Social Media Catalyst

Clubbing was a decade old form of social networking. Today people tweet their thoughts for the world to see. In between, we’ve had instant messaging, MySpace, Facebook and blogs.

Social networking technology is changing the way consumers, investors and traders interact and share information. However, all companies are struggling to find ways to show how the trend is actually adding to the bottom line. Almost every industry has seen the influence of social networking.

Moksh: Online social networking is here to stay—the only change will be in what form it takes. It isn’t just a fad. However it needs to keep on coming up with innovations. The content and the features will have to be kept updated very frequently for the consumer to retain interest in the same.

Daksh: yes, apart from this, more interactivity between the website and the user will go a long way in him being loyal and an evangelist for the site to a new user or even an existing user. I think the young generation get bored very easily and thus the secret to success for the network would be real time innovation, as Moksh said. It is very difficult to be logged in your site when he has plenty other options just at the click of a button.

Moksh: people ask me whether social networking would take advertisement away from the conventional media. The answer is that no media can be indispensable, ever. Period.
Each media compliments the other and social networking isn’t any different. The only thing that might happen is that initially till the media is new and people have not experienced it, some amount of content will go to it. But in the long run, it will all even out.

Daksh: people in India don’t buy or sell stuff online which I think could be a small drawback in terms of leveraging the media for trade purposes. Advertising is fine but not trade. Also the internet connectivity in India is very low which could act as a barrier. Stringent laws by the government will help trade and as people’s confidence in the system increases, more use of social networks will happen.

The newest kid on the block always gets the eyeballs and attention with respect to what it does. Same is the case with the social networking sites which have taken the world by storm. Experts predict it to be the next big thing. Only time will tell whether it will but it doesn’t stop people from taking big bets on it.

What started out as a forum for like-people to exchange views and opinions and start type of online club has turned into a marketing arena for marketers to get each and every pounce of it. The huge response social network sites have got and the type of audience available to the marketers unprecedented before has resulted in them researching how to leverage it. However there are concerns whether they should be clubbed with the other forms of media or should be kept separately due to the type of audience.

Moksh: Integration with existing marketing strategy or not? For me it doesn’t matter, what matters is how we tap this market. If our goal is the same, then I think we should integrate it since it would give a holistic picture and there would not be duplication of activities.

Daksh: Integrating it will help more since the objectives are same. However the technology and information for this media is developing and thus the quantity of budget allotment would differ from product/ service to product/ service. E.g. Telecom players such as Vodafone or Airtel or Idea who spend huge budgets would not mind spending on social media but low spenders and who prefer focused marketing would be circumspect till the actual response of social media is known.

Moksh: though social media is a bit different from internet marketing, the basics remain the same. i.e. banner ads or classified ads or search based ads will be the way on social media. Social networking websites cannot force neitizens to click on the banner ad.

Daksh: I think social media scores over other forms of media in a way that it is interactive. Thus the consumer is more likely to read and understand the product. Thus I would say that it is more focused and the target market is much more under the microscope.

Facebook
According to Nielsen, Facebook is the No. 7 mobile website in terms of reach. About 15% of Facebook users (11 million) in the U.S. regularly access the social network’s mobile web version (not to mention various downloadable versions and the roughly three million users who use SMS).

Facebook fan pages are just beginning to be supported on the mobile web, and hopefully soon on mobile applications as well. Once they are fully supported, that will open up mobile social-media integration opportunities.

Facebook recently launched a new feature for fan pages that allows users to subscribe via SMS. This is a free service that essentially gives any brand with a Fan Page the ability to send targeted SMS updates to their fan’s mobile phones if they have opted into the service. However, only a few brands have effectively used this new feature, and more work needs to be done to actively engage fans with it by including content that is relevant to mobile users.

Twitter:

Twitter is another great example of the power of mobile and social media working together. According to Nielsen, more than 3 million Twitter users in the U.S. alone regularly access the service via the mobile web. Additionally, many consumers are frequently using Twitter through SMS and a range of downloadable mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile devices. This makes Twitter an easy and seamless way to drive consumers to mobile content.

If you’re already actively using Twitter for a brand, consider how mobile-friendly your tweets are. Also, if your brand has a mobile site and a Twitter account, then why not invite your mobile users to click over and follow your tweets right then and there? Brands can take advantage of this easy integration point.

YouTube
YouTube is a powerful social network and content site, and by far the most ubiquitous in terms of the number of platforms and devices that it can be accessed from. Even on mobile, there are a number of distinct ways that users can access the full range of mobile content. The native versions of YouTube that come pre-installed on iPhones, Android phones like the G1, and the Palm Pre offer the best mobile user experience. However, the mobile web version is also outstanding, and has well over 4.6 million users that log in many times a month.

Orkut has introduced a completely new get up facing competition with Facebook. (via Orkut Blog)

Orkut - New Look

The new look is a mixture taking elements from MySpace the new default color theme, updates is a are very Facebook element and last one also the see the notification like the one in gmail.

What would have made a difference and probably switch the evolved internet users back to Orkut would the integration of status updates via twitter, friendfeed and any other RSS compatible links.

Primarily, Orkut being very popular in Brazil and India, they should have added some very specific themes which are contextually relevant to Brazilians and Indians respectively. Plus, the usability has also become easy in the sense that a person does not need to wait for new tab or window to open. Personally, i always liked Orkut, since it was the first social networking site that i was introduced to and that time, till date I dont like chatting, so Orkut was a welcome relief to be connecting with friends and at the same time, we dont need to give them instant responses.

Even though, you have the chat facility in Orkut, the video chat may not be all that successful, since we are still facing with low bandwith and the major population who is accessing Orkut, might still be using Dial up, so then the chances of using video chat again, diminishes.

With the new feature, you might just have a slight increase in the usage and interactivity on Orkut, but then a lot of people in groups have already shifted to Facebook and now adopting to Twitter. Dont see all of them shifting or spending time on Orkut, untill they make some drastic changes, not just theme colour. They should also look into adding some more community features and connecting with the people on the communities.

Ryze has the clunkiest interface of the four major social network services — your personal home page starts with a two column profile that is professionally oriented, but has difficulty if you have more then one affliliation. Below this standard profile you can use some HTML to create a better looking section, but for non-HTML users it is difficult. Finally, the page ends with a Guestbook, which other other service members can post comments in.

One of my favorite features in Ryze is that when you click on a friend or potential friend, it shows you all the connections that you have between yourself and that person through your friends and friends of friends. Related, once you sign in the site home page will show you small pictures and first names of various friends of friends, and you’ll sometimes recognize some of them and ask them to join your network.

One of the most interesting things about Ryze is its orientation toward having physical gatherings, such as parties. There various events going on every week. As they charge for many of these events, thus Ryse has sort of a business model.

The worst thing about Ryze is that it is a little too open by default. To add someone as a friend takes a single click, and you get no opportunity to say why someone should join your network. Though that makes it easier to add people, on the receiving side I ended up with a number of people who wanted to add me as a friend when I had no idea who they were.

Tribe- Each tribe has a message board, so ‘intentional communities’ is an important part of this service. In fact, this site almost hides your professional information, putting it under a secondary tab, but unfortunately, this tab also only allows for one affiliation per member.

Another unique thing about Tribe is the classified listings — you see on various pages listings of requests and to a lesser extent offers from your social network. The biggest weakness with Tribe.Net is that it lacks the ability to personalize very much. Your personal home page is mainly lists, and thus your personalization is largely limited to your photo.

Friendster:

This social networking service is designed originally for dating.
The nicest thing about Friendster is its simplicity. There are 13 entries to fill out, ranging from gender to favorite movies. Unfortunately the site has become a bit over-popular with the under-25 crowd lately, so it can be very slow in the evenings. Because it was a dating site, the photo links are important, and the actual photos show up larger on this site then they do on any other site, making your photo on your personal page even more important.

The biggest weakness to Friendster is also that simplicity — it is not oriented toward professional connections, nor to your group affiliations. It is just about you and your immediate friends. This makes Frienster the most “status” oriented of the various sites. It becomes more important to see how many friends you have, and how many endorsements you can get.

LinkedIn is the most professional looking of all the social networking service. It is very oriented toward your professional network and not your broader personal network. In fact, unlike almost all the other sites, LinkedIn doesn’t allow for you to add a photo your personal page. The “connections” are not called friends here.

LinkedIn has a very good resume engine. Basically you put in all of your recent job history, with dates, and the software displays it in a form that looks a lot like a resume. This is the only social networking service that lets you have multiple current professional affiliations, which for me is important. Unfortunately, this site does not allow you to easily list your non-professional affiliations, nor does it allow for you to separate job-type affiliations with lesser type affiliations like ‘investor’, ‘member of professional association’, etc.

An important strength and weakness to LinkedIn is that it is much more protective of your privacy. You can’t add anyone to your network unless you know their name and email address, or you have to get a referral from someone who is already your friend. This makes this service much more professional respectable then the other social networking services, which are more casual. For busy and well connected people, this is very important.

I’ve only recently joined LinkedIn, so I haven’t had a chance to use its requests feature yet, but in at least the area of Venture Capital, it seems quite powerful. When I searched on this I got over 500 people that were somehow connected to my social network that I might be able to ask a friend for an introduction.

The biggest weakness of this site is that it tries to be completely self-contained. It doesn’t let you list your website, blogs, or give out your personal information selectively like Ryse does. The only external information that it allows you to share is your email address and that only to friends.

As social networking sites explode in popularity, the hype and interest continue to build. But sorting the fact from the hype can be a challenge. Social networking at a high level is described as the convergence of technologies that make it possible for individuals to easily communicate, share information, and form new communities online. But the big question today is not what social networking is, but rather what it means for businesses. While social networks began as the province of individuals, businesses are now trying to capitalize on this trend as they search for specific strategies and tactics to derive value from it. Used effectively, social networking sites can enable marketing professionals, salespeople, and customer service agents to develop meaningful relationships with customers in new ways. But the true value from social networking can’t be achieved in isolation. Rather, organizations need to take stock of their core business processes and customer management initiatives and identify how social networking can further enhance and extend those initiatives.

Unlike other communication mediums, social networking sites not only provide the ability for users to communicate with each other but also enable users to find like-minded individuals. Once they discover each other, members can form ad hoc communities based on their mutual interests. Multiplied many times over, these individuals become the new power behind the old saying, “power of the masses.” Thus social networking sites help shift power from the company to the consumer as the masses are able to channel and exert their influence. As social networking sites continue to grow in popularity, firms can no longer solely rely on traditional mediums (print, radio, TV, etc.) to enforce public perception of their product. Conversely, these new communication channels also provide organizations with a way to discover and maintain a persistent connection with their most vocal constituents. By harnessing this social networking information organizations can use it to help identify their most influential consumers, drive participation in product development, and improve brand sentiment. While some organizations may still question the business relevance of social networking, un-monitored conversations that impact their business are likely occurring online right now. And as many companies have learned, it is important to be involved in those conversations. In this case, ignorance is not bliss. Ultimately, social networks should be viewed as a channel that organizations need to monitor and engage in.

Skype’s new owners might make it the platform it always should have been.
On the list of technology companies that inspire speculation and interest disproportionate to their size, Skype has often been near the top. The international success of its Internet-calling service was near-instant.

In ebay’s hands, however, Skype never quite achieved its promise. After spending $3.1 billion to buy it, eBay today sold off control to a group of technology investors for $1.9 billion in a deal that values Skype at about $2.75 billion. Not by any means small change but not the outlandish success that was once expected of Skype—and that it could have been.

Eighteen or 24 months ago, if you were asked to name the most important social networking platform, “Skype” would have been a very good, if unexpected, answer. Skype had passed 200 million user accounts way back in early 2007. It had 30 million or so users a day. The total time spent with Skype a year and a half ago was about 10 billion minutes a month already well behind Facebook’s 20 billion but not so far that it could never catch up.

Skype is not, of course, a “social networking” tool as the term is generally used. But it unquestionably involves social interaction. And one advantage that Skype had over social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace was that Skype had persuaded many millions of people to download its software—something very few companies have been able to do.

Today a comparison like this would be completely academic. Measured by the number of users a day or the time they spend with it, Facebook has left Skype far in the dust. And while Zuckerberg’s gutsy decision to turn down Yahoo‘s (YHOO) reported $1 billion bid for Facebook looks brilliant, eBay is happy to have wound up with a smaller loss than most analysts expected.

When eBay bought Skype, the talk was about Skype’s synergies with eBay’s marketplace, and lots of folks thought that eBay’s purchase meant that Skype would transform how eBayers did business. As social networks gained traction, Skype, with its powerful client software and enormous user base, seemed well-positioned to jump into the pool. But Skype didn’t go in this direction. Instead, Skype has chugged along, steadily building its business, but never getting to a big transformative moment.

Blogs, forums and wikis are all tools that can help companies reach out to customers and boost business.

Social-networking tools aren’t just for Facebook fanatics anymore. These days, consumers are demanding a higher degree of interactivity from customer-service departments. As a result, companies are being challenged to add online capabilities to their CRM systems.

Take, for example, today’s social-networking technologies. By building a product-centric social network that encourages visitors to swap information and connect with other like-minded individuals, a company can gather crucial customer contact information and build a virtual community.

Then there is the blogging phenomenon. For marketing, blogs work great to build brand equity and familiarity. Whether introduced as part of an existing product site or as a dedicated minisite for a particular product, a blog can serve as a casual and conversational approach to addressing consumer concerns and building product loyalty.

Companies can also use wikis to enhance customer relations. A wiki is a Web site that allows users to freely create and edit content using any Web browser — without requiring HTML or other technical skills. “Wikis can be a cheap way to maintain a product Web site for both marketing and for service,” said Hickernell. Not to mention the value-add capabilities of wiki technology. For example, a food manufacturer can easily create a wiki-based Web site that allows customers to contribute to a recipe database.

DISCUSS AMONGST YOURSELVES
Discussion forums“are good for building customer communities around products and brands. More than simply a destination for consumers to swap product information and tips, a discussion forum can be used to generate buzz around a product or service without a multimillion-dollar advertising budget. The right discussion forum can even increase sales revenue. Consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more for a service that received an “excellent” rating from fellow consumers than they are for the same service that received a “good” rating. And respondents said that reviews generated by consumers had a greater influence than those written by professionals.

But while online tools can engender a sense of community and brand loyalty among consumers, there is also a downside. For starters, you do need to have strong moderation when you offer user-support forums to make sure bad discussion threads are removed immediately. After all, foul language, racist comments and unflattering product reviews can “be very detrimental” to a company’s customer relations, sales and image.

If you want to boost your online business then you must have a good website. You must have a website that looks superb and attracts visitors and customers. Frankly speaking, most of the visitors prefer the websites having easy layout and access of all things at one look. That is why; website design makes one of the significant elements for internet marketing and business.

Thus what is it that makes a good and profitable web design? Well, the answer for this can be that an effective website design is user-friendly and SEO friendly. These both points must be adequately impregnated into the making and processing of a website.

Features of SEO friendly web design:

Content Management: Content should be unique, attractive and very much relevant. Content makes a great impact on the minds of visitors hence it should be written in the interest of customers and upon the focuses of your website.

User-Friendly: Website must have user-friendly features that makes browsing and navigation easy along with less time consuming.

Presentation: In the times of Web 2.0, presentations and looks have been the key for internet marketing. Presentation involves everything that is graphics, textures, colors, tones and so on.

Technical Aspects: HTML coding, graphic designs, flash, multimedia, alignments and other things combine together to create a unique web design.

Importance of SEO Friendly Web designs:
Better Visibility at the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
Popularity and help in building a unique brand image
Direct interaction with visitors and potential customers
Good and Entertaining presentation attracts visitors’ attention

According to the modern Internet trends, SEO friendly web design is must to enhance one’s online business. Get it as soon as possible.