Scenario, Afterthoughts & Prompts

The news of how Twitter is planning to take on Facebook in social media turf was appeared on www.mashable.com . As the fight to challenge the supremacy of Facebook is heating up, different social networking sites are revamping their looks and offerings to stay relevant to the users. In order to do that, they are borrowing each other’s ideas, albeit with different name. Facebook came with ‘Lists” and “Real Time Feeds”, heavily borrowed from Google Plus and Twitter respectively. Similarly, twitter had added photo and video sharing features. Now Twitter is adding on more features to make it more relevant to the end users, breaking out of their 140 character identity. Brand Pages : Marketers can customize their headers which makes their logos and taglines more prominent. They can also choose a tweet to stay at the top of their page and that tweet will automatically expand, even if the visitor doesn’t click on it, to show a photo or video. Profile Pages : Twitter profile pag...

I need not to write how important food is for all us and so the point, from where we buy it. It is as important, if not less than agriculture, because it provides an outlet to it for value realization. Moreover millions of Indians are dependent on it for their employment. There has been a lot of debate and criticism, some positive and lot negative about allowing foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail in the country. I personally believe that foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail is very much required due to following reasons: It will help in reducing discontinuity in marketing information : Food inflation, as we all know, plays a very crucial role in bringing or dissipating smile from common Indian’s face. And this inflation is caused by discontinuity in market information about the availability of agricultural produce (Carry Over Stock + Production + Import – Export- Stock Kept for seeds – Wastage) for sale, along with other factors. This...

My mother is my hero , much against the concept of common perception of son emulating his father. I worship her clarity of thought and resoluteness while fighting any adversity. Not only me but there will be many man like me, whose philosophy of life would be shaped by their mothers. So, this way, I and men like me, defy the traditional segmentation theory of marketing, which does it on the basis of gender, along with many others. And it is throwing a new realm of segmentation before the experts of marketing, which fortunately I am not. That’s why, I am leaving the segmentation job on marketing experts and penning down what challenge and benefit digital and social media is going to present before everybody. Earlier, all the marketing exercise used to be unidirectional, coming from marketers to the consumers. But, digital media has changed the scenario completely, where communication now originates from the consumers, which they release after consumption of servic...

Caught in the crossfire of daily personal and professional routine, life seemed to stuck somewhere, not moving an inch from where it was, I told myself, ‘enough is enough’; I need peace, I need a new beginning, I need to reboot my life. Despite being born in the country of mystic and mythology and much after the hippie culture, and I decided to move to region of hills of Himalaya and Ganges in search of peace and what I call “Reboot” the life. This is just second day of my journey in pursuit of ‘rebooting the life’ and I have learnt few good lessons of life, which are as follows: 1.        Format your mind : This has been told and written innumerable times by various experts and gurus of different sects and religion that if you want to fill new ideas and concepts then you will have to empty the old one out. I have given a new name to it.   Whatever has happened is the matter of past. It may help you to take some pre-decided steps, but will...

I was talking to one my client today, a person with more than 10 years of experience in stock market, habituated of seeing and making quick money. He is one of first client, biggest critic and active user of social media, all at the same time. He admitted today that he has got substantial business from social networking, which prompted me to remind him that he never loses a chance to criticise the use of social networking sites. Sheepishly he agreed to my point that social media now a day has become a great tool, not only to create a strong brand image but generate business also, but not before leaving comments that it takes his good amount of time and he has to be personally there to engage with his clients. I could not agree more with him that although social media is not about talking big but about talking business, it takes time and it has to be personal . So, the mantra of success in social media, other than informative and transparent content are scheduling your content and ma...

Every digital marketer knows that keywords and keyword phrases have to be won through bidding process at different search and networking sites; nothing new in that. I discussed in previous blog about using negative keywords and keyword phrases for the benefit of your marketing campaign, especially when it is pay-per-click campaign. Every campaign has a creative communication designed for it, so in the case of digital marketing campaign, which contains these keywords, to enable it in getting desired ranking in search. Again it is a normal practice to run one ad communication at a time, so that, unified message goes to the audience. But have you ever thought of using two ad simultaneously for a single marketing campaign. Some of you might have used it and many, maybe not. The logic is simple, after bidding the keywords and phrases; you own it for a certain period. Now, you can use these keywords the way you wish during that period. So, for your campaign’s benefit, create two ads. Your...

Keywords or keyword phrases are very crucial for digital marketing; nothing new in that, whosoever is connected with digital media knows it very well. In offline or traditional marketing campaign, we target our consumers on the basis of income group, age, sex, religion, community, culture, location etc., because these things are more or less defined and visible to everybody, but in digital media, as the consumer is sitting somewhere far off and logged in their computers, keywords plays the first level of segmentation tool. We target our consumers on the basis of keywords or keyword phrases they put in search engines while looking for information of their choice. So, all SEO experts and practitioners put lots of emphasis on selecting the keywords and keyword phrases. In fact, exact match keywords are considered high priority on Bing as they place a lot more emphasis on them. Unlike Google that still offers a few options, searches carried out on Bing using the exact match signs were m...

All roads in integrated marketing communication plan in India are now leading towards social and digital media. This is most happening place right now and everybody wants to be there. After all Facebook alone boast more than 23 million users in India, nearly 50% of all users acquired by Google+ in first three week of its inception are from India and USA. Professionals here are sold out to LinkedIn. Twitter is rapidly gaining ground and Orkut may fading out in comparison of above mentioned young entrant but it is still there. But pertinent question here is that so much is being talked and written about social media, but is it actually of any benefit? Why should anybody opt for social media? Answers are aplenty; some of them are as follows: -           Direct Consumer Feedback and Engagement: So far, research agencies and internal consumer insight departments were the carrier of consumer’s message to the management. Now social media has given ...

We use different social media tools to fulfil our different objectives. While Facebook helps us organize our friends and activity in better way because it is limited to approved list of friends, Twitter helps us to communicate to large group of people who are there in open, free to follow us, reply and retweet our updates.     The usefulness of Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as Facebook; although it may be more addictive once you get the hang of Tweeting; you get more immediate responses and it seems to live somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging. Twitter encourages constant “linking out” to anywhere and, in that respect, is more analogous to a pure search engine; another way to find people and content all over the Net. Twitter has many benefits, which are as follows: Easy to navigate and update, link to and promote anything Reach far beyond your inner circle of friends One feed pools all users; anyone can follow an...