Case Studies, Digital Marketing Practices, Industry News, Social Media Trends

IPL5 Social Media Case Studies & Strategies – The Fever Begins!

Nine days to go, says the official IPL website as of today (March 16), and the organizers have taken the social media world by a storm. With a widespread presence on all major platforms as well as one-to-one interactions, it looks like the teams are leaving no stone unturned in garnering support. And about time, too, if you ask me, considering the less than satisfactory performance by the Indian cricket team in the recent matches.

Previously I have covered many case studies dealing with new-age marketing on social media, but this kind of trust-building exercise is unique on its own. Let’s have a look at what the teams are doing.

Mumbai Indians

The IPL are out projecting a friendly image and trying to engage fans, hence the smiling faces with the tagline “The Mumbai Indians would like to be your Friend”.

Once you hit “Like”, you are taken to the wall page, which is quite unlike the traditional wall page. Instead of being formal and communicating one-way, Mumbai Indians have decided to spice things up by sharing team photos, running small contests, and posting videos featuring the players.

Here we see Munaf Patel reminiscing about the day he joined the team. On the left you see the unmistakable proof of the team’s popularity – over 2.5 million fans, which is next to impossible in social media campaigns! Of the course part of the charm lies with heavyweights the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan Singh.

The players have also been given their separate pages, where fans can interact with them individually. Consider the fan page of “Bhajji”, where he just posted something personal and fans are loving it!

The Mumbai Indians are also active on Twitter, and are taking the pains to interact with followers one on one – a demanding exercise, for sure, but one that pays off handsomely.

Delhi Daredevils

Next up is another interesting campaign being run by Delhi Daredevils. You see it as soon as you visit their official Facebook page.

That’s right: create your own mascot! It looks me that Delhi Daredevils have come up with a “daredevil” strategy of killing two birds with a stone – they want to engage fans in the best possible manner, and at the same time want to have an awesome mascot developed by crowdsourcing it! I think this provides a wonderful opportunity to all the fans out there to connect, express themselves, and win some cool prizes. Let’s see what mascot comes out of this intelligently planned exercise!

Step inside to see the team present analysis of Sachin’s innings against the match against Bangladesh today, as well as another interesting interactive campaign going on: The Delhi Daredevils’ Advocate.

Click on http://www.dddevilsadvocate.in/ and you find that the team is looking for three ultra-passionate fans to prove their mettle and cover the Delhi Daredevils during IPL 5 – talk about dreams coming true! The three positions are for Photographer, Videographer, and Blogger. Online journalism indeed! There are a few other contests also being run, such as the “Khelo Front Foot Pe” contest, which is an interactive Facebook app. This shows that they are tapping into all the available channels. All said and done, Delhi Daredevils doesn’t have as many fans as the Mumbai Indians do, though.

The team also has an active Twitter presence, and as the screenshot shows, they are involved in one to one interaction, posting fresh updates, as well as retweeting tweets by the fans. One look is enough to convince me that it is working – people are thrilled at the attention they are getting, and are cheering for their team. The Twitter page also has photos by the team, adding an extra dimension to interactivity.

Social Media reach and Influence

It’s interesting to compare the number of fans and followers across the nine teams. Here’s a break-up:

Team	Facebook fans	Twitter followers
Chennai Super Kings	902,686	27,588
Deccan Chargers	191,258	16,296
Delhi Daredevils	230,127	10,157
Kolkata Knight Riders	776,340	68,585
Kings XI Punjab	12,382	16,873
Mumbai Indians	2,503,358	29,174
Pune Warriors India	86,156	7,520
Royal Challengers Bangalore	616,886	33,204
Rajasthan Royals	239,853	18,951

The Facebook arena is dominated by Mumbai Indians, with over 2.5 million fans, as I already discussed. However, the true Twitter champions are Kolkata Knight Riders, with over 68,500 followers!

At the same time, the numbers reveal that Kings XI Punjab has not been doing much on the social media front, and is lacking on both the platforms. Same goes for Pune Warriors India, who has very poor Facebook and Twitter presence by comparison. A large part of such failed social media marketing is blindingly simple: failing to engage the people.

Have a look at the Kings XI Punjab’s Facebook page:

There we go: no special attractions, no challenges, no contents. This reminds me of the golden rule: do to others what you want other do to you. It seems that on social media, people really don’t care how big you are. If you fail to communicate and extend a hand of warmth and trust, you’re out! It’s too late to be making corrections now, but I hope they learn their lessons from here.

While it’s not possible to do a detailed analysis of all the teams, I hope this case study has revealed something interesting.

Conclusion

The massive effort and thought put into these campaigns has some important lessons for all of us:

• Social media has become a force to reckon with, and is increasingly being seen at par with traditional media when it comes to reputation management.

• No matter how big your brand, social media is not going to work unless you offer something exciting and keep the conversations going, day in and out. Sorry, but, it’s an impatient world out there!

• The best form of publicity is word of mouth, of which social media is the direct proof. People see others doing something fun and they want to join in – it’s as simple as that.

As a matter of fact, I can confidently predict that very soon, social media will surpass all other available channels as it increases reach, especially in highly niche campaigns.

Also looks like many of these brands loves to Buy Twitter Followers with lots of freebies and contests integrated.

Uncategorized

Facebook / Social Media Marketing Workshop in Bangalore on 10th March, 2012

On a special request we are organizing our Facebook Marketing Workshop in Bangalore on 10th March and luckily this time it is our 25th Workshop in the country, marking the silver jubilee feather on our wing.

The Facebook Marketing Workshop in Bangalore is purely focusing to help individuals, brand managers, professionals, CXOs, Entrepreneurs learn Facebook from business, marketing perspective.

The 8 Hours long event is aiming to cover various business aspects of marketing, how to create Facebook business page, 50 ways of engaging audience via Facebook, how to create, execute and manage advertisements on Facebook, how to strategize social media marketing strategy, how to evaluate the ROI via Facebook Analytics and lot more. You can view the complete agenda in the link below: http://www.echovme.in/workshops/upcoming-events-and-workshops.html
The event cost Rs. 4,000 per person that includes cost of workshop (inclusive of Lunch and 2 high teas, certification from echoVME)

You can make the payment for the event online here: http://www.eventnu.com/echovmes/echovme. For other modes of payment (Net Banking/ Cheque Payment Kindly check Registration Tab here: http://www.echovme.in/workshops/upcoming-events-and-workshops.html)

Remember, such workshops are very rare from us! So do not miss the opportunity to learn to be the Facebook Marketing Guru.

Case Studies, Digital Marketing Practices, Social Media Trends

How Amrutanjan Relief Listens to People on Twitter | Social Media Case Study

Amrutanjan Relief (@WuhooRelief) a 2 months old brand on Twitter is now ensuring to provide Relief and homemade remedy solutions to people suffering from Cough, Cold or Sore Throat on Twitter. Keeping it clean, it also recommends its congestion management products to the needy suffering from the same.

The dedicated team behind WuhooRelief actively listens to people suffering from cough and cold, sore throat and recommend them the Relief products / home remedies / gets little personal by asking ‘if they are ok and also checks the status of their described illness in tweets to recommend solutions accordingly’.

In less than 2 months of time Amrutanjan Relief (@WuhooRelief) has made around 700+ tweets got about 350 RTs and about 260 Mentions more than that it has got some great responses from people who were surprised to see a healthcare product brand getting concerned about them. Below mentioned are few print screens of conversations for your reference:

From Listening, Conversing to Fan:

Amrutanjan Relief ended up conversation saying “Have a Good Day”

Followed by Amrutanjan Relief requested Zakiy to become part of their Facebook family and Zakiy readily accepted the invitation to join.

Request For Trial, Resulting in Purchase of Product:

Amrutanjan Relief Getting Genuinely Concerned:

Carefully Listening, Conversing & Offering Product:

Most cases I have seen bots directly responding back with links or recommendations as soon as you tweet the words listed in their directory. Amrutanjan Relief ensures to take up conversation in most cases before offering a product or takes up conversation after offering a product solution:

Listening, Responding, Getting Appreciated & Increasing Followers:

Concerned Conversations, Precautionary Advice:

Recommendations:

Listening to Sufferers and their Responses:

Listening, Getting Concerned:

Responses When @Annkur Retweeted Amrutanjan Relief’s (@WuhooRelief) Tweet to Him:

Some More Conversations & Appreciations Are In the Print Screens Below:

We are glad Amrutanjan Relief (WuhooRelief) is creating relevant engagements on Twitter unlike many other brands that are merely there for the sake of Tweeting/Broadcasting. After all Social Media is all about engagement and brand needs to Listen, Converse! Converse right! Converse relevant!

Industry News

Why Am I Not Attending Click Asia Summit 2012 – Literally Boycotting #CAS12!

I was asked by many If I am attending Click Asia Summit 2012 and I had to clearly tell NO and this blog post will put across the reasons behind it. Please carefully read the below email conversation:

 

Now that you have checked the conversations, I would like to share some more points that might help trigger some thoughts about such act:

1. I had applied to Click Asia Summit as any other panelist/speaker and in response to the same Ms. Kavita had reverted to me stating the event can’t host me as a speaker but I can host the event as MC.

2. I had already expressed my interest and confirmed that I would be willing to participate. In revert Kavita wanted me to promote this event via my Social Networks (I had tweeted, facebooked, blogged about it and also hosted a small banner about the event on my blog’s advertising section, they were all deleted later)

3. Later when I wanted to re-confirm the status Ms. Neha Mehta responded to me stating ‘we are unable to include panelists / speakers who are directly running or associated with other events”. There was no such policy given while applying for speaking/panelist slot and wondering what makes them device such policies all of a sudden? I wasn’t sure of what they mean’t by “directly running or associated with other events” – I wished Ms. Neha had clearly mentioned in the mail the kind of events she was referring to as I am associated with several events right from my nephew’s birthday celebrations, social media workshops, mashable meetups to Social Media Summit 2011.

4. I still thought Ms. Neha was confused about my presence in event as panelist/speaker as Ms. Kavita had confirmed me as a emcee ,I thought of clarifying in the response mail and I was perplexed with the tone of her response back stating:

“It will not matter which role you are in at the event, we cannot give any position to other event organizers. Thank you for your time and patience”

The above response was humiliating, any speaker/panelist on earth would expect apologies!

I am Still Curious For Various Reasons!

1. I am still not sure why other event organizers cannot participate in Click Asia Summit? Are they keeping the Click Asia Summit’s organizers insecure?
2. Why was confirmation given to me on first place by Ms. Kavita with a request to promote the event? Was it to benefit the network and influence I share and later fool me?
3. Does organizing a event mean that the person cannot ever participate in Click Asia Summit even if they really have good knowledge and experience in the subject?

PS: I have no intention to bring down the brand image of Click Asia Summit with this post. My only intention is to be respected and get the above questions answered, few of which was previously raised to @ClickAsiaSummit on Twitter.

Industry News, Social Media Trends

What Customers Really Want on Social Media – Promotional Offers or Good Content?

On my daily routine of reading some interesting insights on Social Media, I had come across Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium report on a survey taken by 1300 consumers and 120 CMOs called ‘The Major Disconnect between Brands and Consumers When It Comes to Social Media’. The survey throws a clear picture of what exactly customer expects from brands on Social Media and what CMO perceives. An attitude and behavioral study was done amongst two different categories (usually done on one ), the behavior of consumers didn’t match with what CMOs perceived. Below mentioned facts support the same:

The above images shows about 65% of the consumer connect with brands to participate in games and contests and avail promotions, discounts the brand offer. In another question 67% consumers responded that they connect with brands on Social Media to avail exclusive offers. This clearly indicates that people are connecting with brands on social media because they expect something in return. Surprisingly, 57% of the CMOs perceive that customers engage with brand because content is agreeable. Only 33% CMOs perceive that customers engage with brands for rewards or incentives.

Another similar study revealed by Chief Marketer produced similar results. The study in Part 1 shows 59% Marketers believe it is unique content that matters for engaging customers in Part 2 at 39% you’ll see the actual motivation consumers want to connect with brands and follow: coupons, promotions, exclusive offers, etc. And even further down the chart are flyers, offers and discounts that can either be shared with their customers or accessible via a geo-location service such as FourSquare.

Both the studies above clearly indicate the gap between the customer needs on Social Media and marketer’s perception. The study also brings the importance of freebies / promotional offers / coupons for marketers to consider as the true Social Media Currency that their customers can earn.

I Contradict!

Though both the study indicates customers are actually looking for promotional offers, coupons, discounts, freebies etc. Brands also need to believe and understand that it is essential for marketers to make a brand credible on web to make people believe in the offers shared via brand’s channel. In many cases I have seen people don’t engage with brand if it just shares promotional offers / contests they also need some valuable insights about the products/services, industry, backstage activities of the brand, relevant event pictures, team work photographs etc.

A B2B brand prefer to go on Social Media to keep their well wishers, stake holders informed and engage their customers with detailed information about the products and organization. As a customer I don’t expect a B2B brand to offer me discounts, I follow them because I am loyal to the brand or expecting solutions that can help me decide over its products / services. Whereas a B2C brand creates a channel on Social Media for various purposes: thought leadership, integrated marketing communication, customer engagement/relationship management, as a channel to advertise its new products / services, to gain customer insights and more. In a nutshell to meet various purpose of business.

Bringing a brand on Social Media = Setting up a Virtual Office/Store:

When I go to a shopping mall I necessarily don’t go to a store that highlights ‘Sale / Discount’ or offers me a freebie to enter. I do consider the below mentioned points too

1. The way store is put forth
2. Loyalty towards the brands the store sells or loyalty towards the store itself.
3. The way store puts across its products on the display.
4. The crowd standing inside the store, at times I prefer to enter the store which is crowded at times I prefer not to enter a store if it’s overcrowded.
5. After I enter the store I also prefer to look at the price tags, product displays inside the store and the way staff behaves with customers
6. Most of the times, I relate to above incidents with brand’s positioning in reality and from people’s perspective

A brand entering on Social Media considers all the social media intangibles such as customer services, research and personal, image branding which definitely are important component in business. Brand’s presence on social channels impacts every aspect of business from HR to finance, research, marketing, business development, CSR, operations and more. A marketer adapting “Social Media for Marketing” soon realizes Social Media is about complete business ecosystem. Social Media can never be considered as a pure marketing platform it has its set of responsibilities which a brand manager needs to understand before adapting to it.

Final Verdict:

Promotional offers, contests, games and content are all equally important to run a brand’s Social Media campaign. Content helps you engage with your audience on regular basis and keep them updated about what’s happening with your organization, industry (it also does impact to the overall brand equity, relationship building and generating sales). Promotional offers grab your customer’s attention for quick action. Remember, promotional offers / contests / games are more tangible to calculate than the ROI of a content based activity. Your content creates mindset to relate to your brand and that works in the long run. Offers and gamification are instant. You might want to contradict or support the facts shared above, please share your views in the comment section below.

Sources: Google Images, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium, Chief Marketer