Categorizing Social Media presence enablers

If you are a small business then it is highly likely that you would have thought of  putting your business on social media. As discussed earlier, this can be done in a variety of ways, in this post we will discuss how can we categorize various in which a business can be social media enabled. Broadly these can be classified into 3 possible categories

1. Direct Social Media Channels
2. Channel Consolidators
3. Channel and Account Consolidators

Moving away from Apps towards Atomization

Creating a smartphone app is becoming more of a hygiene factor in today's world. Pick up any industry vertical and you will find that top player in this vertical are vying for client attention on his/her smartphone screen. That said, as per the Dunbar number there there can be only a limited number of apps which a user uses on his/her phone. Thus true winners in this space are those businesses who are atomizing their services, it is clear that business can not meet the ever increasing and changing expectation, thus atomization of services means providing interfaces for other services or businesses to interact with digital platforms and thus create various new and contextual user experiences. 

Outsourcing Social Media presence - myth or reality?

Before you start reading this post, I want you to Google following "social media presence maintenance"

The result you see is a proof that it is possible to outsource social media presence or at least this is how it appears.

Before jumping to any conclusions, lets first understand what is meant by outsourcing social media presence for a business. Lets take an example of a small business as they are easier to understand and visualize. Say I own a coffee shop, I sell gourmet coffee, cakes etc. I do most of my operations on my own and this do not get time to ensure that my brand is actively present on various social media or may be I do not know how to handle my brands presence on social media.

One day some one comes to my shop and asks me if I would like some help on making sure that my brand is actively present on social media, he/ she also tells me that by doing so I would be able to do the following things which would help my brand

1. Marketing of new / existing products

2. Sales and promotions

3. Maintain relatinship with my clients and gain feedback on my products

I say yes (obviously :D ), he/ she then tells me what all he can do for my brand and what would be the price of the same.

I agree and get into a contract, now this person makes sure that my brand is actively posting on Twitter, Facebook, etc. by making accounts on these websites and representing my brand on these sites. He/ She actually logs into FB as administrator of the Pages and posts latest about my brand. How does He/ She comes to know about what happening in my coffee shop? He calls me daily and asks me about what’s happening in the coffee shop? what are the cakes we are selling today? which products are on discount etc.

After some time as the number of followers for my brand increase and they start interacting with my brand it becomes difficult for this person to make sure that he is answering all the questions and thus he has to hire more people to do so and so he increases the price of hi services to me.

After some time i realize that i can do it inhouse if my wife learns to handle social media presence and does it for my coffee shop and thus my wife takes a training on social media presence and starts doing it for my coffee shop. I no longer take service from this person. My wife act as the page administrator now.

After some time I realize that it would be better if my wife helps me in preparing coffee, making cake etc. as we have no loads of customer in our shop so I call up this person and ask for his services again.

End of story...

So what I could understand from this example is that answer is "Yes" and "No"

it depends on what you want to do with your brands social media presence. Please share your views in comments below!

CRM, Social Media and Social CRM L0

What is CRM?

In three words : Marketing,Sales and Support

All the big names involved in developing CRM software, implementing CRM systems and using CRM systems play around these three words. Each activity, task, functionality in a CRM system touches one or more of these three aspects i.e. Marketing,Sales and Support

What is Social Media?

If your are reading this then probably you know this, so I am not wasting time on this one.

What is social CRM?

The integration pf a traditional CRM system with social media platforms is called Social CRM (Duhh.....)

So why do we need it? again the three magical words(Marketing,Sales and Support)  Brands can integrate CRM and Social Media to ensure better sales, marketing and support opportunities. How?

Customers are active on social media, companies can gain knowledge about them using social media sites and thus can offer them related products, offers, etc : Say a 19 year old would be interested in knowing venues for parties where as a 30 year old would be interested in knowing more about how can he reduce is car insurance cost. Targeted action can be taken using social media to focus marketing and sales efforts towards these individuals or demographics.

All brands need to provide customer support, no matter is you are a technology giant or a small coffee shop. Social CRM provides one of the quickest and engaging channels for customer support.

So again going back to the basics, social CRM stands on same three pillars : Marketing, Sales and Support

6 Simple Steps to drive traffic to your blog!!!

This post is dedicated to all the effort I have made to make my blog attract more and more traffic. Here are some of the things which I have done to make my blog “FAMOUS” …well…or simply….how did I get more and more traffic to my Blog!

So here are the things which I did

1. Allow Blog site to list your blog: Allow you blog site to list your blog in its blog directory. For example If you use Blogspot, when you publish your blog , it would ask you if you want to publish the blog in its directory? You can select “yes” at that time. This would list your blog on the directory.

2. Associate appropriate tags: Tags are the list of words which you associate with your blog or posts. So in order to make sure that more and more people are able to find your blog if they search for a word that has been tagged with your blog then associate the same with your blog. For example: If your blog talks about “how to make sugar free cakes :P” then make sure you include words like cakes, bakery, sugar free, diabetes, diabetics etc in you tags.

3. List your blogs on various Blog directories: There are many blog directories which are available and which offer blog listing services for free. Ensure that your blog is listed. Here is a list to start with http://www.avangate.com/articles/blog-directories-95.htm

4. Submit your blog to Google and other search engines: Search engines like Google, yahoo allow users to submit blogs to be listed on their blog directories. Here is a link to submit your blog to Google http://blogsearch.google.com/ping . and here is a tutorial to submit your blog to Yahoo http://googlewebmasterblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/submit-blog-to-yahoo.html

5. Submit your Blog to news site like DIGG, REDDIT : You can bring more visibility to your blog by submitting your blog on sites like Digg ™ www.digg.com and www.reddit.com , these sites help you to publish your blog in front of world wide audience.

6. Publish your blog on other social media platforms : you can also post link to your blog on all the other social media platforms like face book, LinkedIn, twitter and so on. Also blog sites like www.Blogspot.com Allow you to link your face book account to your blog.

Ok, Enough of talking , now let me do all this with the post which you have been reading …
Cheers!
Madhur Dhawan