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.

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.

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.

The Future is Augmented Reality.

Marketing,promotions, communications and ultimately the technology used for these communications has come a long way since the inception of the internet and online brand management/marketing. It started with emails; sending out mass emails related to products and promotions in order to entice and capture customer minds and trickled down towards the phenomenon of SMS marketing, when companies started sending out mass cellphone texts to customer databases hence trying to get their attention through that. Then came the era of  “the Social Network”, marketing took a huge leap and brands set on the journey of social media and viral marketing, creating fans,tweeting,uploading viral videos. When all this became a norm marketers started towards the use of codes and QRs integrating QR images with products, using it in their BTLs and so on.

Enter Augmented Reality

According to its precise definition; Augmented Reality is a live,direct,or indirect view of a physical,real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer generated sensory input such as sound,video,graphics or GPS data. 

in simple words, Augmented Reality allowed marketers to bring the actual brand alive, available virtually right in the palm of your hand..literally. You can view the product from all dimensions, see the product in actual use,size and shape and experience just what it would feel like to own it.

Many companies have so far used AR for promotion, you could search what Appshaker did with National Geographic in London. They took AR and made people experience what it would be like being a part of National Geogrpahic :

similarly many people have started using AR quite creatively;

using it in furniture design and architecture:

Creating Business cards out of Augmented Reality;

Many other uses of Augmented Reality have surfaced, like using it for Medical lectures, Character creation,GPS systems, etc.

Are we ready for AR?

after seeing all this you would probably want to just get up an get your self a Phd in AR, but honestly its not just about the code, there’s design,content and video involved behind it but i am sure its nothing you creatives cant handle :).

We have yet to see a full blown use of AR integrated with brands, here locally, AR has hatched from its first phase in many western countries but its use is still limited, its any ones game right now to bring a solid AR based brand campaign. so saddle up.

 

How to Make an Awesome Social Media impact

The Social Media age has seen many brands skyrocket to fame in short spans of time, creating an exposure so strong that audience worldwide automatically synchronized themselves with the brand values they experienced on the social mediums. Interactive videos, augmented reality based branded apps, Android and IOS compatible apps on smart phones, content ( both visual and verbal) have really augmented the reach and growth of products,brands and services at an exponential rate.

if you have taken the “social media” road to success you must have started spending a lot of time on your favorite social medium,gathering information regarding it and trying to grow your Social connections to the strongest, are there even any lines which can be drawn to where all this ends.

the question is can you create a social media impact without spending a gazillion minutes/hours,commenting,interacting and tweeting? (since i have always mentioned social media is all about creating a two way method of interaction and communication with the target audience).

the answer here is,YES YOU CAN,But (oh yes theres always a but isn’t there),all you need to be is efficient. How? simply by the use of some easy methods,online tools and a little patience, you can create an amazing social media impact. How do you do it? heres how ;

• Create an audience research pool, you should be able to answer the 5 W’s 1 H

1. Who is your audience?
2. Where can you find them?
3. When are they most likely to engage in a conversation online?
4. When should they connect with you online?
5. What do they want to know about?
6. How do they want the information sent to them?

• Plan your Online Time schedule, you need to plan your time for your social interactions and online promotions everyday, you cannot go around spending all day on it,your time for interacting with your audience needs to be focused and effective, once you are done with step 1 you need to analyze your learnings from it and find out where your audience spends most of its time, and then you use that social medium and that “form” of content to interact with your customers/audiences.
• Establish Goals, do you want more people on your fan page? do you want traffic on your website? you need to set goals for your online presence, you need to define certain KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for acheiving these goals, KPIs help you in measuring the milestones you have reached in accomplishing your goal.
• Content is King, like the famous “customer is king” philosophy in marketing,Social media and digital marketing follow the philosophy of “great content”,online audiences spends way too much time sifting through tons on unnecessary content on websites,Facebook pages,Blogs etc, you need to create content which is concise and has a great message which captures their attention,like WHAM. Focus on the quality of content NOT the quantity, a well crafted status update can help audience growth exponentially rather then a cliched,and heavily repeated one.
• Interact with you audiences whenever you find the chance, you necessarily don’t have to be near a computer or your laptop to update your brand pages status or answer a query, use you Mobile phone,connect while in the train, riding the cab,just do it whenever you can.
• Adapt to the change,the Digisphere is a fast moving fast changing world,you need to keep on tweaking your methods and changing your online strategy in accordance with the fast changing trends and needs of your audiences.

Cheers 🙂

Using Social media professionally..Job seekers guide

More and more organizations,both local and international are now turning towards Digital and more prominently towards social media for shortlisting and choosing candidates for jobs, it is  quite prominent now when a candidate goes in for an interview he is asked about his “Digital literacy and his Social Media competencies”.

More and more companies and recruiters are now focusing towards the social media when it comes to highlighting potential candidates for jobs,by going through “their” networks and social media influences. for all those new job seekers out there here are a few tips which you guys can probably use :

• Make your Social Media profile as strong as your Resume; companies and recruiters nowadays look for up to date information on job seekers so if you are sending in a resume be sure to include your updated and complete Linkedin,Twitter and Facebook profile addresses in it.
• Like i have mentioned countless times before Social Media is all about being “social” or socially active, be part of groups,industry discussions,topics and pages related to your field, create a connection with your field influencers, have online discussions and interactions with them, people/companies/recruiters should KNOW that you exist in the market, and are an active online participant of whatever industry you are in,this makes it easier for recruiters to spot you out.
• Social media has created a culture of openness there was a time when Job seekers had to call recruiters and try to get in touch with them, and they often failed at this. Social media has allowed job seekers to break this barrier,job seekers now can not only call recruiters or hiring managers but can also often visit their social media profiles before contacting them.Job seekers need to connect with recruiters or hiring managers on the social media, if you cant reach them directly, subscribe to their facebook profile,follow them on Twitter, stay updated on what they are putting up online regarding job openings or other news. try building a good online relationship with them.
• Your Networks will help you in landing yourself a job, companies in today’s economically shaken surroundings have cut down on advertising for jobs,Companies look towards their employee’s social networks to share jobs and attract the most qualified candidates. The more extensive your personal network is, the greater your odds of encountering these unadvertised job opportunities. Grow your network simply by being more social,interact with people within or even outside your professional industry,get to know friends or friends, if you cant maintain direct contact try subscribing to them or following them on Twitter,LinkedIn, where ever.

Establish your online professional brand and presence now. Your dream job is gonna follow you 🙂