Rajat's blog

Although, we wanted to continue our free offering of social media monitoring, the cost of maintaining it has skyrocketed with over 100,000 keywords tracked by tens of thousands of users.

Also, cost of storing open-ended unstructured data for years has taken a toll by bloating into tens of TBs of data stored in RDS/Elastic Search/S3/EBS etc.

So, we have decided to do the following –

1) Free users will no longer be able to create social media monitoring profiles.

2) Current free users will also not be able to see their data starting Monday unless they upgrade.

3) Daily monitoring email updates will continue but if you at any time want them stopped, simply delete your monitoring profiles from the Monitoring section.

These changes will roll out over the weekend.

Please do let us know if you have strong opinions on this. Else, please upgrade

Thx for continued support.

Chief Trouble Maker

Rajat Garg

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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Coca Cola Campaign brings Happiness from Air

Social Media has been the one stop destination for a majority of campaigns that have the power and the capability of driving maximum attention and loyalty towards the brands. There have been many successful social media campaigns over the years.

Youtube has now become one of the most prevalent social networking platform to share campaigns that can help brands to spread their message across and bring in valuable feedback from its viewers.

So was the case with the social media campaign that we are going to discuss today.

Coca Cola, the famous brand that needs no recognition launched a youtube video to spread happiness. The campaign was based out in Singapore when the skies were filled with red boxes of happiness as remote-controlled #CokeDrones took flight, dropping off refreshment and words of encouragement to more than 2500 guest workers around Singapore. Thousands of cans of ice cold Coke, along with genuine messages of gratitude, to workers at high-rise construction sites around the country, providing a refreshing break, lifting spirits and bringing cheer to appreciative recipients.

Themed “Happiness from the Skies,” the project sought to build much needed bridges between Singaporeans and the city-state’s 1.3 million-strong guest worker population that comprises about one third of the country’s entire workforce. The largest group of foreign laborers is made up of guest workers that come from as far away as India, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Leonardo O’Grady, ASEAN Director of Integrated Marketing Communications, Coca-Cola Singapore said, “At Coca-Cola we are in the business of sharing happiness all around the world. So when Ogilvy came to us with the innovative idea of combining Coke with drone technology to connect two segments of the community, who rarely interact, to share a special moment of happiness, we could not resist the temptation to give it a go.”

The campaign has proved to be great, just within a week from when it was uploaded the video has 283,361 views which means that the video took an excellent start and is supposedly going to do well in the coming times as well. This video has not only affected the traffic but has given Coke a better image even further.

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Thursday, May 08, 2014

The All New Facebook Audience Network

Facebook has been venturing into many new arenas lately and has had a strong impact on the advertising and branding market as well. The social media giant Facebook has launched its mobile ad network called Facebook Audience Network so developers can make money without having to sell their own ads, do their own targeting, handle measurement, or route payments. Now this has given maximum power in the hands of the advertisers such that they can with a small piece of code run campaigns on the platform or they can work directly with Facebook to create native ad units that feel like a natural part of their user experience.

Although this new feature has not yet rolled out, developers can sign-up for Facebook Audience Network or talk to their ad rep about getting early access. The program, or the new network will roll out next month and will start with advertisers interested in buying app install and engagement ads. Facebook revealed that it will cut out a minimal portion and pay the rest to the developers, those the company wouldn’t reveal exactly how much its cut will be.

All this seems to provide the basic framework that would once again make Facebook an important social media marketing hub. Eventually Facebook plans on integrating other marketing objectives including website traffic or ecommerce purchases. Existing Facebook advertisers can start pushing their ads to Audience Network with a single click since they use the same creative as News Feed Ads. The ads come in three formats: standard IAB banners, standard IAB interstitials, and native ad units. Facebook says the ads are “designed to help marketers meet key business objectives, like driving app installs and engagement.”

The launch represents a big shift in how Facebook’s business works, from monetizing engagment on its own properties to earning money from its ad targeting data elsewhere. Until now, Facebook’s revenue has essentially been directly proportional to how many ads it showed in the News Feed and how many users visited. Lets wait and watch what happens once this is rolled out.

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Wednesday, May 07, 2014

The Importance of Personalising your Mobile App

The past year has seen a huge rise in the popularity of personalisation marketing, as brands come to realise that there are ever increasing ways of reaching customers through various devices. We’re all aware by now of the meteoric rise of mobile and tablet devices and also how this has led to many large brands looking to mobile apps to further enhance the shopping experience for customers, especially those that use augmented reality.

Personalisation and mobile marry perfectly and since as a retailer you’re looking for footfall, the best place to catch potential shoppers is whilst they are on the move. Mobile apps have become the official channel to drive content and services to consumers. From entertainment content to productivity services, from quantified-self to home automation, there is an app for practically anything a connected consumer may want to achieve.

Personalisation in mobile apps gives the apps a better chance to effectively reach out to its users and sustain them for a longer time. Just as GlobalCom did with its app, Mobile Number Locator. With this app a user could look up for numbers, block users and find out other vivid details. To give it a personalised approach they added labels to their app. Now a user can add labels to every contact and easily know and understand who is trying to contact them. With this smart move GlobalCom was able to increase their retention rate from 15% to 30%.

Optimising mobile apps is important, keeping in mind the objectives with which a customer will download a particular app and begin using it. By zeroing in on user’s preferences, as well as providing product information and configuration tools, the company is able to sell apps quickly and efficiently.

By developing apps that enable customers’ to implement their personal preferences, brands can get ahead of an increasingly crowded field eager to capture the attention of the mobile majority. However, many brands are reluctant to give users control given a myopic focus on their business objectives, but personalization is the key to achieving lasting engagement. Users are more likely to keep an app when they can create a tailored experience that extends the value of that brand in their life.

A personalised mobile app experience surely adds great value to the app thereby increasing the number of customers manifold.

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Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Push Messages in Mobile Apps

The new wave of technology favors mobile apps in a more better and a more advanced manner. Mobile applications is the newest technology that is getting at par with the social media, especially internet. As we know that marketers keep finding new and innovative strategies to reach their target audience and build loyal relationships, mobile apps have become their new personal favorites.

Mobile applications have become an essential part of mobile marketing. Through apps, you can deliver rich and contextual content to any customer who downloads the experience and develop a more personal relationship with your customer based on usage insights. Getting your users to successfully download your app is the first step in establishing this relationship; but, it is not enough to ensure consistent usage. The conversation must be maintained so that the app and the brand continue to serve as important elements in the consumers’ daily lives. That’s where a push mobile marketing strategy comes in.

This is where the role of push messages comes in, they are used to send segmented and custom messages directly to the home screens of app users, including breaking headlines, sports scores, gaming challenges, news updates, functionality enhancements and context-aware messages. These are more or less types of alert messages which are used by marketers to remind their customers about the existing and the new features that they can leverage. Push notifications cannot be avoided or missed and they are good attention seekers.

Once dominated by mobile messages, push notifications have not only entered the arena but has taken over normal mobile messages completely. Currently the use of mobile apps (nearly for every possible thing) has increased manifold. If two years back there were 100 smartphone users now there will be 1000. Consumers have downloaded 25 billion mobile apps on their iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Another 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the Android app store by owners of phones running Google’s Android operating system. With such facts and such a progressive growth brand managers have found the key to all their branding relate issues.

Using the technology and the potential of push notifications, Avenue, a fashion retailer for real-sized women, was able to achieve an ROI of over 6,600%, as well as drive in-store traffic and increase sales. The campaign consisted of weekly promotions that effectively motivated subscribers to visit the store for the latest fashions. Avenue was able to accomplish these results through rich media messaging. With this innovative technology, subscribers were sent image-based coupons with an effective call to action that produced high engagement rates.

Nowadays there are so many agencies who are solely working to create push messages/notifications for brands such that each click converts a prospective user into a loyal customer. Mobile apps are the future of technology and mobile marketing is the future of all branding and promotion activities that are done in lieu of a brand. Keeping this in mind push notifications are working well and will continue to deliver some insightful results in the times to come.

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Thursday, May 01, 2014

The 2014 elections in India on Social Media

It is certain that social media is the stop destination for all spheres. Not only brands but celebrities and now not to forget political parties and personnel are also using the platform to carry out campaigns, thereby reaching out to the masses in one of the most economical ways possible. Off and on these politicians use the domain to aware people of an occurrence or share with them the new norms that the Government has made. Not only in India, this stands true for almost all countries.

Obama’s Obama care is an apt example of the same. The extent to which the social media domain has been used in India in 2014 is enormous. The onset of general elections saw widespread campaigning from all major parties that dominate the subcontinent and in such a scenario social media campaigns could not be kept aside. Not only the political parties many tech giants also took the initiative of persuading the citizens of India to go and cast their votes. Be it Google’s ‘pledge to vote’ campaign, Facebook’s online political debates, Vebbler’s ‘the Ungli campaign’ or telecom operator MTS’ election tracker, firms are trying to woo voters ahead of this year’s general election.

India has the third largest Internet users base globally of more than 238 million users with a majority comprising of youth. This includes well over a 100 million active on various social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. No wonder, social media platforms, technology firms, e-commerce portals and telecom operators are using this opportunity to connect with users.

As per a recent study by Assocham states that technology giants like Google and social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook will see their India revenue soaring this year. The three major political parties in today’s time are; the ruling party- The Indian National Congress, The opposition party- Bhartiya Janta Party and the one which has emerged out lately promising to eradicate corruption from the roots of India- The Aam Aadmi Party. This year all these parties have taken it to social media to tell the public that why should they vote them.

The parties have hired a number of advertising agencies to help them accomplish the task. Be its Modi’s, ‘Abki Baar Modi Sarkaar’along with the various memes and sayings which were trending on Facebook and Twitter for quite some time, or Kejriwal’s video throwing light upon his life and his aim to make India a dream country, or Rahul Gandhi’s speeches which wooed many of the Congress supporters, the social media has seen it all. For more than a month these have been the talk of the social networking websites with people going crazy over these posts and statements.

This year’s election in India has seen by far the maximum use of the social media domain to spread the message across and allow users/followers. Leaving no stones unturned political parties have tried to exploit every possible way to accumulate as many votes as they can. Political parties typically spend around 30% of their poll expenditure, estimated at Rs 15,000 crore, on advertising and publicity. Of this amount, 15-20% is spent on the emerging digital marketing.

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Monday, March 16, 2015

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Monday, December 22, 2014

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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

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