Social Media has emerged from last couple of years as one of the most popular digital media platform. It has been used as a tool for listening, monitoring, conversing, connecting, advertising and marketing.  It has changed the way we have been communicating till now. It has re-defined the social connection. And, the most important fact is – It has just begun. Things are yet to take a final shape. Businesses across globe are utilizing this new media to improve their current communication model.

In between all this buzz, there are businesses which are still struggling with the obvious question – Why do I need a social media agency? Their basic understanding is – Do I really need an agency to manage my Facebook and Twitter account? And, the basic answer would be – No. You don’t need an agency to manage your Facebook and Twitter account. But, social media is not all about Facebook and Twitter. It’s not about writing few posts and tweets. It’s much more than that. Let’s look at the importance of social media agencies.

Real-Time Information : Time is money and just-in-time information has a great value for any business. The pace of change in business is growing by leaps and bounds. To get competitive edge and access a piece of information before someone else grabs it, is getting crucial. Real time information prompts you to take a quick call, a call which can even change the fate of your business. Information is floating in public domain and all you need is to grab it as quickly as possible.

Meaning out of Mess : Social Media is messy, unorganized and uncontrolled. But, there are real people creating some real data. And, the entire ecosystem is growing. You need to find a way to get meaning out of this mess. Out of millions of posts, thousands of them would be related to your domain and hundreds of them can surely impact your business. You need to rely on a strong filtration so that you don’t miss any relevant information.

Connection and Collaboration : Connecting with your customers, your employees and your competitors is very tough in real life. Social media makes it easy. You can not only connect with people but also collaborate. You can share information, exchange ideas, views and listen to the feedback. But, do you have in-house expertise to utilize different social media channels to do so? Do you monitor them 24*7? How much in-house person hour you can devote on this?

Research and Grow : Social Media is a great source / tool for doing research. There are millions of people talking on thousands of different topic at any given point of time. These people are real people and most of the time they share data which is relevant to them. A company which is aiming a research before taking a call can easily utilize this flow of information. They can even talk to people who are conversing on their area of interest. They can connect with subject matter experts.. If needed – they can do online surveys and / or check out previous such surveys / polls done by other agencies.

Enhance +ve WOM : We had a lesson in childhood. Our teacher used to ask,  “how can you make a particular line small?”. He used to draw a line on blackboard. Most of the students used to rub from one side to make it small but teacher had a different solution. He used to draw a bigger line near that existing line. It makes the original line smaller without doing any harm. The same theory applies with your online impression. You need to draw a bigger line of your positive Word Of Mouth. If will help the negative flow of data about your organization smaller. Do you know how to do that? Which channel to use? What time?

Having said all this, you shouldn’t make haste. Don’t appoint a social media agency just because everybody else is doing so. Do your homework first. Understand your business requirements. Make sure that the agency your are appointing also understands your business. And, most important – make sure that the agency has a subject matter expert from your domain.

I’ll try to touch base on this topic again in my further posts. Drop me a mail at info@niteshambuj.com for any specific question on this.

In last post we saw that era of social media monitoring is not yet over. It has become more intense in the form of returning value. People and practitioners  are exploring new opportunities to apply the huge data / information gathered by these tools. These are real and meaningful data. It has information about people, their preferences, their conversations and sometimes their intentions as well. The next part is to channelize them, to integrate them with existing business line.  And, there are quite a few dimensions emerging up.

One of such areas where it has picked up momentum is integration with CRM [Customer Relationship Management]. There are various tools in this category now. They call it Social CRM. The acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce could be seen as one of such moves. Salesforce is a big player in traditional CRM business and by adding Radian6 to its kitty it can very well position itself into Social CRM market. Their latest move to integrate social media monitoring to CRM proves the same. Salesforce is not the only player which is eyeing this market. The other players are also interested to enter this. Lithium’s move to add CRM capabilities is another example of social media monitoring and CRM engagement. As I see, if things will move in right direction, there will be some major acquisitions in this space. This time, it could be by big CRM players like Oracle, Microsoft, Amdocs, etc. Or, even SAP can eye for a social media solution which can add more value to its existing suite. The platform is all set for big market leaders to integrate both of these products and look for a futuristic solution.

This mix and match is working well with smaller social media monitoring tools as well. They are adding CRM features with products like Sugar CRM and vtiger. This solution looks perfect for SMBs which are looking for a CRM solution with social media integration. This combined package will enable them to manage not only their brands on social media but also their customers. They won’t even mind to pay for this package which has got dual benefit. 

A good number of existing social media monitoring tools are moving into Social CRM. It reduces the pain of their marketing team in terms of explaining ROI and it helps the end user to understand the connection. This new line of business has just started and it is surely going to evolve from here.

Talks about the future of social media monitoring picked up momentum when Salesforce entered the market. They acquired Radian6, industry’s leading social media monitoring platform. Radian6 is used by 50% of Fortune 100 companies and hence this acquisition is crucial, not only for Salesforce but also for entire social web market.

When we go little back in times we would see that this market got flooded with hundreds of players of all sizes in a very small time frame.They offered almost similar solutions with different price tags. The purpose was to capture the larger share of the market and lead this new business. Few companies like Radian6, Alterian and Visible Technologies were lucky to catch the early bus. But, as the market got flooded, everybody started asking the very obvious question – where are we heading? And, none of them had the correct answer. The one point agenda to exploit the social media wave seems to have come to an end.

• Does that mean an end of social media monitoring business?
• Is there any scope for re-defining this business model?
• Is there any scope for smaller players?

It’s not so dark as of yet. We do have scope for re-defining this business model and YES, there’s a scope for small players as well. But, to do all this, we’ll have to re-think. We’ll have to re-visit to this business model. Instead of catching the social wave we’ll have to think in terms providing real business value. We’ll have to think in terms of investment and return.

Alright. So the next question would be – How to go about this? What is the way forward for all these companies and also to the concept of social media monitoring?

The way forward is to show results, not in terms of data but in terms of value. There are multiple ways which could provide a proper value, a proper ROI. Getting more marketing insights, social search optimization, social PR and Social CRM are few of them. In next post we’ll talk about one of these concepts and we’ll see how they can help the concept of social media monitoring to flourish further.

• Tom Anderson, co-founder and ex-president of MySpace has suggested that Google+ looks good enough to beat Facebook and other social networking websites.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Google+ and one of his early connections is current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.
• The networking model of Google+ is more real. Circles help you distinguish between family, close friends and acquaintances, claims Google.

These are the popular stories of web world today. These stories are making noise because the wonder ball is now open. Google has launched Google+ [to few limited users]. And, it has started creating buzz in the industry. People were guessing about a similar product for long. Few leaked stories also talked about names like loop, circles, etc; but now we know it’s Google Plus. It’s not just another product from Google; they promote it as the future of Google. It’s not buzz or wave. This time they are much more serious and much more prepared.

But, as most of us ask in our circle – the real question is, why Google needed a product like this? The answer is simple. They want to dominate internet market. They are leaders in search, video sharing, emailing and they want to spread their wings to other spaces like photo sharing, group discussion, and social networking. They had products like orkut, buzz, wave but people at Google were not serious about this business, at least till the time Facebook storm took the internet to a new level. Facebook not only emerged as the leader in social networking space but it also become a threat for the core business of Google, emailing [Facebook’s social inbox] and search [Social Search]. Google had to response. And, they responded with a bang this time.

The challenges for others like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are different. They have to build everything from scratch. But, Google doesn’t face this problem. It has YouTube for video, Picasa for photo sharing, Google docs for document management, Gmail for email service, Android for mobile services and many more utility products. What they needed was a product which can integrate all these utilities and give users a platform to plug and play at a single dashboard. They seem to be winning this race by launching Google+ . Yes, it does provide a single dashboard, a simple look, filled with some powerful features.

But, it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges. They do have challenges. The challenge for Google+ is not to attract users but to maintain the simplicity it has right now. People have started liking this product because it is simple. It is not clustered and it is not noisy. But, that could be because there are not much people. And, there are not much applications. Going forward when there would be a crowd of users, developers and applications – the real test of Google+ will begin.

When entire world is going gaga over Facebook and Twitter, I see a new champion emerging at the dais. This champion is focused at its work. It’s not wasting time to do experiments but quickly grabbing the top influential folks of the industry.  Werner Vogels [from Amazon], Evan Williams [from Twitter], Dennis Crowley [from FourSquare] and Steve Case [former AOL chairman] are just few of them. The name of this new champion is Quora.

What is Quora?

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. This is the official answer from Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora. He wrote this while answering this question “What is Quora?”. At this page, you will find several other answers from Quora evangelists and Quora reviewerers.

There are some initial myths about Quora. Let’s take them one by one.

Myth 1: Many people will not like to join “another network”

My Views: I don’t agree with this notion. People love to try new things. They get bored with using same service. Change is constant and that’s why we said good bye to Orkut, MySpace and adopted Facebook, Twitter. If a new service is giving you a different dimension, a new way to satisfy your eagerness – you would love to try that.

Myth 2: Quora is for focused groups

My Views: In the beginning everything looks like a service for few people only. If you remember, Facebook was only for fun when it was started. Look at the scenario now. Every business wants its presense on Facebook. Same happened with Twitter. People were not sure as why they should use it. They thought it’s only for celebrities but that’s not the case now. I see the same with Quora. It may have some focused attention right now but going forward it will definitely have a broad appeal.

My experience with Quora

While preparing my blog SEO is overhyped I thought to get the opinion of others, especially those who are working in this industry. I asked a question on Quora and Interestingly the very first answer was from Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz. Other answers were also from reputed professionals. Isn’t it interesting?

Challenges for Quora

Every organization, be it a big one or small one, has some challenges. Quora has just started its journey and it also has some challenges. As I perceive, the toughest challenge in front of Quora is Quality and Sustainability.

Quality

Currently when you ask a question on Quora, you get quality answers from experts of the industry. It is possible as number of users and number of questions, both are less. When both will grow, the challenge would be to maintain the same quality. Quora will have to continuously attract experts from every spectrum of life.

Sustainability

The domain of Question-Answers is less traveled and less explored. The chances of getting initial success was high. Quora gained the initial momentum. Now, when the niche is known and some bigger players are also venturing in, the challegne for Quora would be sustainability. It would be nice to see as how they manage to beat the rest.

You can ask a question to me on Quora at http://www.quora.com/Nitesh-Ambuj

Quora still has invitation based sign up process. Let me know if you need one.

Type SEO in Google and you’ll get around 26 million results in less than a second. Wow. Isn’t that amazing? Look at the volume. How much content has been created around this concept? But, is it really that important? Or, it’s just because of a hype created around this term?

Why SEO?

SEO is a process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines. It starts from the design and development phase and continues till entire life span of the website. You want your website to top the list in a contextual search at search engines. You want your web page to be more relevant, more attractive, and more friendly to search engine crawlers. You want your customers, potential customers and other stakeholders to find you easily through Google. And, you want more traffic to your website. To achieve all this, you go for SEO.

Who requires SEO?

Remarkable websites like Facebook and Twitter don’t require SEO. They have enough meat to grab million eyeballs. They concentrate more on providing engaging stuffs rather than focusing on adding more meta tags and keywords. Quality writers also don’t care  about SEO. Set Godin would focus more on his next blog post rather than finding a way to top the Google rank, the rank which itself is overhyped.

So, who requires SEO? Average websites having average stuffs require SEO to manipulate the rankings in different search engines. You want to build a remarkable product – focus on the problem you are trying to solve. If your solution is brilliant enough to be recommended – search engines will follow you.

How traffic comes to your website?

When your website is new, most of your traffic comes from direct links. You give this link to your friends, your acquaintances, send emails to your contacts and people visit your website directly. That’s direct traffic. Next stage comes when you have people subscribed to your website. You achieve this by creating quality content, posting interesting stuffs on a regular basis. Once you have significant numbers of subscribers, your search rankings will automatically start improving.

Should I stop SEO?

No. I never suggested that. Keeping few basic items intact is required. Meaningful keywords, tags, URLs, titles, etc add value to your website. It helps in better organization of content. It also improves your internal search. Doing all this is not a rocket science. You just need to have some common sense.

Social Search vs Traditional Search

Facebook drives more traffic to major websites than Google. If you follow the latest trend around web traffic you must have noticed this news. One of the major traffic analysis firms Compete made this statement early last year. They said Facebook drives 13% of web traffic to major websites like Yahoo, MSN, AOL while Google generates only 7%.

What does it mean? All your effort to get higher rank in Google is a waste when social media channels are going to drive more traffic to websites.

Is it happening with all the websites? No. Not Yet. But, going forward social media is going to be the major source of web traffic. In that case, social media optimization will have more value than SEO.

Crux

People will appreciate your effort on your product / solution and not your effort on SEO. 

United States Presidential elections of 1940 was revolutionary. It was fought at the backdrop of World War II. The United States was emerging from a great depression. The new president had to take some tough decision about World War, Economy, etc. At that time, an American Sociologist Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was doing a research on influence. Paul was the founder of Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research. He exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of social research and his study was focused on finding out reasons behind people voting for a particular candidate. His finding were not only interesting but also very surprising. A new dimension was emerging. It gave birth to a new communication theory called “Two Step Flow”. 

This research helped Paul to understand the impact of social opinion. He along with another sociologist Elihu Katz discovered the term called “Opinion Leaders”. It explains – in every society there are people unknown to others, unseen to others who influences decisions taken by that society. Those influencing people are Opinion Leaders of that society. During 1940 crucial US elections, people relied more on these opinion leaders and less on any other issue. Initially, the thought process of influence was mainly revolving around 3 Ms – Mass, Media, Message. But, this new discovery changed the traditional communication theory. The impact of an opinion leader was so high that it surpassed the basic elements, 3Ms of decision making. The new era of communication was born.

This was perhaps the first time when social influence was felt at a large scale. This study captured the attention of politicians, businessmen and also several other researchers. The reliance on humans for conveying messages, promoting brands became higher than ever. This study became a milestone for people trying to understand the influence behind decision. And hence, we can rightfully say – This was the beginning of Social Influence.

Aggregation is not a new concept for marketing professionals, but, it’s usage in Social Media is certainly a new buzz for them. As we understand from my previous post [on Social Media Marketing], the need to address this emerging market is fiercely felt. Companies are aggressively placing their marketing budgets to this newly created sphere.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Post started the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit has their own distinct features. Different set of people use these websites for different reasons. As a marketer I get a tough time when I try to track online presence of my brand across all these websites. In this scenario I would love to have an aggregator which can monitor all these social media websites and give me a consolidated report. ContextMine is one of such tools which does this aggregation. This market is also diverse in nature. For example, there are specific search engines to search content / messages floating on real time web. Collecta is one of those search engines.

Aggregated data which is contextual and real time, gives a real feel of your social reputation. Marketing professionals are already planning to utilize this domain, and owing to this need, there are plenty of services ready to cater. It would be interesting to watch out this space going forward.

In my last post, I talked about the power of information and how relevant information is still not a reality in web world. Taking that discussion forward, the next question is, if search engines are not providing relevant information, who does?  The answer is nobody does it at this point of time. But, there are many players who are working on this model, including Google. In third quarter of 2009, Google launched its real time search engine. While launching this new search they stated.

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

The point is, real time information may not be very popular but it’s relevant. There are many other players who are eyeing this market. Recently I was looking at a service socialmention. They have an interesting way to show search results. Along with real time search from across universe [that’s what they say]; they also show strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the searched object.

There is another service called whostalking. They have a different approach of showing search results. They categorize it with source. They have options like “Twitter”, “FriendFeed”, “Plurk”, “Wordpress”, etc. You can search your results from any of these sources.

If you look at many other small search engines, you will find they all are doing something innovative. They all are trying to grab a share of this emerging market. They all know – The Search Business is still open.

Around 26% of World’s population uses Internet and this phenomenon has grown 380% over last ten years. Billions of data are floating all over web but this technology is still into its beginning.  We all are moving in a high-tech society and those who have information will emerge as a winner. The concept is, Information is power – grab it as quickly as you can.

Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.

For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.

Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.

Then, how to get useful information out of it?

Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?

When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India.  The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.

Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.

Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.

Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?

Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.

Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.