Finding your target audience on social media – A quick primer

Posted Jul.14, 2010 under Audience stats, B2B marketing, Social media monitoring, Tools

For all the talks of internet being more measurable than traditional media, most brands still fall short in optimizing their social media efforts by not narrowing down on where exactly is their target audience amongst dozens of popular platforms. Initially, in Search Engine Marketing, we marketers were restricted to target users based on their location using I.P. address tracking and also via interests based on the search query typed. But this is obviously not a complete picture because our target audience gets influenced and makes purchase decisions based on a lot of other factors like sex, platform being used and recommendations from friends etc.

And this is where social media comes in – Most platforms have such a deep knowledge of our personal data like interests, kind of friends, age, sex, current location etc. that it becomes much easier for them to categorise the user base and present targeted information to marketers. But one thing which I have realized in my past 7-8 social media projects is this:

Build it, and they will come. Just make sure your content and strategy is in sync with people whom you are targeting. Content and context are still kings, after all.

Why this happens is because of the most common filtering solution, social interests and good discoverability. X guy sees my content in my community, and shares it to all his x00 friends. Out of those x00, only Y% users will come to your branded community. But they will be highly relevant to you and will get you y% more users.

The conclusion: It’s pull. Not push.

It takes time for this viral effect to kick in (depends on platform design and content strategy) .. so it’s always good to give momentum to this virality by pushing out some social ads from your own side. Here’s how you can reach out to your target audience on various social media platforms:

  • Take a thorough look at the demographics of the audience and then decide which platform is best suited for you. Do a quick search for demographics for social media platforms which would give you a list of options. Collate your data from there and narrow down to 1-2 platforms you think your target audience might reside e.g. B2B audience and chatter would be on Linkedin and not on Facebook. Teens would be on Orkut, Myspace and Facebook etc.

  • Most of the stats you would find online are via international research and you can either extrapolate this data to India or you can also take help of Indian tools like Vizisense.com which is a personal favourite and is owned by Komli Media [below is a sample screenshot for Facebook]

Next step can be a bit tricky, because every platform has a different UI and requires different strategy to reach out to your audience. A brief summary of how to do this on Facebook and Twitter is below. But the basic strategy for any other platform is the same too. Be a part of the platform using a profile / community and start interacting with the audience. Remember the golden rule:
Content + Conversations = Community

Facebook

This one is the easiest and the bestest. Facebook is the big bad wolf. It knows everything about you. What things you like. Your complete demographics to the extent of your family relations. And this CRM data can be used by marketers by using Facebook ads. You can advertise for an external link or a Group / Page inside Facebook. The payment models for these ads can be both CPC or CPM as usual in SEM practices.

Twitter

Though not open for all, Twitter has recently opened up Promoted Trending Topics and Promoted Tweets in search queries. When a user searches for a query, on the top he can see relevant tweets from the advertiser which he can then again interact with. So, if you are trying to reach out to movie buffs, it would be a good idea to buy promoted tweets for the search query movies, mall etc.
Same goes for promoted Trending Topics. It has also very recently launched an @earlybirds account from where users can see discounts and deals being offered via different brands. Bad news is, all these new experiments are still in Beta and only via invitation.

The other option you have is to use the Twitter API and some tools like Tweeple etc. to find tweets and users based on their profile info, status updates, location, conversations etc. Below is a good list of tools to start from:

  • Tweeple – Complete bio and update history of Indian Twitter users
  • Listorious – List of users based on topics of interest
  • Advanced Twitter search – Good old fashioned style of searching content via words and location of users

Linkedin

This platform is more of a professional place where users can connect with others from the same industry. Though the UI design is not very ‘social’ the one thing that has made Linkedin more than just an online CV marketplace are the discussions happening in various groups.

Anyone can create a group based on interests and invite other users. And this should be the strategy that your every B2B effort should incorporate i.e.

  • Build a strong presence of your brand representatives on Linkedin via personal profiles.
  • Infiltrate relevant groups using these profiles. Keep an active eye on new groups related to your industry, this is the only way to find your audience.
  • Engage users in conversations around your industry. Answer their queries. Solve their problems. And then you can start converting leads into sales.
  • To have more control over the activities, you should also look at owning your own active and growing group. Your broad objective here should be to make sure that the market perceives you as the thought leader which gives out good content.

The Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) Program is a very good and highly successful example of the above strategy.

Apart from these you can also use tools for the complete social web like:

  • Klout – To identify thought leaders / influencers in various topics on social media
  • Radian6 / Alterian SM2 – Monitoring tools to identify people talking about you
  • Beatblogging.org – To find out bloggers via topics of interest
You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Bollywood takes to crowdsourcing

Posted Jul.14, 2010 under Crowd-sourcing

Call it a Mutual Fund or Crowd Funding or whatever. But collecting 85 lakhs for a movie just via Facebook and Twitter is no mean task. This video tells the tale of director Onir (@onir_anticlock on Twitter) (of My Brother Nikhil fame) … who used Facebook and Twitter to ask for funding from common users, after they faced difficulty in getting on board producers. The movie in reference is I Am which is a collection of 4 short stories on homosexuality, Kashmirir pundits, single motherhood and child abuse.

And no, it is NOT some low budget B grade college freshmen movie. It has stalwarts like Anurag Basu, Anurag Kashyap, Juhi Chawla, Sanjay Suri, Manisha Koirala and Nandita Das!

Onir basically started sending out updates to his online community (fans and followers) about this one time opportunity to be a part of the film. Users can pay either 1000 Rs. to see their name in credits or 1,00,000+ Rs. to become a co-producer, where your get a share of the profit! As of now ‘I am’ has got about 65-70 owners and almost 350 co-owners raising 85 lakhs. Onir goes on to say how they spent 2-3 hours per day on social networking websites and engaging with users (now contributors and effective stakeholders) on what’s happening with the movie. Here’s why such a move is good for the entire ecosystem around a movie:

  • The ownership and hence the risks gets distributed amongst many.
  • The audience is a part of the product from the beginning and is hence more suspectible to spreading the word in its their own social circles and influencing peers to be a part of product in coming days.
  • Perfect way to generate some pre-launch buzz, without any monetary costs.

Tips for Mr. Onir:

Give users multiple options to send some online itself. Paypal on website. And e-commerce app on Facebook. There would be many drop outs if you ask people to read online and pay offline.

Update:

There is one more example that can be put here which I read in HT Cafe today (and it involves the gorgeous Chitrangda Singh, so I had to put it here)

Sudhir Mishra used Facebook Polls to ask users to come up with a name for his next movie! He uploaded a clip of the movie and gave its users to chose from two options. He has now finalised on Yeh Sali Zindagi

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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A ‘social’ game on Queen’s Baton Relay for CWG?

Posted Jul.13, 2010 under Campaigns

Note: I have seen so many recently, that I think I might be soon forced to make a completely different category for these #epicfail campaigns.

Note 2: I just realised after finishing the post, I have been pretty sarcastic in my recent posts. On second thoughts, they were well fitting words.

Aaaaaaaaaaan. Not really. But I am really glad that IBNlive.com has taken the first baby (though faltering) steps towards a more social approach to marketing campaigns. There’s even a slightest hint of game mechanics. So let’s see. The micro-site allows users to ‘virtually’ be a part of the baton relay that will travel around India before coming back to Delhi.

When I heard the news, I was actually excited. Virtually being there meant some snazzy on the road camera angles and real time updates for me. But of course I over-estimated the digital media prowess of India media powerhouses. The website has a Google Map which lays down the route. It has an announcements section which is 2 days behind. And that’s it! This is how I am supposed to be virtually present at the relay.

Well, after I do login (thankfully using a simple FB connect) I can chose my city to run and the date. And voila! Nothing happens. #fail again for sure. But we must take some plus points (if you can afford to be very VERY optimistic about this site) from here, and those are the social features (unknowingly?) that have been inserted into the design:

  • A profile where I can see which cities have I applied for and what are the others doing there. Are any of them my friends? (automatically picked by FB cookies)
  • An activity stream turned into a game feature by a surprisingly clever process. Whoever has the last conversation has the baton and so to grab the baton you have to reply to the person below you! Ubercool I say. Ubercool. Simple and full of potential.

But it again falls short. There are no sharing options after I update my conversation reply. And why shouldn’t there be one? I would love to tell my friends on Twitter and Facebook about my virtual new cool identity. Hmmm… Well atleast they did something.

Once again, a good step towards more ‘social’ features in digital media campaigns. I am glad of the Indian industry all of a sudden. We are reaching there guys, we surely are!

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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You wanna comment on my content, bitch? Pay 0.99 dollars first

Posted Jul.12, 2010 under Online publishing

Ok so guess what, The Sun Chronicle has now opened its gates to social media. Users can comment (ooooh, snazzy!) on their articles now. What a privilege, I must say.

But you have to pay up a one time 99 cents fee first.
Huh?

Are times really that desperate? Surely, the dwindling print newspaper industry in USA can’t have dwindled that much already that they are going to ask users for 99 cents to acquire the rights of commenting. I am in two minds about the move. I mean look at the reasoning:

  • The Sun knows that print is gonna die and digital is the future.
  • The banner ads model is simply not profitable enough to sustain the media house.
  • But I am assuming that the strategy would remain the same > Get as many users as possible to make use of my service (reading content) and construct a revenue stream around it.

So why prompt users and result in fall-outs by forcing them to type their name, address, phone number and a legitimate credit card number! I have had my share of A/B testing experience and I know how much difference can one extra box in the form make. We are talking about a whole 2 minute procedure here, coupled with the fact that paying money for my basic right of ‘Freedom of Speech’ just doesn’t go well. Most of the big blogs get around 30% of their traffic from social networks these days.

Why not make the commenting feature more easy using Facebook connect / Disqus to push out these comments as status updates and thus bring in more visitors creating a neat viral effect. You don’t have to pay money for a Payment Gateway that way, nor disrespect your valuable users.

An interesting and only comment on the article for now:
The paywall you are requiring is honorable and perhaps even inevitable but it is too early for this in the evolution of the internet, and it will fail and cost you enormously.

A time may come many, many years out when we’ll all pay fees and microfees for interactivity on the network. But that time is not soon, and it’s most certainly not now.

Respectfully,
Gregory A. Roach

Respeck for Mr. Gregory!

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Stats: User behaviour on social media

Posted Jul.12, 2010 under Audience stats

Found this via a post at Mashable and it’s a pretty cool tool actually. Lets you define your country, target group via age and some weird classifications (attitudes) like risk takers, informers, positives etc. Good for making your good old social media pitches to prospective clients. You can find out more on how this data was collected here.

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Industry speaks: Mayank from Dialabook.in

Posted Jul.12, 2010 under Facebook, Industry speaks, Twitter

I have somehow always get @dialabook tweets into my stream via common friends. So I decided to do some snooping and find out more about the service. Found it interesting. Thought of conducting an interview. Better still, thought of making it a whole series of interviews to feature how brands are using Social Media, some interesting case studies and some failures. I am going to call it ‘Industry Speaks’

First one in line is Mayank, Founder of Dial A Book, a 9 months old startup:

  • Tell us something about yourself. And how did you come up with the idea for Dial A Book. Why do you think will it be successful?
    I am a software engineer by profession and based out of Delhi. The idea for Dial-a-Book occurred to me just like that, literally. I was reading up and researching the book space in India for a few months when it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a huge untapped market segment between retail stores and online bookstores. I myself started doing e-commerce some time last year and I was sure there would be many more like me who’ll take even more time to get there, so why not offer them a service that they can use right now as well.

    Dial-a-Book caters to an interesting set of customers. Our customers range from people who are not yet willing to do e-commerce to people who want their books delivered super fast(in a few hours). This is a unique space which we occupy and we being readers ourselves our passion for books reflects on how we run the business.

  • Where does the organisation stand right now? :) In terms of branding. Sales. And competitors.
    We are about 9 months young and working hard to improve our processes and trying to constantly up our service levels. Branding is not really a priority right now and we’ll be working on it in the coming months. Book market being one of the oldest is a highly competitive market and we are trying to establish a unique position for us so that we don’t have to worry about the competition much. Sales are picking up, we started with a few books/month and we are up to a few hundred books/month now.
  • If you dont give users visuals options to chose from, dont you think you are restricting your revenue stream?
    Guess you are referring to the (non-existing) website here :) Actually if you have a look at our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/dialabook) you’ll realize that a lot of customers actually buy books based on the pictures we upload on our facebook page. Though a website isn’t mandatory in our case because of the nature of our business, we do realize its importance and it’s in the pipeline.
  • How are you planning to scale up?
    We are scaling up as we grow. We used to do deliveries ourselves when we started but now we have a delivery team. We are also exploring tie-up opportunities with courier companies for outside Delhi/NCR orders.
  • What have you done to get those x no. of sales over the past few months? What is your distribution process and how is it different from lets say Flipkart? What if a bigger company like that suddenly introduces pay-on-delivery-order via phone system?
    We’ve been promoting ourselves both online(mostly Social Media) and offline and each medium has helped us in it’s own unique way.Just like online bookstores we maintain an inventory of running titles and source others as per the demand, however unlike them we have our own delivery team that does the deliveries and this gives us the option to offer better and customizable delivery solutions.
    That’s a good question. When we started we had this in mind that if ‘Dial-a-Book’ picks up, people shall try to replicate the same thing and to a certain extent its started to happen with some online stores having a ‘Cash on Delivery’ model but then we were have the first movers advantage and some unique advantages that we enjoy being a startup which won’t be that easy to counter. Am sure the market will see something like this soon and the game will only get more interesting then :)
  • How much do you think has social media benefited you? How have you been measuring the sales your ‘conversations’ and ‘relationships’ on social media give you? Have you tried any other marketing efforts?
    We wouldn’t have been talking like this had it not been for Social Media :) Social Media has been a boon for us, literally. Social Media is core of our business, we spend a lot of time on it and take it very very seriously. When we crunched our numbers a month or so back we found that upto 1/3rd of our orders were from Twitter and Facebook combined, which is huge. Yes, we keep a close on the numbers as well as the quality of conversations/relationships. We monitor conversations and act on them asap. We’ve tried a few offline things like Direct Marketing and some promotional activities.We will be doing more tie-ups, cross promotional campaigns soon.
  • If SM has been successful, do you have any further plans to scale it up? If not, then where do you think is it lacking?
    Once we get a bit big, we’ll have a dedicated resource for Social Media to start with who’ll take things from here and make them bigger, get more engagement and interaction going. You can probably tell us where we are lacking :)
  • Have you seen http://www.shelfari.com/ .. a community based on books. Do you think such a branded community (under your brand name) can work for indian readers?
    Future Plans are to increase revenue without loosing sight of the processes and customer service levels. We have been not that active on Business Development front, but that shall change now and you should more on that soon. Target is to get to selling a few thousand books a month by the end of this year.
  • Any social media tips and best practices that you would like to share with us?
    We’ve been amazed to see the response a tiny brand like us has got on Social Media. Like the other day @kamla asked her followers to recommend her an online bookstore in India and one of her followers from London recommended Dial-a-Book. The interesting thing about this is that she’s not even a customer yet :) Selling doesn’t work in Social Media, Conversation Does.

Conclusions:

Some consistent and hard work on social media seems to be paying off now for Mayank. Though the next step for them now should be reaching more people, and then let them carry forward the viral momentum that he has already built. Maybe some options like mobile commerce or tie-ups with carriers can also be looked into. I have always been bullish on e/m-commerce and Dialabook seems to be standing on the verge of one.

Good luck with everything Mayank!

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Why do we check-in?

Posted Jul.11, 2010 under Foursquare, Location based services, Social Psychology

For the past few weeks, non social-media savvy people (those douche bags, eh?) and even loads of Twitter and Facebook friends of mine have been asking me the same question (not without irritation, mind you)

It’s a difficult one to answer. But if I would like to do so without getting jargon in between, I would say – vanity and social gratifications.

RWW recently did some really cool and detailed thinking on why people are using LBS and here’s the summary of it:

  • Serendipity and Connections
  • For the win
  • As a trvelogue

But I think that the core and basic reason why anyone uses @foursquare is this inbuilt inherent social need of human beings, which require us to proclaim proudly of what we have won in any game. The pride that comes with being popular and cool tech-savvy traveler. The pride of showing prizes and records we have earned in our life. The pride of having our own unique identity (vanity) in this cluttered world. The pride of owning a place, because well if you can’t own it in real life, might as well do it in a virtual world.

And this is social psychology at its basic, which has till now, is currently, and will always remain true till the dusk of time. And it looks as if businesses are starting to make use of this behaviour.

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Stop picking on the new kid

Posted Jul.11, 2010 under ROI

I hate it wen people ask me for ROI on social media. I always ask them this, “If I put up a 25 fuckin’ feet banner with strobing lights and loud music coming out of it on Marine Drive for one month, can you tell me the EXACT ROI it gives me?”

That usually does the trick to shut most of them up. Some of them go ahead to explain things like X no. of views and footfalls. And that X is an elusive number you know. No one knows for sure what it is. They just know it’s a lot and it’s more than the no. X from a banner in the middle of the sea! Even this definition is wrong, if you go by the book. ROI is defined as Y amount of money you get back after investing X amount. Not footfalls. Not hits. Not conversations. Hard cash…

Brand managers usually calculate (if some MBA honcho is reading this, please correct me if I am wrong) ROI from different mediums using the no. of users reached. And there in lies the problem. If I reach X no. of users via TV and same X no. of users via Radio, which one  is more influential and will give me more ROI? No one fucking knows. Sure, you can make up some metrics by giving weighted values to each medium i.e. TV carries 2x times more influencing power than Radio and hence will give more ROI (this magic no. 2x either is made out of thin air or via some kinda market research). But lemme make one thing very clear. This is all qualitative.

You need more proof? Take TV for example. TRP’s are calculated by INTAM (Indian Television Audience Measurement), which is the only electronic rating agency functioning in India. And they install something called People Meters in sample TV homes to measure their viewing habits and then extrapolate it to the whole of India. Someone once told me that they install around 5,000 Meters i.e. 5,000 for a total of 63,000,000 total sets in India! Source

Also, check out this article from Amber Naslund which brings up this interesting research:

Number of web pages Google finds for the following phrases:

“direct mail ROI” – 131,000
“email ROI” 55,900
“radio ROI” – 33,200
“TV ROI” – 12,600 (television roi is just 291)
“magazine ROI” – 3,150
“newspaper ROI” – 210
“billboard ROI” – 85

“social media ROI” – 796,000

We suddenly care an awful lot about measuring this new stuff when we haven’t demonstrated nearly the same urgency around measuring the rest of our work (or at least we haven’t been nearly as vocal about it).

Peace out. I rest my case.

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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Can Balaji telefilms’ web series Bol Niti Bol click?

Posted Jul.05, 2010 under Online publishing

As far as I know, this is the second purely online show out of India. The first one I remember is called Company Bahadur.

It follows the story of a young girl called Neeti who I am guessing chronicles her daily life in the form of a video. The show is aimed at young junta on the internet and hence the theme fits perfectly. Ms. Neeti talks about naughty professors, ooohhs and aaahs at the right times and gushes over the cute boy next door. It currently is being published and promoted on 4 platforms:

That’s not a bad number, considering that it was launched just a week ago. The show will have 2 episodes per week. And I am guessing there would hardly be any production costs. A fresh actress, minor shooting costs and very measly content publishing costs (my personal guess max. 2 lakhs INR per month). I have no clue who they might be earning money right now, apart from some ads on the Midday portal, being served Vdopia ad network.

Personally, the script sucks. But I am assuming it will click with every sex-starved teenager out there (at least that’s what I can see from the user comments). Overall, it has snappy and fresh content. And it makes perfect use of our deeply ingrained social need of peeking into others personal life. But I am still not very sure about how far can they take this. I mean after a web-series gains popularity and has enough audience they can make via

  • Ads on the page like Google ads / banner ads etc.
  • In video ads to promote products. Same as any TV commercial
  • Video advertising e.g. that you see in YouTube (India has a good player in this field, Vdopia)
  • Acquisition by a TV network

The first three can never cover the costs of a professionally made video series. And the fourth looks feasible in some freak scenario if Niti manages to somehow become India’s very own meme. I did some research and there a few web series that have been able to pull off TV deals (mostly the result of hard work by struggling artists while sitting in their garages with a camcorder):

  1. Quarterlife was acquired by NBC but was a huge flop. It was the first of its kind.
  2. Pure Pwnage recently granned a deal with some Canadian TV (who cares right? It’s Canada after all!)
  3. The Guild was picked up by Microsoft MSN Video
  4. Washington Post itself launched a comedy series based on tweets by celebrities! Psst… it;s called Twits ;)

For more cooler stuff, check out some of the most famous web series of our current times:

You can catch me on Twitter @adityarao310 or at my website
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An #epicfail attempt from CCD

Posted Jul.04, 2010 under Ideation platform

Update:
This press release tell me that CCD is planning to increase its spendings on social media. Hopefully, it will be put at the right places.

For those who have worked with me, know very well how passionate I get when it comes to crowd-sourcing. So you can imagine my delight when I saw someone talking about an ideation platform by Café Coffee Day on Twitter (@cafecoffeeday)! It’s called Saucerful of Ideas (kinda reminds of Saucerful of secrets by Pink Floyd). But anyhow, it turns out to be a very shabby effort at harnessing social media. I cannot find a single reason why CCD should pay money and time on this.

  • Firstly, login doesn’t work. The banner doesn’t change and keeps the text in the back hidden all the time.
  • The View ideas page gives 404 error! It’s ok, if there are yet no ideas, but get your linking right guys!

  • But wait a second! There are some ideas already. From the administrator himself! Check out the Share menu #epicfail.

  • The voting feature seems to be the only one working right. After voting it leads me to a page where I can see the percentage of votes for each option. This is a great opportunity but it needs to have more options. The popularity of those options, coupled with feedback on the dishes can then be send to the product development team so that they can realize what to change and what to keep.

Ok, so now after so many fuck ups I thought that maybe site is not yet ready for the public. But voila! It is being promoted there on the homepage menu of their corporate website.

Conclusion:
I really appreciate the effort CCD, but this is just highly uncool. I keep telling every brand manager that DO NOT do ‘funky and new’ social media techniques just because they are the in-thing. Are they actually required by your organisation? What are the business solutions you are trying to solve?

Blindly copying (and doing a horrible job at it) will not get you anywhere. If you are really serious about crowd-sourcing and want some good case studies I suggest you look at Starbucks and Dell.

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