Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
Posted on 25. Apr, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps:
1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay.
2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win at social is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on energizing your evangelists.
3. So, start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talkworthy touchpoints.
My Empodera/ e-STAS Book Chapter — A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework
Posted on 14. Mar, 2010 by admin in Events, Ideas
I recently wrote a book chapter for a book published by Empodera for the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. You can download the PDF version of the book here.
Here’s the full text of the book chapter is titled “A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework” –
Social Technologies and Power Structures
The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.
According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
TOI Article on How Social Activists in India Are Using Social Networking Platforms
Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Media
I was quoted recently in a TOI article on how activists are using social networking platforms.
I like how Indian social activists are using social networking platforms for fundraising, or creating awareness for their causes.
Isha Foundation’s $100K win in the Chase Community Giving Contest is a good example of non-profits using social platforms to get support for a cause for fundraising. A very persuasive lady from Isha Foundation even called me to ask me to write a post supporting their bid.
The Wall Project, Batti Bandh, The Bicycle Project and The Sapling Project have all got attention recently for using Twitter and Facebook for promoting their programs. The Pink Chaddi Campaign, Grassroutes, NGOPost, Bell Bajao and Blank Noise are some of my favorite examples of Indian digital activism campaigns.
However, using Facebook and Twitter to spread a brand-related or cause-related message doesn’t excite me anymore. I would be excited if activists used social platforms to enable collaboration, like Vote Report India did, or build a long-term community, like iJanaagraha is trying to do. I have earlier written about the need for activists to go beyond content and conversations, to tap into the collaboration, community and collective intelligence layers. Ellen Miller’s Sunlight Foundation is showing us how in the area of government transparency and accountability.
Social Community Efforts From Banks & Financial Institutions
Posted on 22. Jan, 2010 by Mohit in Reviews
Banking and Finance Industry is very competitive. Customers are becoming impatient and loyalty for brands is decreasing. Slowly brands are realizing that they can no longer appear monolithic, imposing and they need to find new ways to engage customers to retain and build relationships.
Web in its new avatar (Social Media) facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration, has given consumers the power to make or break reputations, enhance or damage brands, create winners and losers in the marketplace, and do so with lightning speed. At the same time, social media offer unparalleled access to unfiltered customer opinion, opportunity to understand the real influencers, and opportunities to leverage user-generated content.
Note: There are many popular blogs, forums, and review sites around Banking and Finance. But in this post I am focusing on how large banks and financial institutions are adopting social media to reach out to customers, prospectus and Influencers.
Community efforts from Banks and Financial Institutions.
This online community HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs. The focus is to empower new start-up companies to succeed by enabling them to network and form relationships with each other, as well as leveraging the expertise and support of HSBC’s business specialists
Announcement: Kaushal Sarda Joins the 2020 Social Team
Posted on 09. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Announcements
I’m delighted to announce that Kaushal Sarda has joined the 2020 Social team as a consultant.
Kaushal will head the Bangalore office for 2020 Social and focus on B2B, technology and startup clients. He will also work with Gautam to develop our collaboration/ innovation practice, where we connect employees and partners to help clients achieve their business objectives. Finally, he will work with Upasana to strengthen our “build” practice, where we build online communities using white label or open source platforms.
Previously, Kaushal has worked as a CRM consultant at Capgemini Consulting and founded SaaS based enterprise collaboration platform Uhuroo. He writes about collaboration and innovation at his Creating Connections blog and is a regular speaker on these topics. Kaushal holds an MS in information systems from George Mason University.
Do connect with Kaushal on email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.
The making of a Social Organization
Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
At 2020 Social one of the things we believe is that we are a our own petri-dish. We experiment with technology and processes to convert ourselves into the kind of organization we think is suitable to be called social.
So not only do we have a blog, a Facebook page, a twitter account, a twitter list showcasing all our tweets – we’ve also now started a wiki to focus on building a repository of social media successes in India – and will invite participation from like minded folks soon.
On the other side of the seriousness spectrum we have started a Fun page where we publicly talk on the lighter side of life at 2020 Social
Internally we are driving online collaboration using three tools, Google Apps for mail, document sharing and calendering - Socialtextfor internal conversations and collaboration on a wiki – and Basecamp for project management.
As social media enthusiasts we have noticed that internally even we need to see a business/behavioral benefit to using a tool – and we understand that more traditional businesses would need to see it more.
One of the way to showcase this is look for external cases where ROI has been calculated – but we believe that using the tools showcases a greater commitment and a better story for any client.
How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit
Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in How To Guides, Ideas, Reports
The Experience Ecosystem
Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.
The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.
At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.
The Experience Ecosystem provides the framework for creating talk-worthy experiences. It consists of all the touchpoints between the organization and the customer, including products, services and partners, sales and support channels and interactions, and the values for which the organization and its individual brands stand for.
Are Indian News, Media and Entertainment Companies Social Media Savvy?
Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Reports, Reviews
Most companies see social media as a part of communications, sales and marketing. Some, with a little help from us, realize that social technologies have implications for diverse business functions beyond these functions: from market research and product innovation to customer support and process redesign and even to partner relations and organizationsal development.
However, social technologies are a part of the core product for few companies, apart from the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, standalone social networking firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and social tool vendors like Jive, Lithium and Salesforce.
I believe that social technologies are becoming a part of the core product for news, media and entertainment companies, because an increasing amount of the content available online is now consumer generated content. As the boundary between content companies and technology companies blur even more, all news, media and entertainment companies will need to become technology companies.
In the US, the ubiquity of the internet has forced news, media and entertainment companies to become early adopters of social technologies and experiment with all the five underlying drivers of consumer generated content (CNN iReport), conversations (NPR Community), collaboration (Al Jazeera War on Gaja), community (NYT Times People) and collective intelligence (CNN News Pulse).
Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
Posted on 01. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Ideas
At 2020 Social, we believe that business is social. Here are five reasons why.
1. Consumer Generated Content: Your consumers are authors, photographers and filmmakers, all rolled into one. Tap into their creativity, ask them to interpret your brand.
2. Conversations: Your customers, partners and employees are talking about you, in public. Listen to them, reach out to them, engage them in a two-way conversation.
3. Collaboration: People work together in flow when they connect with each other as people. Create rich profiles and shared workspaces to enable people to help each other.
4. Community: Communities come together around a shared social object: a lifestyle, cause or passion. Build and nurture a community around a social object that is bigger than your brand.
5. Collective Intelligence: Customers, employees and partners can give you new ideas and insights. Observe their behavior, ask them for their ideas, recognize and reward them for their contribution.
While social platforms like Twitter, SMSGupShup, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and YouTube are transient, the underlying value system consisting of these five archetypes, or 5Cs, is here to stay.
Ask us how you can leverage these 5Cs to catalyze innovation and drive engagement, trial and advocacy amongst your customers, partners and employees.
2020 Social builds and nurtures online communities for Indian and international clients, connects their customers, partners and employees, and helps them achieve their business objectives.
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