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

B2B enterprises going social in India!

Would love to share with you two live examples of how B2B enterprises are coming up with innovative ways to interact with individuals over the web, what is the motto behind their initiative, may be you can understand this better once you see their pages.

First example is Commtel Networks, a B2B enterprise in the telecom field which turnkey provider of converged communication, surveillance and related technology solutions based out of Mumbai, They have their own Facebook page, this page updated on average of around 2 times a day with posts ranging from latest news in telecom, whats happening at Commtel, trivia and useful tips.Till date they have received 841 likes which is a substantial number considering that it is a B2B enterprise.

Another example of B2B enterprise going social is Telemeet, which offers conferencing solutions to businesses, they too have their Facebook page and keep updating it with News, Trivia and other updates, they also have around 34 likes. Here is there FB page 

I am sure there would be many more examples of B2B going social but here in India, the trend is just catching up! Sure businesses in India have started understanding the potential of going Social :)

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The mind boggling number!

As per the 2009 data 5.12 people out of every hundred use internet in India. The total population of India in 2009 was 1,166,079,217 as per CIA fact book. So the total number of internet user comes to 0.0512 X 1,166,079,217 which equals to a whopping 59703256 Or 59.70 million users!!


Another report on FT (Source) says that India’s 1.1bn people currently take just 0.03 flights per person per year so that brings us to a whopping 34.98 million flight tickets!!


Now if we want to see how many of these tickets are booked online, let’s multiply this number by 0.70 as 70 % of people say that they booked flight tickets online in last three months (Source).


This brings us to a number which is mind boggling. As you can see from above calculation, approximately 24.48 million people book air tickets online.


And this is just one sector we are talking about, what if we combine all sectors!

Social Media Market Overview

As per Forrester’s report on “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014” the spend on Social Media Marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that online advertising will grow from 12 percent of total marketing spend this year to 21 percent by 2014.

Number of people on social media platforms is increasing by the minute, if we have a look at the most popular social media platform i.e. Facebook®, it had 350 million users in January 2010 out of which 102 million were from USA and only 5.6 million users were from India where as if you compare the population of these two countries the trend is exactly opposite i.e. In 2010 India’s population has reached 1.18 billion and that of China has reached 1.34 billion where that of USA is 0.31 billion people.

Giants like IBM, SAS, Google and Accenture have jumped into the game with both feet and offer solution offerings ranging from SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, Social Media Analytics to Social CRM. There are huge numbers of smaller player which offer more customized solution and number of such players is increasing exponentially.

Social media consulting as a career

Since now we have read about how to drive traffic to your blog http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html and how can businesses generate sales leads using LinkedIn http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html , lets now understand that if you have limitless passion for social networks and even tweet about what time you went to the loo today, you convert this passion to a career!

Just imagine how much fun it would be if you get paid for being on facebook or just for tweeting :p.

I am not kidding. In today’s internet active business environment, every business understands the importance of Social Media and the impact of web presence on the business. Management understands the importance of social media but on the other hand do not have dedicated experts to work on the same. Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the fast paced social media scenario and the amount of time required to maintain their web presence.

You, yes you can be the solution! How? Just read along to know...

Businesses today look for one stop solution to maintain and upkeep their face on social media world, freelance consultants are best solution for this as organizations find it easier to hire them and get expert advice without taking them on their payrolls :)

So it does not matter if you are an internet junkie or are a master in business studies, you can choose to be a social media advisor or social media jockey for a business. This business might be your own college or a coaching class.

The only thing I would like to highlight is that you would have to prove your worth before you start earning on per hour basis, so don’t mind doing a couple of projects for free ;)

cheers!

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