Social Media Strategies and Technologies

How small Indian brands out-innovating big guys on the social web?

Vijay Rayapati — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:45:14 +0000

One of the things that always fascinated me about social web is the power of influence is no longer in the hands of a select few and everyone can have a share of voice. The recent report in Afaqs by Kapil Ohri discusses how a small brands like restaurants, juice centers and dental clinics in India leveraging the social channels like Facebook better than Big brands. It’s also interesting to note that

“These brands are leveraging Facebook for customer engagement and to drive sales”

not just creating fans by numbers. You can read the report below.

How small brands leveraging Facebook better than big guys in India?

What do you think? - can small brands effectively leverage social channels better than big guys?

Social media trust - How it varies across users social graph and social channels?

Vijay Rayapati — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 06:05:41 +0000

We have heard enough number of times that the power of social media is peer influence, the consumers or users will get influenced by the tone of conversations about your brand on blogs, twitter, forums and other social channels. But how influential are these conversations and social channels on the consumer behavior?. The recent study by Invoke focuses on how this trust varies from brand messages to friends posts to network of friends messages and also does the trustworthiness varies across channels like Blog, Facebook or Twitter?

As reported by eMarketer - the blog posts were more likely to be trusted than posts on Facebook, and trust dropped off sharply when it came to Twitter, even among friends.

Also while consumers are pushing the brands to use social channels - their messages were trusted less and in general Twitter messages were trusted less compared to other social channels even when posted by the user friends.

While reviews on Amazon incredibly helped them to drive the sales even when people who posted them are not connected to the users and the group of reviews including positive/negative highlights might have helped people to increase their trustworthiness. It would be interesting to see how the proposed integration between Amazon and Facebook will play out when you can filter the reviews based on your social graph. Do you think it will increase the trustworthiness when more and more brands integrate social graph based filters in to their e-commence websites?.

Are you part of the Conversation? - Vital statistics for B2B Marketers

Vijay Rayapati — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:33:09 +0000

Excellent video on the state of social engagement in B2B market. What do you think?

Corporate Social Media : Why You Need to Integrate Social Content into Corporate Website?

Vijay Rayapati — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:45:08 +0000

Jeremiah Owyang has written an excellent post on “Roadmap: Integrating Social Technologies with your Corporate Website” explaining why it’s important to integrate social content and experience into your corporate website instead of just throwing away the traffic to third party sites like Facebook, Twitter etc using follow us links.

At GizaPage, we have been working on building a social media hubs platform to help brands integrate their social content into corporate websites at multiple engagement touch points including http://social.BRANDNAME.com to give an unique social experience to their users or customers. This kind of integration helps brands to share content, nurture and cross pollinate their community across different social channels instead of just sending visitors to third party social site like Facebook or Twitter etc. In the long term, we strongly believe brands have to take ownership of their social identity.

Do check out social media hubs of our customers Fastrack, NASSCOM and Prathambooks. Please drop your feedback on what we are doing to vijay [AT] gizapage [dot] com

The Future of Web is about Context

Vijay Rayapati — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:16:45 +0000

Here is a video about semantic web and captures insights from some of the best people like Tim Berners Lee, Clay Shirky and Chris Dixon etc on why it’s important to add meaning (meta-data) to the information to extract meaning (context) of it.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Credit : Techcrunch

What a SPAM email is worth? still with a 0.000008% Conversion Rate

Vijay Rayapati — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:12:32 +0000

There was an interesting article in NewScientist on “Spamdemic: Tracking the plague of junk mail“. In one of the spam tracking experiments , it was found out that even with a dead low conversion rate of 0.000008% of a pharmaceutical spam email was able to generate sales of $3.5 millions.

Find out more interesting stats from below graphics.

How does spam effecting you on internet & particularly in email?.

Awesome video from Socialnomics - What is the Social Media ROI anyway?

Vijay Rayapati — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:27:19 +0000

Here is an excellent video from Socialnomics on what is the Social Media ROI? in B2C and B2B segments with some real world examples. I have earlier written about measurement models for Social Media ROI.

What is your take?.

How Cafe Coffee Day Handled Their #CCDSUCKS Issue?

Vijay Rayapati — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:21:48 +0000

Here is my presentation on the recent #CCDSUCKS issue and also how the negative word of mouth was spread even after @CafeCoffeeDay responded to it’s customers and why many Indian online influencers supported Cafe Coffee day.

What do you think?, would love to hear your thoughts.

Announcing Social Media Club Bangalore

Vijay Rayapati — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:37:22 +0000

Thanks to the heads-up push from @gauravonomics and @evansdave in setting up Social Media Clubs across all major cities in India. We had a first meet up of #smcbangalore last month. The first meet up was filled with interesting discussions around “personal and professional usages of Social Media” and “how social platforms can help at grass root level to bring in change?” apart from a quick debate on privacy concerns in closed networks like Facebook compared to open platforms like Twitter.

We have planned to organize another meetup this weekend at Jaaga with a panel discussion on “Indian web 2.0 startups targeting the global market”, please RSVP at http://twtvite.com/df4itv.

Quick summary of this week event (1.00 PM, 6th, Feb - 2010 ) : Kaushal Sarda (@Uhuroo, @ksarda) moderates a panel with me (@gizapage, @smmpro) and Pranav Bhasin (@LifeBlob, @pranavbhasin) on Indian web 2.0 startups targeting the global market.

Agenda :
1. Introduction to by Social Media Club Bangalore by Freeman Murray (@freemanindia). (15 min)

2. Panel discussion and Q&A. (75 min)

3. Networking. (30 min)

See you at #jaaga, we also have ActivityCircle first meetup after “social media club bangalore” session.

Building a Company with Social Media?

Vijay Rayapati — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:22:18 +0000

Just came across a brilliant 25 Mind Blowing Social Media Infographics presentation, which captures the state of social media through visuals.

What is your take?.