Social Media is about selling awareness

To take things in a more positive way is what each one of us should focus on, many call it gossip and the tantrum of chit chats, but I more likely claim it to be the awareness...

Just think of it in this way, if people on twitter are discussing about Mr. SRK they are also talking more about the Regional bias that is happening in Mumbai, positive side to it is taht the Social Media is acting with a default awareness strategy. Beautiful irony!! With an average of more than 500 tweets every day using #mumbaiforall & #shivsena discussing the same issue on twitter.

Social Media these days is no doubt the most popular thing in and around each one of us and the best part is its ability to sell awareness. The term sell does not inculcate any monetary benefits. If you are able to sell awareness, be it of a brand, or a cause or a product through social media of which the returns would be assessed only by the Word Of Mouth marketing that particular awareness creates.

Therefore its all about creating the right awareness and selling it through the right channels.

Is Social Media Trendy!!!

A lot of them are unaware of the fact that Social Media is a trendy platform with its arms open, it started way back in 2001 introduction of social media was like a crawling baby learning to walk around. People used to get connected without targeted audiences. The trend took the next step in 2004-2006 with introduction of sites like Facebook (Students being the targeted audience) MySpace, Twitter etc.

Coming down towards 2007-2009 social media is the talk of the town, city and every corner of the world. All that people talk about is making their presence felt online through interesting ways like the Social media sites. Its important these days to be in talk and to present oneself, popular personalities and companies introduce themselves through their social sites. Below are the few examples of when can a trend follow:

Trend follows:

- When politicians like Obama enters social media by doing a personal branding for himself and to everybody's surprise also wins US elections, reaches the people of US in a better and a smart way.

- When Indian politicians like Shashi Tharoor gives his point of view and the whole of the nation reacts towards it by all means.

- When Actors like Amitabh Bacchan reaches the audiences by writing his mind out on a blog and when he receives 500 odd comments on each blog everyday.

- When companies like Tata Indicom, Comcast take steps through social media for resolving issues of their customers and adding on goodwill to their company.

- When you know that YouTube, the video site is about 10 times more popular than Television.

- When the daily soaps, like "Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" get an average of 1 million views on their videos on Youtube


Therefore pack in your seat belts cause its Social Media that is going to be the next trend setter in and around the world!! Ask yourself are you on the right place at the right time?

Digital Marketing Intelligence

Digital marketing intelligence (DMI) is an integral part of marketing, one fails to understand the connection between the both. Research being the key ingredient for DMI it becomes equally important to understand the essence of it to relate it to Marketing.

Marketing pulls in a lot of your funds, with a vague promise or assurance of ROI, this is the time when a marketer has to put his thoughts on the ways and means to understand the trend and the marketing activities happening in and around, I have placed in a few steps as to how one can use these Research techniques and would help you to keep a check on the digital marketing activities happening in and around the world.

The six step methodology that would help you to understand the digital marketing intelligence for your company.

Situational Analysis: Answer the question where we are? the situational analysis is a very helpful step to analyze the present scenario of your company. The kind of digital marketing strategy followed by your company is apt or not, are there enough visitors to your site? What are the things that your website lack, therefore taking care of the SEO related data is equally important for a marketing digital strategy of your site. This can be done through a various tools like the website grader.

Competitors Analysis: Analyzing one's competitor is like benchmarking oneself with the trends in the market and understating the reach towards your customers. The research on marketing towards your competitors helps you to get an online value proposition for your company. Analysis can be of different levels as to what are companies offering on the digital zone with a comparison to what you are offering, for example looking on to the travelling sites in India when a person texts "cheap online ticket" on the search engines it is either Makemytrip.com that comes on the top lists or the yatra.com, this shows the SEO related competitor level in a particular industry.

Research 2.0: The third step in the DMI process is Research 2.0, this focuses more on the consumer insight and the behavior of the human mind upon your product and services. This would help you analyse your online reputation management, where one can find out who is talking what about your product, the type of reaction people give to your brand. Like a positive feedback can add stars and new prospective clients the negative feedback would certainly create wrong vibes to the existing and the prospective customers. Henceforth a negative vibe can be turned positive by connecting to the particular customer and resolving the issues, this would create an impact not just on that customer but would make him/her to write good about your product or service.

Geographical Research: Looking on the globalization, it is important to understand the spread of customers and also to scan the minds of those customers, for example if your target customers are located in India then you will have to get to the social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut,Twitter etc, whereas the spread of the networking sites would be different when it comes to other countries like China, Brazil etc. Focusing the same geographical research from an SEO perspective you will have to understand the key words people use in different countries for example: People in US might search for an Insurance company placing keywords like "trusted insurance" and the same in India would go like "best coverage insurance". Therefore it is necessary to hit the right nail at the right time.

Trends Research: The next step in line is to understand the trends of the market, the industry trends, the consumer mind, as the saying says "When in Rome act like Romans". Keeping in the mind the trends of the industry on has to take a step forward.

Research Tools: The most critical part of any marketing research are its research tools, the above five steps would be complete using only the type of research tools one applies to its DMI. There are a different types of methodologies one can apply to its research like customer satisfaction survey, opinion and polls survey, secondary & primary data on web, focus group via chat rooms and communities.

Hence the important factor here is to analyse utilizing the above factors and the right combination of Research Techniques would help you get the apt digital marketing intelligence for your company.