How Brands Should Not “Over”Social Media Themselves!

Sometimes in the race of being the most “liked” brand on a social media network, brands forget what they actually stand for, their purpose of being present on social media and most importantly when to stop being a nuance for their on-line audience.

There are also times when brands who try to be a little too “human” with their audience for.e.g by sharing posts/images which they think might reflect a sympathetic “human” feeling from their end but these end up backfiring into a whiplash from the audience itself, that is when brands starts losing out on their reputation and on-line “persona’s”.

Marketers and brands both need to understand that the internet is a vicious VICIOUS playground, without boundaries and with a “no holes barred” policy when it comes to filtering and content censorship . They might want to start rethinking before posting content which THEY think would earn them a few brownie points with their target audience and might want to think about how an audience which irrespective of being their loyal customer or not is affected by factors influencing their society,economy,politics and their personal lives. So if putting up a picture of impoverished kids playing football in a slum of Taiwan might be Nike’s Idea of promoting a tag line, it might come off as an offensive statement to many of its on-line audience, who might also be human right activists.

point being explained here is that “don’t bite on more than you can chew” keep it( your social media presence) natural and neutral.

here are a few pointers:

• You don’t need to be a mediator in EVERY sort of discussion that is happening on your page:take an action IF a discussion takes on a tone which you wouldn’t want being excessively discussed (politics,religion,profanity).  you Don’t need to take sides and be a part of a discussion involving 2 customers fighting over shoe models or colours. Let them decide,you cant be on both sides!!

 

• DON’T SELL ALL THE TIME! yes you are in the selling business, you need to make profits, that’s the whole point of marketing,promoting and selling products but at the same time do not lose the real meaning of social media,which is to create 2 way conversation, listen to your followers/fans, understand their underlying needs through these conversations, there might be a purchase or brand behaviour pattern which you might come across, something which you ignored as part of your marketing mix perhaps, a new feature, need,complement. You can get an understanding of this through general conversations with your followers/fans.

 

• Do not lose your “cool”: every single consumer on mother earth has been bestowed with one quality or gift which no brand, product,service can ever take away, no doctor can cure, and there are no medicines for it; dissatisfaction. Yes, no matter what you offer to the consumer, no matter how well you package it, price it, promote it, the consumer will ALWAYS be dissatisfied from it. Dissatisfaction occurs on different scales and doesn’t mean that the consumer HAS to NOT like the product in order to be dissatisfied, he/she could love the product but there’s always that ” if only this blue could be a little lighter,it would be perfect than” ” its great but if these patterns would have been vertical, this would be perfect” , ” this is so good, if only they’d make it a bit larger in size” . Followers on a brands social media page will often get into such conversations, sometimes these conversations take a meaner turn and consumers end up bad mouthing the product, a feature, show their annoyance with something in the brand/product or service, this is where the brand /social media team needs to keep their cool, don’t take things personally, you will be humiliated , thrashed and knocked around like a rag doll because of a consumers slight annoyance or dissatisfaction, try to follow up positively, containing the situation and managing the crisis. If you go after customers/followers with all guns blazing, you are pretty much throwing your target market and brand loyals out the window.

 

• Don’t go falling for all social media “trends and Fads”: Social networks are the central points for trends and fads all over the world,be it fashion,news,politics,social actions etc. One thing which brands/brand social teams need to keep in mind is, something might be the ” thing” on social media one day and in a blink of the eye it either fades away,backfires or is overthrown by a bigger better ( not always) thing, point is they die down after a while, your brand however is in for the long haul. Don’t participate or fall for news,trends and fads which can backfire or cause a bad impression on your brand. A good news piece for some followers might be a bad news piece for the others, some fads might be sensitive for certain target groups, your focus should be retaining that “neutrality” .

 

Brands should always keep in mind, especially on social media, that they are there to converse, get to know their loyal market more personally and pick out behaviour patterns from those conversations, selling becomes easy once you have all the right information.

 

 

Effective Online Community Managers And Their Habits.

Ever since Social Media has started to make its ground in the middle of all brand/marketing campaigns, organizations and senior managements have warmed up to the idea of actually looking towards social media and other online platforms as an important part of their brands marketing entourage. This has in return given rise to the concept of hiring “Online Community Managers”, Social Media Specialists, Online content specialists, and the list goes on.

Certain important traits which I have found to be innate in all Online Community Managers or Social Media Specialists, or should be naturally present in Community Managers are:

• They love to have conversations,time and again I have mentioned that Social Media is all about having conversations,developing conversations, starting and carrying them on. A Social Media Specialist should be able to  talk to people,start conversations not only this he should be have the quality of loving talking to people. If he is all this then your Social Media/Network page will flourish, if not…its time to think on alternatives.
• is good with analysing emotions, trust me when i say empathy can be one of your most important weapons on the social media,it allows you to understand the emotional state one is in, and create a favourable path for you to communicate your opinion and take control of the conversation accordingly. A good online Community Manager knows how to handle frustrated customers because he is able to assess their frame of minds and thinking at that very instant, therefore he knows how to handle them/criticism appropriately.
• Staying informed, a good social media manager makes it a point to stay informed about trends,major events, trends in conversations to judge where to pick up a good angle from. In other words, he/she should be hooked to the social network.
• Reflecting on the culture of your customers.Understanding the customer and what are his inclinations is a very important trait of any Online Community and Social Media Managers. Analyse conversations which go on around your page. What are your page fans talking about? what topics do they normally bring up when interacting with other fans on the page? you might want to have someone in your social media team who,if not an expert,possesses knowledge on the topics being talked about so that he can add in to the conversation, and ultimately steer it in whichever way he wants to.
• Needs to have a sense of humour,lots of it, No one likes dry messaging on Fan pages, the whole concept of a Facebook Fanpage is interacting with the fans, you need to interact with the fans using techniques which develop conversations and a flow of comments,opinions and preferably,ideas. Having a sense of humour helps in breaking the ice,getting information which the brand might be able to use for future, and pretty much an honest opinion from the users.
• Word-play: perhaps one of the most important traits in an effective Community Manager is that he knows how to craft conversations, content and statements. Always remember, in order to get “inside” information out of the customer/user, one needs to know how to angle a conversation in such a way that the information which he/she requires falls right in his/her lap. in other words an effective community manager will always be a good Wordsmith.

Without Limits…Without Boundaries

Its been quite some time since i wrote a post. So as a jump starter for gaining that posting momentum again i thought of starting with something light today. No Content marketing strategies, or how to “WOW” online audiences, this post is dedicated to simply casting a stone on how far and wide is the reach of the social media, and any/every content produced online, and how it just cannot be kept hidden from public/people anywhere in the world.

Talking specifically about Epic content websites/engines such as Youtube where content pools extend into gazillions of videos and other interactive content available to audience worldwide, content stealing, idea ripping and idea duplication cannot go unnoticed. To ALL THE BRANDS/MARKETERS /CREATIVE AGENCIES out there, people do find out when a particular concept has been ripped off an international campaign, or when a complete international commercial has been duplicated onto a local brand communication/advertisement.

People cannot be made a fool of anymore simply because of the fact that:

1) Online resources for content searching and researching are mostly crowd sourced and hence open/available for use by anyone at all.

2) The biggest online resource pool for ideas is Youtube itself and hence its quite evident that someone is bound to run into a “rip off” you agencies make out of various international ads/campaigns.

people, and more specifically people related to creative fields such as marketing and advertising need to realize the fact that online content sources are made without keeping limits or boundaries in mind when it comes to sharing content ,so if a video is made in Pakistan, it would take less then an hour or so for it to go global and be watched by millions of other users on the internet, and out of those millions there are going to be at least a couple of thousands who would catch it IF its a rip off of some other campaign or idea, and hence would start a new thread of sharing but this time around that thread would not be so positive, rather it will be filled with critiques and negativity for the Brand,the Agency and the ultimately the company.

Its better to be cliched honestly than ripping off content online and duplicating it. not cool 🙂

Content Marketing Success.

I read a very interesting post on content marketing the other day and it talked about how to position your content marketing strategy to really hit it where it counts with consumers. just to summarize it lets look at some of the things I learned from it.

Design means a lot: your content is far more interesting to read and a lot more receptive for the reader if it has visual appeal to it, remember the reader/audience might not be big on reading lengthy articles, while if these articles are complimented with visual aids, (infographs,pictures,GIFs) it hold the audience concentration in one place and allows you to get your point across more efficiently.

Use all aids: like i mentioned above about how to give a thought into putting some design in your content, adding visual aids pretty much goes hand-in-hand with this, use videos ,animations, call-outs to make your message more interesting to the audience.

Don’t force feed: the basic rule of marketing, which is to make profits and sales is always there somewhere in the head of a marketer,but when it comes to content marketing this changes a little.With content marketing you need to follow a more subtle and in-direct approach to selling your brand, content marketing should aim at educating,informing and entertaining the audience so that they themselves are enticed enough to inquire about the product or service and then allow themselves to experiment by actually using it. Going in with a “hard-selling” strategy will not allow you to approach audience/customers in a unique manner and you will end up as just another orthodox marketer trying to force feed your brand into the customers mouth.

Don’t keep them waiting: Most marketers do not realize when writing content that on the digital front, information needs to be fast and complete, and there has to be as much IMPORTANT information as you can put in when writing a content piece. What you need to do is to maintain the audience attention and make them go through as much information as they can WHEN they are in their “content reading mode”, provide links to support your article,give them hyper-linked content so that they can look into something right there and then. Don’t lead them on and don’t make them wait give them all important information all at once.

Sharing is caring..literally: Your content should be easy to share and go around, “liquid” content should not only be in terms of smoothly flowing and connecting but also in the form of easy sharing.

This is it for now 😀

Helpful ways of Catching Customers Through Social Media

Hey all, so its been a while since i wrote another blog post for Digitarium, other things had been keeping me busy lately, soo finally getting a little time today i decided to keep today’s post very simple and related to one of the things i talk most about here i.e. ways/tips on interacting and getting customers/audiences through the Social Media.

Here goes.

Search,Search and Search a bit more: the Social Media sphere is huge and believe it or not if you have a brand you might not be aware of people talking about it half the time, if not directly people might be using key words which are associated with your brand or word that might match your brand name, so you need to find these people,filter out these words on the Social Media, especially Twitter, use TweetDeck to put searches on specific words,tags. or associated brand words and find out whoever is talking about anything related to your brand,narrow them down and give them shout-outs a customer loves nothing better then the brand addressing them personally.

Pictures are always good: in today’s world people do not have time to read lengthy content, articles and paragraphs, but IF you post up a picture it can speak volumes..literally.. the probability of people engaging in conversation and feedback with you or your brand is twice as much when you put up a catchy picture or any sort of visual reference/ medium for the audience to interact with.

Use different platforms: Brands on the Social Media need to realize that their competitors might be using more than 1 medium of Digital communication, BUT they also need to realize that if they are using different Social Media Platforms for promotion they need to focus on attracting users on that specific platform, uniform offers all around different networks is not the best way to expand on Social Media, if an audience can find a brand promotion on Facebook and finds the same brand promotion on Twitter, then he would go on to the platform he is more accustomed to rather then going to all of em.try making exclusive offers on different Social Networks, to keep audience interested.

Lets Get Competing: Competitions are the best “evergreen” way of gathering volumes of followers and fans on your social media, it brings people on your page and it actually gets them to interact even. But, yes you need to be a little strategic when it comes to hosting these competitions, because this can attract a lot of unwanted or “fake” followers too. so yes hold competitions but looks for “quality” over “quantity” when devising competitions, so that you get loyal followers.

Lets Get Personal: People like it more when you are addressing them personally, they would be more inclined towards listening to you and do what you tell them to, if you address them individually they would prefer talking to you/your brand more rather than going towards others, and they will sooner or later turn into brand advocates for you. A consumer appreciates it more when a brand shouts out to them personally.

Ciao.

Make A Successful Social Media Campaign…You Shall!

Social Media plays a very important role of influencing and engaging audiences like no other medium, hence the probability of deriving a successful campaign through this medium is relatively solid then old age marketing in today’s world.

so how can you derive more traffic, sales conversions and more audience through a successful social media campaign:

• Each person should have a specific role on the social media; you need to divide the responsibilities and tasks of every member in your team, who will look after online business development?who will derive content? who will maintain regular updates? etc. it beats 6 people talking to the same person on the fan page,overlapping each others jobs, everyone in your team needs to be effective and consistent what they are looking after.
• You need to know where your target market spends most of their online time; we see new social networks popping up by the dozen everyday, what you need to realize is that it is impossible..rather stupid if you try to be on all these networks, it will only end up in causing more chaos then any sort of systematic process in your life. The more “intelligent” solution to this is by doing an applied research on all popular networks, going through blog directories and using online measuring tools to see which networks are your audience mostly interacting on, and them jump in, then its your ball game on which tactics to use for enticing the audience.
• and the most important aspect as always, engagement, sensible engagement that is, you need to know what to write,how to interact and just what will the audience respond to, your updates,statuses and any message broadcast should be unique and interesting enough to create a conversation,retain it and ultimately convert it 🙂

More on this later :)….

Boosting Your Business Through the Social Media

How was the world functioning,communication thriving and people interacting with each other before Facebook and the Social Media influx, i think things were pretty much progressing the way they should, companies and clients were communicating in the usual manner and businesses were attracting customers using the normal sales/brand promotion cycles.

What social media really did for us was to create a more efficient manner of communicating brand offerings and content sharing with people not only close to us but also people out of our physical reach, it really didn’t create a new “field” or “branch” in marketing 101 it actually complemented the already existing marketing techniques used for product and brand.

So by using social media and by understanding how  people use social media you can actually derive the most core marketing objectives out of it.

• Marketing aims to create awareness, it focuses at reaching as many people and relevant audiences as possible, how social media helps here; although you may be sending out the message to a handful of people, those handful further have their own friends, their friends have yet another set of friends,so on an so forth, social media helps in dissemination of the message to a broader scope an reach of focused audiences. All content sharing may not convert into promised purchases but if you are sharing content and your friends are further sharing it,it may end up being seen by more people at the days end, interesting,unique,appealing content has a virality and awareness level of its own.
• Sales, the biggest objective behind every marketer,when using the social media to do this create exclusive offers which might catch the eye of influence makers and in-turn allow them to generate it further among their friends, so instead of going to the masses,when it comes to using social media with the objective of generating sales try being as exclusive as possible.
• a very effective way of using social media is for creating loyalty of your brand among your followers,potential market, you need to use social media to promote your page and presence among your customers whenever you have access to it, create engaging content, visual and textual, create apps and mini competitions which would keep all audiences captivated and maintain interest in what the brand is offering.Get customers to engage with your content, it is very important, it helps in creating a deeper relationship with your customer an generate loyalty with them.

 

Marketing strategies relate very much to social media marketing strategies but you should not try to implement on the online front as they are, cater to offerings exclusively, one size DOES NOT fit all here. Brands in the New Age should be regular social media users, and should be helpful to customers in driving content based conversations by providing them the solutions which they are looking for.

How is Facebook Changing.

A while ago Facebook went through a whole new change aesthetically when it introduced its timeline design and a huge space on top of the profile to make ‘cover photos’.

When Facebook had mentioned before that it was going to create greater adaptability for brands on their pages, they really meant it. After changing the way it looks Facebook gave all brands notifications to change their pages according to the new design by  March 31st, a move which brands should consider making at the earliest, why? because the new design provides much more exposure and visual appeal to everything than the previous design did, and brands could really put their Social Media promotion in the next gear if they took care of their old designs asap.

So how has Facebook changed? lets see.

• Prominent Design; the new design change in Facebook allows for a bigger area for displaying images, easier for brands to highlight their product. the timeline provides a good means to look at how the brand story or a particular discussion is progressing over time.
• Personal Messaging; the private messaging option with the new design has allowed brands to communicate with the audience or the page fans on a more personal level, you can make your conversations more personalized now.
• Landing Page; The new design dictates that there will be one single landing page for all the fans, you will no longer be able to create a custom tab as put if up as a landing page for your Facebook Brand page.
• Promo Tabs; in the previous design page owners were allowed to create promo/custom tabs whenever and however they pleased and they would be visible on the left side of the page, the new Facebook design dictates only Four promo tabs to be “featured” or view-able on the main page, out of those 4 tabs the Photos tab is permanently attached and cannot be moved or removed from the page, the rest of the 3 tabs are movable and customize-able, so choose wisely.
• Content Featuring; The new Facebook design allows you to “pin” content which you want to feature on the top of the timeline, there is a yellow “marker” available to page owners so you can take promotions,call to actions, images and blog posts to the top of the page to be exposed more to visitors.

Although the changes which Facebook has brought to itself seem to be beneficial to brands especially in terms of promoting themselves and specific content which they would want their visitors to read, there could however be certain downfalls to it too, what do you think?

Are you Social Media Marketing..or Stalking Audiences?

Whenever we see a new commercial on television, or listen to a product ad on the radio for the first time and like it, we usually want to watch it again soon to enjoy it once more, this happens a couple of times until we grow used to it and then want to distance ourselves from it because we have seen it or heard it way too many times, however if that particular ad still keeps up with increasing appearances on our television, pretty soon it becomes really annoying and at times irritating to your senses, so much so that you just cant stand it and you change any and every channel it is being aired from.

My point here is that the Social Media follows a similar if not the same cycle as orthodox marketing does.

YES social media is all about interaction and connecting with people BUT, in a SANE MANNER. Brand communications need to revolve around creating a positive impression in the mind of all potential and current customers/audiences and not to drive them insane with unnecessary tagging, self promotion and projecting a “Saint” image every 2 minutes. The line between promotion of your brand and cyber stalking your potential market is very very thin and should be understood before your brand/you end up getting on the last nerves of people and face social media boycott for your brand.

With the growing trends in Social Media businesses or “Digiprenuers” as i like to call them especially in growing countries like Pakistan it is imperative for these Digiprenuers to understand how to cater to their online audience, Yes they only have one way of communicating with all potential customers, BUT that does not mean they should be force feeding every bit of their brand to any and every user that stumbles across the Social Network. You need to understand the difference between promotion and stalking, feeding and smothering.

According to Insight Strategy Group in a research which they conducted on how people react to Brands on the Social Media, 58% thought it to be “invasive” when brands use social networking to promote because the Social Network is for people coming in to socialize and not to hear brand pitches, and self promotion of products which 80% of the time turn out to be mediocre. Then there is the problem which they highlighted is face by all new Digiprenuers, if not at,most of them (the anxious ones especially) , They are all trigger happy status/update bombardiers… a big no no like NO. Always remember that if a potential customer finds something of value or something that he likes on your Brands Social Media page he will find you himself, he will become a regular part of the feed HIMSELF, if he doesnt then you try to improve your content and your offering and NOT bombard him with Self promotional updates.

Jeremy Gutsche the best known Trend Hunter in the world mentions that no matter how average your product is YOUR STORY in promoting it should be awesome… but that by no way means that you unload a truck load of updates and picture tags on your online customers every 1 min. Promote NOT bombard and so NOT Stalk.

in summary:

• Maintain a steady stream of updates ( once or Twice a day) or if its something important to promote 4-5 times a day extended over planned regular intervals. NOT after every 1 minute,and not A MILLION UPDATES in 1 min.
• Do not DO NOT SELF PROMOTE yourself. Promotion of the Brand is Necessary but a brand SELF PROMOTING ITSELF obsessively is not cool. if it is that good people will notice it LET THEM be the JUDGE.
• Maintain a distinction between what you update/status through your brand and what you update as an individual, remember THE BRAND cannot have a be-grudging tone on its page, your brand will face criticism,hate comments,and biased remarks, DO NOT take them personally and start fighting with customers on the page, turn it into a positive and resolve it, DONT THREATEN them with claims and brute arrogance.
• I cannot stress on it enough DO NOT BLOW YOUR OWN HORN continuously, people WILL get irritated and they will start hating the brand and you and they will start posting trash around.

This is for all the new Digiprenuers on the Social Media. Sell your cupcakes, take your t-shirts, promote your photographs, but do not tick off the customer you are promoting to,  do not make them hit that invisible “hate” button instead of the “Like” one.

 

How is Social Media Transforming Us and The World

The future has never seemed better.In fact to me it looks like the future will be marked with smooth sailing. I say this with regards to the evolution that internet has gone through over the past 20 years or less, and just how many times it has helped us in making our lives easier and more convenient to spend, with the advent of tools which help us in creating flawless designs,documents etc, to mediums which have facilitated the way we share and use knowledge or entertain our selves, mediums like YouTube and Facebook. The internet has in fact drastically changed our culture patterns, our communication patterns and pretty much everything in between.

So how has the internet, particularly the Social Media changed us and the global culture around.

• It has challenged the “Normal” way of life/ communication; it has actually brought people closer than we think. Everyone now is one click (or screen tap) away.
• Bought in more Diversity; though connection you can now view what other people are doing, how they are living, you can view their pictures, relate to them on the pages they like, share your joys and sorrow with them in a more larger scope, look at things from a lot of different perspectives through the diversity in demographics offered by the Social Media.
• Supporting one another; in recent years individuals have brought around complete revolutions around the world and even locally (Google Maya Khan 😛 ) just by running campaigns on the Social Media, gathering support from like minded people, the Revolution in the Middle East was one of the largest and longest ever Tweeted campaign by individuals and freedom fighters all around the world. Social Media played a very important role in bringing these historic events to be realized.
• Learning; by far the most positive change Social Media has brought to culture an society has been changing the habits of people to focus more on learning,reading and interacting on the things they are learning.
• Crowd sourcing; whoever said “too many cooks spoil the broth” is living in the last century, Crowd sourcing content and learning is the new way to be, what people dont see is that through crowd sourcing you are able to generate more perspectives,angles and more thoughts to topics and discussions.
• Unleashed Creativity; the Digisphere has helped people with skills, and crazy imagination to take their skills and talents to the very next level, share it with people all across and get recognized.
• Unique and Authenticity; as there are people with unique capabilities being highlighted around the world through the use of Social networks, there has also been a tremendous increase in authentic and unique content being generated all over the globe to be shared with millions across the world.
• Limitless Contribution; The Digisphere or even Social Media does not restrict anyone from contributing their thoughts,their notions or pretty much anything they want to share, anyone can contribute…how awesome is that.

Social Media and other digital tools have been given to us as a tool to bring about change and transform the world for the better. It has given us the power to reach anyone and everyone anywhere in the world….. so what are YOU waiting for start reaching out.