilities using the #-trend feature, break news and announcements, provide link backs. Twitter is a place where all professionals are, this is where real-time conversations happen so it is obvious when you are planning to create buzz in the professional circles, you need to leverage Twitter as a marketing channel.
Marketing Spends & Resources
Around 33% of the companies are ready to spend around Rs. 50000 to Rs. 1 Lakh per month on their social media marketing initiatives. Companies with in-house teams are ready to spend more than 18 hours a week on the internet. Around 50% of the survey respondents are ready to spend more than 18 hours a week on social media marketing.
Now, 18 hours a week is quite a big chunk of time from the marketing initiatives point of view. But there is an associated pitfall here that we can do things but it is important to the right things in a right measure. And this is where the role of digital marketing agencies come to the fore. They know the market and social media dynamics better and can ensure that the investments in terms of money and time do not go down the drain.
Results from Digital Marketing
In our view, unless the digital strategy is leading to tangible results in the medium term then its not worth it. One of our ecommerce client has had a 250% increase in revenues and 300% increase in web traffic since their association with us. This result in the highly competitive ecommerce industry when all players are putting in a lot of effort on the digital marketing is great by any measure. You can read the Ecommerce India Case Study for more information.
Again, one of our healthcare client which is already a leading name in the industry, had a 300% boost in the number of leads generated via digital media. Now, if this result would have been for a new player in the industry, it would have been good but if it is the impact on established businesses, then it clearly says something big. In this case, the returns that were generate due to their social media presence, were far greater than their investments. You can read the Healthcare India Digital Marketing Case Study for more information.
On the whole, the writing on the wall is quite clear. No matter how well-known the business is, if we are ignoring the digital media, we are clearly losing a chunk of our business. How big the chunk is, depends on the industry. But clearly, we would not like to end up on the wrong side. It is all about money. If it is able to drive the revenues for a business, then definitely it is not just a concept. It is for real and here to revolutionize the way marketing is done traditionally.
As goes the famous quote "The biggest ROI for digital marketing, is that your business will still exist after 10 years"
Ernst and Young (EY) recently launched the a report on trends in social media marketing in India. They went to about 50 companies across the country to understand how are marketers and digital agencies leveraging social media. While most of these companies are mid to large size, it throws up some interesting insights. As EY calls it, these are the "social media-savvy organisations", who are possibly by and far fewer in percentage terms compared to other countries.
The study interestingly also looks at how does an organisation measure social media marketing efforts, and also what could be the future of social media. Though the report is 27 pages long, we have given a summary of the most interesting insights:
Social Media Usage in India
95.7% of the social media-savvy organizations that were surveyed by EY use social media to build communities (more engaging for the consumers), while 76.1% use social media as a platform to highlight brand news (which in our view, may not necessarily be as engaging as building a community). In terms of generating leads, only 43.5% of the organisations use it to actively help their sales efforts.
Not surprisingly, Facebook tops the charts as the most important and most influential social media channel. There is a wide gap in terms of usage between FB and the 2nd and 3rd ranked platforms Twitter & Youtube. The study also shows that around 29% of the organisations don't plan to use Google Plus in the near future. This is in spite of the fact that Google+ Local is increasingly becoming more integrated with Google Search (we will be writing more on this in our future posts). We agree with Prasant Nair of Lighthouse insights when he says "I believe integrating networks over social media is the future for Indian brands.". This is surely the way forward and even all digital efforts need to be integrated with offline marketing efforts.
Content & Consumer Engagement on Social Media
The study validates a known fact that brands in India show special favor for their online fans and consumers. It could be in the form of prompt customer service or in the form of giving special deals. EY also quotes the According to Lighthouse Insights study, where in the period from 1 January –31 May 2012, out of Airtel’s 34,991 tweets, 33,928 were replies. For Vodafone, out of 1,015 tweets,1,013 were replies.
Blogging and Content will be the driver for social media going forward and the study shows that less than half the organisations actively engaged with the blogger community, inspite of a platform like Indiblogger. So what kind of content is currently going on the social media platforms? A majority of the updates are generic updates as opposed to brand led updates. This increases the connect with the fans. This could be showing the tired cheerleaders after Gayle's 175.
Social Media Advertising & Spends
Close to 83% of the organisations surveyed said they advertise on social media to promote their online campaigns and also for overall brand visibility. 89% of felt the results were achieved. But this is an interesting question to ask as to how do they measure the ROI on social media? Disappointingly 81% said that they measure results on social media through platform specific parameters like Likes, Plus Ones etc. Almost half the surveyed organisations have not measured sales, leads or revenue from social media. This lack of clarity on ROI is surprising because they spend between 1% to 5% of their marketing budget on social media marketing. Inspite of there being no result focussed approach, the surveyed organisations are optimistic about the future of social media. It does brands engage with consumers and create communities but a result oriented approach is required. You can see some of our case studies on healthcare and ecommerce of how an ROI approach has helped achieved desired results for client.
More on individual sections of the report soon.
Social Beat Co-Founder Vikas Chawla, recently spoke at the Marketing Symposium on Frontiers of New Age Business at KCT Business School (Coimbatore) over the weekend. The topic of discussion was growing relevance of social media marketing in India. You cans see the slideshare presentation below:
Gartner has recently reported that across USA, companies spend 10.4% of their revenue in marketing of which 2.5% of revenue (or almost 25% of their entire marketing spend) on an average is spent on their digital marketing efforts. The more interesting finding of this survey is that this number is expected to rice to 9% this year. The survey was done with over 250 marketing executives from across 6 industries in USA towards end of 2012. The complete findings of the Gartner's US digital marketing spending report can be found on their website.
The largest chunk of digital marketing spend went to digital advertising, possibly with Google Adwords leading on this spend. Such increased spends are increasingly being seen even in India. However this also means that ROI on digital marketing needs to be more specific and tangible than ever before. The digital marketing spends and efforts need to be measured with sales growth, brand recall and actual market penetration.
Gartner also reported an increase in spends on content management and content driving marketing. So while digital advertising pushes customers to the brand, content marketing actually pulls customers and creates a community where brands can interact and excite customers.
In a recent article on this subject, Damodar Mall (Currently Director, food strategy at the Future Group) said to Forbes India that "Ecommerce is a new game for everyone. People will have to try different things. In the grocery space, I would like to say that most of e-commerce is imagined by men and designed by men. As long as you do that, I believe you cannot crack most categories except for a few like gadgets. Till you design it for women customers and till the woman customer bites into it, they won’t succeed. It has to be e-commerce later and shopping first. Right now, it is for men and by men"
In our view, women love shopping (in India or otherwise). The question is how do you create the WOW experience online. She loves window shopping, trying out clothes and looking at new designs, colours etc. So how do you create this intimate shopping experience. Moreover, its a social activity. So how do you create an interface which tries to replicate the experience online. Ofcourse for a category like grocery, Damodar Mall might have a different take but for lifestyle products creating a social shopping experience is essential.
Read the entire Forbes article here.
