Why do I need a social presence?

I am sure this is not the first time you would have heard this question! Some of us may have been cheeky enough to ask this question to get a sales guy off his back.

Then there is another type of response which is more mellowed than the earlier one – I have a website! Ah, well of course you do. As Bezos would have famously responded – I am sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?

To be fair, website is an online presence and it does reflect on the organizations culture and its products & Services. If you were to rely only on that presence, it is akin to having a store in the days when there were no malls. People would have to come looking for you to do business with you.

Now consider this, if you were in a mall, isn’t it easier for your consumers to find you because there are many people coming to the mall anyways!! Social & Digital media sites are nothing but modern day virtual malls for the businesses.

The point is very simple – be where your consumers are. Make it easier for them to find you! Coz if he does not find you, in all probability, he will find your competitor!

Consulting to Consultants is really a hard thing!

Most of the consumer products companies have recognized this to a greater extent and have taken the much needed social and digital plunge to reach their target set of consumers. Try telling this to businesses who are in the professional services!

The most difficult thing to consult them on social media strategy, objectives, framework…well you got it! This is exactly the stuff they do for their clients and in all fairness they know quite a lot of it!  The problem is with IMPLEMENTATION. Now that’s not quite unique, is it? Well, we have seen that even companies who are in the business of strategic thinking and advisory are very poor in terms of their social and digital presence.

What’s in it for me!

Well now comes the real hard part of any social and digital initiative. Are there benefits of having a social / digital presence? Are these benefits real?

I would tend to believe there are real benefits and I have given them monetary significance. If nothing, it does help get past the cynics in the first step.

§  Monetary  worth of Relationship

–      People have to see that you are credible when they do a search for your name or the company’s name. This helps to build a foundation of trust to the relationship. People know you even before they start their conversation with you or discover new layers to your profile after meeting with you!

–      Multiple small touch-points towards building a relationship are often best done online (to support your offline networking activity). Consider sending a Linkedin request after a a good meeting with a CXO. It gets you on his network and help build another line of connection to your relationship.

§  Monetary  worth of Reputation

–      Enquiries always flow to firms with a strong reputation. Reputation also helps strengthen the brand and its recall value. If you are looking to build a brand with enduring value, you cannot ignore the online contribution of Reputation!

–      Long-term reputation building opportunities such as publishing a book, keynote speaker slots, etc only come to people who are easy to find and consistently appear credible online. These days any PR activity on Print and TV has a huge impact on social and digital media. Similarly, the social and digital too contribute back to Print and TV media and this contribution is only growing!

Seriously, is this it?

Well, if you have not already noticed, the professional services model in India is evolving albeit slowly. The newer lot of boutique companies who work differently and approach clients on a relationship built on value premise.

The value in a consultancy in not so distant past, used to be in the Partner’s ‘black book‘, which was built through booze and in-person meetings. These are still important but are being slowly eroded.

The new model of building long-term value in a consultancy is through reputation, speaking engagements, articles & content publishing and thought leadership. All of these are made easier and more efficient when your online channels are working effectively.

For those who are on my side now, I would like to say that you were not alone. Many professionals would see digital and social media as being on the periphery to support marketing/PR or as project work for junior members - “I got no time for social media, I’ve got work to do”. Thankfully, people like you are now waking up to the possibilities of leveraging digital and social media for driving some of the core objectives that flow down from the Board. And so, increasingly digital and social media is giving them faster and more poignant insights into the vertical markets in which they operate helping them grow outside of the traditional business building methods.

We shall deep dive into the nature of content and the objectives that can be driven from a comprehensive social and digital strategy next time around.

You can reach me at uday@vondasoft.com with your comments and questions. I would love to hear from you all.

 

Uday Kelleputtige

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up. Vondasoft has developed industry specific solutions for unstructured data analytics and has business outcome focused solution for helping clients in Social Media Marketing.   www.vondasoft.com

                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can I meet my objectives with a message that has a lifespan of 1 day or maybe less?

While it is evident that Social media marketing is quite different from traditional marketing, it is also strikingly different from digital marketing. Many a time organizations use these terms of digital and social interchangeably.

The key difference between a social campaign and other traditional marketing is that there is lot of focus on creative design and it is often the area where maximum effort is spent. And quite rightly so!  These creatives are then pushed across various media channels for a minimum of 6-10 months.

Thus, the life span of creatives is a minimum of 6 months for traditional marketing and this can be a minimum of 1-3 months for digital marketing. However, if you compare this with social, the life span of a creative is less than half a day. Any post is already old by the end of day as a new post is ready to go. This also means that the time allowed for a post to get on to fans and followers’ timeline is less than 10-12 hours.

Hence, traditional logic makes one take one of the following positions:

·         The posts and campaigns need to make more impact in less time. Hence the posts need to be stronger in content and visuals.

·         It is quite expensive to create posts day after day with strong content and visuals that create maximum impact

However both these approaches cannot be further from truth.

Consider this, while the earlier successful movies had silver jubilees and golden jubilees with 25 and 50 weeks of continuous run at the box office e.g. Sholay had a run of more than 260 weeks, the current crop of blockbuster movies do more business in a weekend and their lifespan is not more than 1-2 weeks e.g. Latest hit – Singham Returns. Hence the lifespan has come down due to increased reach and increased content forcing their way in.

Given this fact, it is important that social media marketing focuses on generating broad content areas and themes around which communication can be structured. This will ensure that even if the life span of a creative is half a day, consistent re-iteration in various forms will ensure that the themes and the messages around them is driven home.

This is what we call 360 degree approaches on a brand / service. Social media provides an excellent opportunity to etch out a complete personality of the brand that a traditional communication channel does not provide for.  A line from one of my favorite Bollywood films would aptly summarize this point  – Zindagi lambi nahin, badi honi chahiye!

You can read details about this approach on our website www.vondasoft.com  or reach us at info@vondasoft.com

Uday Kelleputtige

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up that is focused on unstructured data analytics. Vondasoft has developed a solution for helping clients to understand and improve the effectiveness of their Social Media Marketing program.

 

An art or a science?

A Full Bengali Meal

Is cooking an art or a science? The debate goes on. Some say it is the ideal meeting point of art and science. The way any recipe is presented is more akin to science – ingredients required, the quantities, the sequence of activities, the temperature to be maintained – sounds almost like a chemistry experiment!!!

But once you execute the process it starts resembling an art where you have to use most of your senses. You need to see if your creation looks beautiful, hear the crackle of spices in hot oil, enjoy the lovely smell (better to call it aroma), taste and adjust the seasoning and feel the texture. An activity where you use all your five senses to such an extent has to be an art right!!!

For beginners, cooking is more like a science where you depend on the measures and timings and try to get the final dish as per the copy book. However, as you progress things start becoming andaaz se – approximately, as per your gut, intorno a !!! If you have noticed, all your grand mom’s recipes would be andaaz se – more an art than a science.

So where does analytics fit into this? Well analytics – or for that matter any research be it qualitative or quantitative is finally interpretation of findings. A friend of mine who is a senior executive in a leading quantitative research firm told me that the findings keep changing (improving) as the data moves up the value chain. Several times its requires his intervention to find insights which will be meaningful for the client. A qualitative research analyst once mentioned that the same data would give him a different insight if seen the first thing in the morning as compared to the last thing in the evening!!! This sounds more like an art than a science!!

Technology tries to reduce the subjectivity in interpretation of data. Algorithms are designed to drive the thought process toward a similar if not same interpretation.

Use of science in cooking has come a long way – on one end of the spectrum is molecular gastronomy and at the other end is industrial grade production of fast food. Similarly in analytics, especially that of unstructured data, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other such artificial intelligence(AI) tools have brought about significant ‘structuring’ which enhances efficiency (by reducing time take for analysis) and accuracy (by removing subjectivity in interpretation).  But NLP and AI still have some way to go.

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

My take on this is technology in analytics is here to stay (like the food processor, refrigerator, automatic oven etc in your kitchen). As time progresses technology will become more intuitive and imperative (and you will add the liquid nitrogen container, heated bath, rotary evaporator etc to your kitchen!!!). But as they say in Hindi – Ghar ke khane ka maaza hi kuch aur hai (roughly translates to ‘There is a different kind of joy in having home cooked food’)

Ameet Das

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up. Vondasoft has developed an algorithm for unstructured data analysis and specializes on Social Listening and Analytics.

Picture credits:

"Full meal" by Nandinissaha - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

"AlineaDessert" by Brancron (talk) (Uploads) - Own work. Via Wikipedia

"GFO taxonomy tree"  Original uploader was Leechuck at en.wikipedia -  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

Is Less Really More?

A marked difference between the Indian cooking style and the Western way of cooking (which would include say Italian, French, Mediterranean, Continental to count a few) is the number of spices/elements used in a recipe.  In a recent episode on Fox Life – David Rocco’s Dolce India, there was a face-off between David and Chef Rajdeep of ITC Hotels – friendly of course. They both decided to make meat balls. The fact that Chef Rajdeep’s meat balls are better known as Galouti Kebabs is another issue !!! While the Indian Chef used about 20+ spices his Italian counterpart used only about five.

 

This gives rise to a favorite debate amongst foodies – who has a more evolved palate? The Indian foodies like to believe that their sense of taste is more evolved – their taste buds can pick out several distinct flavors in one dish. The Europeans on the other hand feel that a dish should have one distinct flavor which is its signature or identity. At best there can be a second flavor which comes as an after taste. Who is right and who is wrong – well your point of view is as good as mine!!!

In case you are wondering why I am talking about food on this forum – for one it is a passion for me;  but more importantly we come across a similar issue with analytics of unstructured data. Unstructured data is by definition – well, unstructured. Therefore, any reports or insights you try to get from this data is not defined by strict rules. The question which the analyst faces on a regular basis – should I make just one or at best two inferences from this myriad of information (the European palate) or do I look at all aspects that this data provides to get multitude inference which may or may not be actionable (the Indian taste).

Similar to the cooking styles, we believe this does not have a right or a wrong answer. Ideally, the defined objective of the exercise should give us the direction to follow. For example – if it is a hypothesis that is being tested then the approach has to be very focused without any scope for distractions from noise. However, if the objective is to discover unknown unknowns then we have to look at all possible inferences which the data throws up. You never know which discovery may be the most important one!!

Afterthought – Culinary tastes and cooking techniques are not a reflection of anyone’s approach towards analytics…the analogy has been drawn to make the reading more interesting!!

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up. Vondasoft has developed an algorithm for unstructured data analysis and specializes on Social Listening and Analytics.

Social Media - the new frontier for Analytics

We often hear that Marketers of today face challenges of the order that their predecessors never encountered.  They have to fight their battles on multiple fronts – Increasing competition, fast changing consumer needs, communication challenges with multiple media, commodization, costs etc.

While most of the problems would have existed in some degree in the past, media proliferation is definitely a challenge that has emerged from the developments in technology. This brings us to the question – OK. So, what exactly is the challenge?

The challenge is not very straightforward and simple to understand. Let's break it into 3 components in the endeavour to understand it better.

Previously media was largely consigned to print and television. When TV started expanding and growing in mid-90s, marketers had to deal with communication challenges with channels exploding – entertainment, sports, news, et al.  Marketers had decide on the channels that synergized with their brand because the viewership got split across these channels.

Today, a new media is emerging and rapidly too! It is social media that once again threatens to be disruptive just as it was in mid-90s.  The challenge is that smart phones have allowed people to consume social media and consequently, has split the earlier audience segment from TV. This poses the first challenge of Reach!! 

How do you reach customer who has moved to social media from TV?  US data for the last 4 years substantiates this point of view.  It is only a matter of time before India gets to a similar situation.

Moreover, people have started sharing their experiences with brands on social media in large numbers. This is the unsolicited feedback that marketers always dreamed of getting from their consumers.  But are they listening?  It’s not so easy if you look at the numbers in the figure below:

source: Intel Inc.

Marketers would need to leverage Social media analytics to listen to these conversations given the volume and speed at which it is generated. This will help marketers address the first challenge too! Analytics will tell you where the potential consumer is spending more time and hence the marketer can choose the right platform to reach her.

This is the second challenge of Listening & Understanding! Analytics will also provide invaluable insights on brands associations, communication strategy, competition benchmarking.

We will cover the 3^rd challenge in our next blog – It’s the most critical one – Action, Reaction & Corrective Action!!

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Millennia back, humans looked towards the skies. 

Free from modern distractions, our ancestors probably stared at the sky long enough to eventually discern patterns:
- in the seemingly random scatter of stars at night: called constellations
- in the path of the sun as it traversed the skies
- in the moon and the planets' celestial dance

As sky gazing evolved, it found utility in multiple fields - among hunters and sailors for navigation, farmers for crop planning, astronomers for understanding celestial events, scientists for tracking time and distances, even astrologers for making predictions on the fortunes of individuals and kingdoms. Each group looking at the same sky with a different perspective and for a different purpose.

Cut to the modern day - Business Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Cloud... fields of study which have gained traction in the last few years or decades. 

Each topic feeds on the same simple millennia-old need of the human mind: the craving to understand something meaningful from something seemingly random; meaningful enough to leverage for an edge or a utility.

Straggling groups of humans from centuries back have now been supplanted by countries and institutions. However, the primordial need is as strong as ever or probably even stronger.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes 1849

(The more things change, the more they stay the same)