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. 

Social Media and Retail Banking, are they compatible?

What do you mean by retail banking? The banking services which you and me use, that is depositing money, withdrawing money, using ATM, fixed deposits, credit/ debit cards, etc.

I initially through what would a bank do on social media?!, Bank can not use broadcast media like social media to do any of the above mentioned jobs, right?

But there is more to retail banking then just above mentioned tasks, here are some of the things which retail banks like HSBC, Barclays, Citi Bank are doing on Social Media

1. Level 0 Customer Service : Banks have established country specific accounts / pages on social media and are providing first level of customer service on these, this level of service does not include any personal or financial information, some very good examples are @BarclaysOnline, @citibankau
2. Recruitment / HR tasks : Since Social Media is one of the best ways to connect to individuals, banks are using social media to connect and recruit work force., some of the best examples are @BarclaysRoles, @BofA_Careers
3. Marketing and Sales : Banks are also using social media as every other industry to do the ususal sales/ marketing online

So basically apart from three pillars of CRM, i.e. Marketing , Sales, and Service, Banks are also using social media as a platform for finding talent. And why not? after all "Social" in Social Media is nothing bit the human element and that's what is required here. :)

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

Which sectors are benefiting the most from social media!

According to Nielsen 85% of the world’s online population has used the internet to make a purchase - increasing the market for online shopping by 40% in the past two years (Source)

84% of internet users in Asia Pacific have made an online purchase as compared to 92% in North America and 93% in Europe. (Source)

 As per another Nielsen report on Internet users in India (Source)

• 26 % of online discussions mentioned brands
• 92% have read online product reviews in the last one year
• 77% visited the product website after reading the review on social media
• 58% of all social media users have made buying decisions by using online reviews as their main source of information

Now let us further magnify the trend in context with different sectors.

Retail: As per the report retail sector is the most benefited sector from online purchase sales. Books, Shoes, clothing and accessories are the most sought after products which are purchased online and the trend in Asia Pacific is in line with the global trends. In Asia Pacific Region 38% of the users in surveyed said that they have bought Clothing, Accessories or shoes on the Internet in the last three months as compared to 39 % in North America.

Travel and Hospitality: Travel and Hospitality is one sector which has the second highest degree of exposure on internet. Increasingly more and more people are planning their travel first on the internet and then on road. None of us can think of planning a vacation or business trip in absence of internet access. Indian Internet users have highest number of air tickets online, more than any other country in the world. 70% of the users surveyed said that they have bought airline tickets/reservations on the Internet in the last three months,

So all the above mentioned facts bring us to a conclusion that online purchase is becoming a reality with every passing year and trend is common across the globe.

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.