Aide et Action [South Asia], an organization working to empower people by providing quality education to all, has launched an initiative called Punni Ki Kahaniyan, a series of short films that uses the voice of a young girl to tell children stories built around the values of multiculturalism, communal harmony and education. The first of the series, an 18 minute film, shows children the bright side of cultural harmony and the pitfalls of ragging, bullying and racism. By showcasing the varied cultures that represent India through the eyes of schoolchildren, the film is a teaching aid that also opens the eyes of adults to the fact that we are one people and that a herd mentality that propagates racism and divide is to be shunned.

Support Punni through social media!

Aide et Action South Asia has partnered with iridium Interactive as a Social Media partner to create Awareness and Buzz for Punni Ki Kahaniyan and reach out to students, teachers, parents and the society at large. The objective is to start a strong movement that promotes cultural harmony through social understanding and integration. iridium Interactive is promoting and connecting with all the stakeholders using the social platforms like facebook,  twitter, youtube, vimeo etc., to promote the film and supporting Aide et Action South Asia to take the message to millions of school children across India.

You can aid this mission by:

1. sharing the movie and/or showcasing it in your neighboring school

2. demonstrate your support  on facebook and take this initiative to parents and educators, the key influencers of young children

3. actively sharing your ideas on how to increase the impact of this initiative

On 26^th October 2010, Punni ki Kahaniyan is formally launched at Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad with 1000 children representing 35 odd schools who will watch this movie and, we hope, learn the importance of unity. Sania Mirza, ace tennis player, is an enthusiastic supporter who is attending the launch of this event. Ravi Pratap Singh, Regional Director-Aide et Action South Asia, Sriram Bharatam, CEO and Founder at iridium Interactive and Ranga Reddy, RM-The Hindu would also be part of this event. Our endeavour is to reach out and promote this movie to as many children as possible and along the way, sensitise the general public so that they too imbibe these values and create an ecosystem that shuns regressive beliefs and promotes unity.

So come, join Punni as she takes the lead and tells children value driven stories that will make them better people.

Punni has been covered by The HIndu in today’s newspaper. Click here to read the full article. The Hindu is an official media partner in A.P for Punni Ki Kahaniyan. You can reach Punni on her facebook page and on her twitter account

For further details contact:
Mohammed Salahuddin
salaudin.m at iridiuminteractive dot com
+919989234334

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Over the course of the past few weeks, we’ve been monitoring several blogs, Indian as well as from across the globe,  to understand the commenting trends and almost everywhere we have come across this phenomenon. It seems that now, with the advent of so many social media platforms, there are a hundred different avenues through which blogs are commented on and discussed, including the blog. A simple tweet on twitter like ‘Read interesting post about wordpress 3.0 by *** and totally disagree’ can trigger a conversation on twitter rather than on the blog. If the blogger would like to be part of this conversation, it becomes her job to track where her story is being shared and discussed and get there as fast as possible with her reasons and opinions to continue the conversation. For instance, this blogpost may be retweeted by 10 different people on twitter, each marking the tweet with his/her thought [which takes the place of the comment] along with the url. In this scenario, it might simply be a better solution to add to the comments box a continuously updating list of mentions on the social web thus allowing you to connect with those who have thoughts about your ideas on their platform rather than bringing them to your blog and expecting them to drop a comment. So if the lack of comments is really getting you down, hang in there! Someone, somewhere is tweeting about you. You just need to find them and engage!

Follow us on @iridiuminter or catch us up on facebook and we’ll keep you posted about more such news.

Here are some methods I feel can help you manage and guard your reputation:

1. Filter what is being said about your company on various social networks. A good social media monitoring can help you turn scattered information on the web into powerful trends & insights about you at a click of your dashboard.

2. Educate employees on the intent for your company’s social media initiative. It is not their personal social network but a corporate forum to interact with customers.

3. Be cordial and approachable while on the social network.

4. Handle negative customer comments with dignity and poise.

5. Do not bad talk any other brand. They will figure it out anyways. Rephrasing a famous quote “keep your fans close but keep your competitors closer”. Competitive analysis about you and your competition is something social media monitoring can give you where you can compare apples to apples and apples to oranges. For example, it can simply find out about a particular feature of your car v/s your competitors and get all the intelligence of what people think and how they perceive your brand.

So, if you are a smart company, understand the big message. Not having the social media presence and intelligence is now considered at par with not having a company website…now you understand…now let us act

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Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/comedynose/3512538453/

“If you cant measure it, you can’t manage it.” as rightly quoted by management guru, Peter Drucker.

This is exactly what social media monitoring attempts to do. There are millions of conversations happening and by now if you have been reading my blogs, the message is loud and clear. If you cannot measure them with a predefined set of benchmarks then you cannot [do brand management] manage what is being said about your company and brand. Today enterprises, including those that approach iridium, face a bold challenge of managing their business in extremely dynamic webs + weeding out the conversations and dialogues in the humanized web networks. The crux of any good social media strategy is the Return on Investment or may I say ‘Return on Influence’. Sentiment Analysis and quantitatively measuring social media conversations gives an understanding of the business impact. Lets find out how.

I will point out the tangible benefits to any business or ROI from social media monitoring:

1. Gather consumer and competitor perceptions of a brand, then work towards changing their perceptions for the better.
2. Create avenues to let your consumers know that they are being heard.
3. Provides you with proactive crisis management and planning.
4. Provides warning or red alerts for defensive or reactive public relations.
5. Identify your real influencers.
6. Understand the environment of your business operations and the ecosystem it operates in.
7. Improves customer services which inturn leads to higher sales.
8. Reduces costs as this is the most cost effective way to touch base with a large volume of customers.
9. Reach the right customers faster and better.
10. Drives better decision making with the information aggregator tools.
11. Aids product development with live consumer inputs.
12. Enhanced SEO diminishes the need of paid searches.

These are some essential benefits anybody can avail from social media monitoring which iridium also provides. Await my next blog as I will talk conduct the SWOT analysis of Social Media Monitoring.

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Image Source: farfromtimid.com

“We have seen a clear evolution in demands from our customers. They are better informed and far more sophisticated in their expectations and requirements.”- Mark Redgrave of Hapax.

True!! With the advent of social media they now have their own platform to express their views and opinions. The main intention behind social media monitoring is to track these conversations as I have mentioned earlier. Determining if these conversations are positive or negative is called Sentiment Analysis.

Listening to the sentiments behind a customer’s voice is very important for any company that wishes to act upon these opinions. According to me, sentiment analysis is very important to any social media monitoring initiative. It is vital to analyze whether good or bad conversations are driving your brand in the social media space. In fact, tracking sentiments is one of the real reasons why businesses enter social media. At iridium, we use several tools to do this.

Automated sentimental analysis tools are generally used to give numbers to these customer sentiments. It is good if you dig deeper than the statistics to get a clearer picture. Also you will need to compare sentiments across several brands over a time period.

If the consumers have positive sentiments with a brand, its all good, but when there is negative sentiment it makes the analysis interesting when you have to uncover the reasons behind this particular sentiment. Sentiment analysis coupled with social monitoring tools make this study even more interesting. It is more like stepping into your consumer’s mind and understanding what drives their thinking about your company.

I would not like to confuse you further, so I conclude by stating that sentiment analysis is nothing but social media monitoring with a qualitative twist.

Here are some free Social media monitoring tools that you can use to assess all social media metrics.

1. How Sociable: it is a free tool that defines simplicity. Just punch in the brand you want to measure metrics for and you will get the visibility score for it across 32 social networks. http://www.howsociable.com/

2. Addict-o-matic: This tool provides you with a comprehensive view of discussions on a topic across the most popular social networks. In just one view you can see all the discussions on all popular social networks and blogs. http://addictomatic.com/

3. Technorati- This tool is used to find top blogs and posts on any searched item. http://technorati.com/

4. Google Blogsearch- This is also a blog oriented tool that generates top discussions happening in blogs on a topic you want to search for. http://blogsearch.google.com/

5. Googletrends- Shows the worldwide traffic/searches of this particular keyword. http://google.com/trends

6. Twitterstats-  This is one tool that serves all my twitter purposes. It shows all the relevant twitter stats for the Iridium account and allows comparisons with other accounts too. One stop for all twitter analytics is what this tool is all about. Check it out on http://www.twitterstats.com/

7. Quantcast- This tool is apt for tracking traffic to a particular website and gives Graphical display and demographics wise data segregation. http://www.quantcast.com/

There are numerous free tools available but its your requirements that defines your choice. After my stint in social media monitoring, these are the top 7 tools I frequently use.

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Companies have their own reasons of joining the social network bandwagon as I have already discussed before, and so do customers who have already mastered the social networking sphere for their own purposes.

Here are some of the reasons why customers befriend companies on social media sites:

• It is considered cool to be associated with your brand on such forums.
• Or to simply be aware of offers and discounts they might avail (majority do this).
• Just to be up-to-date with company information in real time.
• Or even gain access to company information, exclusive only to company fans and friends.
• Sometimes to show support for their loyal brands.
• Follow the herd and be associated with brand making news.

Whatever the reason may be, this has surely provided an incentive to every company to promote their brands on social media, to leverage their marketing efforts by communicating with their community of followers.

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Without joining the bandwagon of people who are attempting to defame Nestle’s online reputation, here is a fair view of how a global company like Nestle can learn to handle this attack through online media.

This type of incident can surely destroy a company, who should instead directly, honestly and personally address this issue rather than escalate it with a hostile approach to criticisms.

Nestle’s online reputation downfall started when Nestle’s Facebook page was flooded with protests and complaints from people over Nestle’s Palm Oil actions in Indonesia and deforestation that endangered orangutans. Already a heated issue,  Nestle added to the fire by posting on their fan page:

“Nestle To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.”

This sparked a wild fire that will only be put to rest when the moderator cordially and patiently talks to sort Nestle’s tainted image and not further taint it with such comments.

Customers have increasingly started using social media as a medium to vent their anger as this provides them a platform to be vocal about their thoughts and views. Companies should take these criticisms with a pinch of salt and try to rectify these issues without any ego.

As I have mentioned in my previous blog on Social Media Etiquettes, Nestle should have simply read the rude remarks and politely responded back. They should appoint a customer care representative to answer their questions politely. In a state when people are angered, humility and modesty should take the front seat instead of hautiness.

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• Introduce your self and your company before adding people relevant to you and your business.
• Don’t blow your own trumpet: Do not talk too much about yourself and promote only your company without understanding the wants of your audience.
• Talk what’s relevant to your audience and community: Double check and ask yourself before submitting a blog if it is what your community will be interested in reading?
• Listen and Respond: If your community is actively responding to your blogs and tweets, it is a good gesture to acknowledge it and reply back in time. Engage them before they loose interest.
• Constantly Participate in social media interactions. This will help you have an everlasting quality group of community and relationships.
• Being Gregarious is one of a valuable social etiquette that rules the charts.
• Be Politically Correct: Do not make any statements just because someone in some blog says so, without being backed by a solid source. This is basic ethic to not join the rat race.
• Rise Above the Noise: If someone is making rude comments on your blog or other social networks, do not engage in a row over the matter. Instead, listen to what they have to say and politely respond back.
• Do not engage in personal conversations on your corporate blog or social network.
• Show your Soft Skills: Value your audience and respect them.

With these etiquettes, your company will develop an honest and authentic voice that your stakeholders will value over time. Do share your inputs with iridium Interactive about what your social media etiquettes are.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

B2B is a complex sales practice which involves a lot of people and companies. It is not easy to start conversations between your prospect and the company. There has to be a way in which your ideas get the conversations rolling. Here lies the need to strategise your marketing content in order to broaden your reach.

It is a fact that consumers rule the buying decisions and companies can no longer dictate or push a product on the consumers. Sales guys have been worst hit thanks to the advent of social media since consumers look for networking sites which will help them make their purchase decisions.

This is the cue B2B marketers can take to enter the social media sphere and make the most of it. Facebook and Twitter are amazing stops for B2B marketing. But the approach for B2B marketing is similar to any non B2B marketing.

Here is what you have to do to start your social media marketing efforts.

1. First, listen to what is happening around your brand and the industry. Set up Google Alerts with your company’s name and also competitor’s name.

2. Second, monitor, analyse and  make conclusions on where you stand and what should your goals and strategy be.

3. Third, after framing your business policies and strategies, design content that will inspire prospects and existing parties to start conversations with you.

4. Fourth, step into your buyers shoes and develop content relevant to them.

5. Fifth, do not start hard selling from the beginning.

6. Sixth, research on audience profile, what are they typically researching, what are the problems they are facing, etc…

7. Seventh, address the issues they may be facing and also the solution to their issues.

This way, you have set the stage for your pre-sales conversations even before you interact with them personally.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.