On 23rd of September, nearly 80 developers, students, company reps and enthusiasts walked into Hotel Golkonda for the first ever Facebook Developer Garage to be held in Hyderabad, the home of Facebook in India. Organized by iridium the event is being hosted for the first time in Hyderabad after succesfully being conducted in a number of cities all over the world. The entire objective of the Garage was to showcase the facebook open graph api from a development perspective so that people can build custom applications and tools and leverage the humongous reach of facebook to reap benefits through the internet.

Siddharth from iridiumInteractive

The event was kickstarted by Siddharth of iridium who introduced the event and described his experiences with using the social internet we access everyday and how the whole concept of facebook makes the world a much more connected place. The key speakers at the event were David Recordon and Jonathan Gray who spoke about the facebook open graph, social plugins and the open source platforms facebook uses.

David’s talk was centered on how the open graph api had evolved and how it made the whole aspect of developing applications for facebook a much easier experience. He described how every object in the social graph has a unique id which allows a developer to easily fetch data associated with that object. It was quite exciting to know the evolution of all these fantastic tools which start-as David simply put it- as hacks. So if you can picture a bunch of developers sitting for 12 hours straight at their laptops and competing with each other to solve a problem or come up with something new which then they all develop into an idea like the graph api, you’d understand this better.

David from facebook

Jonathan spoke about the open source platforms used and contributed to by facebook. Facebook was developed based on open source softwares and offers developers the chance to use the platform with their knowledge of these same open source technologies. Calling himself someone who really believed in open source technology he injected a lot of energy in the audience sharing his experience of developing using the platform.

The break was followed by the application presentation segments. Hasan Khan, a budding entrepreneur from Hyderabad showcased an application he and his associates had developed based on the FIFA world cup. Their application which allowed users to track their team’s progress,  taunt opponents, and ‘dislike’ [yep, the feature we've all been asking facebook for] something if they didn’t like it showed the zeal with which Hyderabadi developers who are aware of this platform are adopting it. He described his experience with working on the platform and the avriious routes he adopted for monetization.  He spoke about several challenges he faced, one of which was the cost of hosting facebook applications which pretty much nullified the profits any small application made. This led to a lively debate about how much more facebook needed to do to help the development community.

Next up was Mohak Gupta, a student from IIIT who showcased his idea for an application that would help users follow updates on a priority basis and news items from different sources. Still under development, he was building this platform as part of his Masters course project. His work was much appreciated and several pats on the back told him he was going in the right direction.

Ending with an open house discussion the gathering of people showed enormous enthusiasm in finding our more about the graph api and how they could use it better. They questioned the facebook team on a variety of topics and privacy-the bane of facebook for the past few months-was given just a nominal mention. One can almost imagine Mark Zuckerberg smiling and thinking it was a very good idea to base the facebook office in Hyderabad!

The event was managed by iridium Interactive and we are looking to create an online+offline community of facebook developers who meetup, learn and grow their business through this exciting new platform!

If you are an application developer [mobile, social or web] do follow our blog to know of how we can partner to build great applications with mass appeal. Drop a line on our facebook or twitter profiles and lets talk.

Permalinks denotes how the URL  structure of a WordPress powered post appears.  From the technical point of view, your webserver should be running Apache with mod rewrite module in it.  It’s always advisable to check with your web-hosting service provider if they support wordpress in their servers.

How to setup your Permalink Structure?

It’s always advisable to prioritize and setup the permalink structure of your blog just after installing WordPress. The reasons, search engines which index your blog based on the URL, might find it hard to track such changes resulting to which you may loose your search engine ranking resulting in a fall of traffic to your website.

To configure the permalink structure of your blog, click on the “Options” tab in your WordPress Dashboard and then select “Permalinks”

A screenshot of the same has been shared below:

a)

b)

You may choose from any of the top 4 options in the “Common settings” and define the URL structure of the blog. In case you want to customize further, choose the 5^th option as shown in the above screen shot.

You may have a look at the common syntaxes below to customize your permalink structure.

%year%  – The year of the post, four digits.  Example: 2004

%monthnum% – Month of the year. Example: 05

%day% – Day of the month. Example: 28

%hour% – Hour of the day. Example: 15

%minute% – Minute of the hour. Example: 43

%second% – Second of the minute. Example 33

%postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “It’s Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%). Starting Permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

*** Note – this has been changed and is ok to do since ver. 2.0

%post_id%  – The unique ID # of the post. Example: 423

%category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI. Starting Permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

%author%  – A sanitized version of the author name.

Now that you know the importance of structured URLs, it’s time to take some time out and change the URL to something that will direct more traffic to your blog and website.

Twitter is a complicated puzzle to many small business owners and particularly fatal if you mess it up. It has a steep learning curve but the returns are exponential when you are passionate to stay the course. Twitter is one tool that can be used to drive traffic to your blog. Here are some simple yet critical ways you can capitalize to make more people read your blogs.

1. Business Logo

Once you have created a twitter account for your small business, first thing you should do is change your default picture to your business logo. Branding is very important as people will relate to your company logo and this is the first step to help you build trust worthy relationships.

2. Start conversations – Be Sincere

One thumb rule for twitter is never directly market here. You have to build communities with your earnesty. Customers tend to look through a company if they start marketing right from the moment they start twittering. Start tweeting and connect with influential people and customers that are impacting the business landscape for you. You will be surprised to know “sincerity is what attracts people”. So step in your transparent shoes, be truthful to your stakeholders. Your competitors are already doing so.

3. Complete Bio Profile

I have seen many companies who do not bother to complete their Bio Profile after creating their accounts. Bio Profile is nothing but a brief write up on what your company does within 160 characters. This is vital if you are looking at creating communities and meeting people and companies relevant to you. Also remember bio lines have to give some useful information about your company, it can just be keywords of the services your company provides. It does not have to be in complete sentences but should carry the right keywords.

4. Customize your Twitter Background

Just like any billboard on the roads used to market brands, Twitter background is a very good place to brand your small business. This can be used to draw attention to your brand. There are many twitter background applications that can be used to customize the background like Twitrbackgrounds, Twitrounds , Twibacks.

5. Social Proof

Twitter may be a challenge to many people but unfortunately this may add more to your challenges. Potential people and consumers look at your social proof i.e. how many people are following you, who and how many people are you following and the number of tweets you post. As I have already mentioned in my earlier tweets, the ideal following versus followers ratio should be 1:10. In the beginning people will slowly trickle in to follow you but as you consistently and patiently continue conversing with your potential community it will not be late when you have an out-pour of people who want to follow you and be a part of your community.

After a trial and error of implementation at our company i.e iridium Interactive, our team is fully aware of the power of engaging communities via twitter.Its all about being patient, consistent and transparent. If you have all these three ingredients topped with the passion to experiment you will have a successful stint in twitter and a huge community of people.

Keep reading on, as I will answer Twitter FAQs in my next Wisdom Series.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

• build communities,
  
• provide consumer service,
  
• selling and providing promotional offers,
  
• building brand awareness and
  
• to raise funds.

Many companies have applied it into their company social policies and have been bearing the fruits of tweeting. Here are some interesting success stories of companies who have successfully applied twitter in their businesses. Take a good read!

Success Stories – Cases for tangible ROI via Twitter

1. Computer manufacturer, Dell is the first company that defined Twitter Monetization to the world. Dell launched the innovative idea of selling refurbished systems through twitter (@DellOutlet), they started posting messages and links to products online by alerting bargain hunters to the latest computer deals. In November 2008, Dell announced that it had made $500,000 through its Dell Outlet Twitter feed.  Joining since 2007 Dell has announced it had made $2 million in sales directly through twitter and additional $1 million from people who see the bargains on twitter then redirect themselves to the Dell Website.

2. Where Dell applied Twitter to increase sales, Comcast Cable provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services applied Twitter to provide costumer services in cost effective and efficient means. Twitter account @Comcastcares engage with customers directly and get their questions answered on varied topics, from billing issues to cable services. Today, Comcast firmly stands as the most successful customer service operations on the Web. Over the past year, Comcast has handled more than 21,000 customer service requests through social media, (a little more than half through Twitter).

3. Zappos, an online retailer featuring shoes, bags, clothing and other accessories wanted to differentiate itself from competitors by focusing on customer service and engaging with them directly. Through @Zappos, employees were encouraged to interact with customers,they answered product questions, helped in customer service. Anyone within Zappos was authorized to help customers on twitter. One thing led to another and this company with almost no sales in 1999 (the year it was established) garnered whopping $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008. The primary driver of their growth has been repeat customers and word of mouth through their proactive help in services given to customers. At present, nearly one third of the employees are on Twitter, helping and engaging and conversing with customers through @Zappos.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

Read ahead the golden rules and most importantly the Do’s and Dont’s one should follow with twitter.

Do’s

• Plan your corporate twitter startegy before taking the plunge.
• Before giving access make a twitter policy clarifying what the employees can say and can’t say.
• Follow relevant people who you want to keep a track of.
• Make clear what and who are you representing. Corporate transparency is appreciated by every stakeholder.
• Engage in constant conversations with your community. The more you talk the better your community will reciprocate.
• Build trust within your community with constant presence. Frequent updates to keep your community up to date with your activities.
• Use tweetscoop or tweetdeck or echofon to follow trends in topics. There is so much activity happening on twitter, install these real time applications on your computer and stay informed all the time.
• Share information that is relevant to your followers/ community, share only what they want to and need to know.
• Follow the above suggestions and be a good twittizen.

Dont’s

• Dont automate this process. This should be real time and customised.
• Dont over promote your brand, product and company. It will backfire.
• Dont give politically negative comments. Try to assess what is the situation and what you can add to the conversations happening.
• Do not assume that people do not know how to use Social media, never form prejudices.

Now that these important pointers have been shared to all, stayed tuned as we explore some more important aspects of the social media world.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

1. Influence: The more useful and relevant information you post on Twitter the more followers you will gather and larger will be your circle of influence.

2. Instant Exposure: There is no tool more powerful than Twitter for this purpose.Used in the right way, this is one of its biggest benefits- The right way being: don’t say anything you don’t want to say, consider your audience and always think twice about what you communicate.

3. Building contacts and influence: If you are tweeting right, you will allow access to billions of people as twitter has mass appeal. Yet you have to target the correct audience to derive instant results.

4. Build up a Buzz: If your company is a part of an event, conducting a conference, annual general meeting, launching a product or making an announcement; twitter is the right place to create a buzz and a sense of anticipation and excitement for your audience if it really matters to them. But keep in mind that this is done within your deadlines. If you makes promises and do not deliver on twitter, most likely you will instantly lose followers.

5. Live Tweets: Just like any commentary to a match, twitter can be used during live events to create an additional buzz around that event. Tweet what is happening, talk about the speakers, rate them, exchange thoughts and comments with people in the same room, and publish live feeds and links.

6. Excellent Brand Builder: If you want to know whether your company is being spoken about or not Tweekdeck is one such application where you, your customers and employees can use buzzwords and search any word is being spoken about you. This strengthens the importance of transparency and immediacy.

7. Substitute for coffee machine/ water cooler: This is an excellent place where employess can stay in touch about the happenings in the office thereby substituting the coffee machines and water coolers which used to be a commonplace for discussions.

8. Brevity: With the current 6 second attention span of modern online browsers, twitter is an excellent platform to send out a clear message within 140 characters. Twitter does not believe in writing a lot much to the advantage to our browsers. Sending short quick messages is the main essence of twitter.

9. Follow Competitiors or Sales Leads: Great way to keep in touch with what your rivals are upto. But again don put up false identities be honest to who you represent.

10. Crisis Communications: Twitter helps companies mitigate the effects of a crisis or even reduce the damage if your followers are well targeted.

11. Customer Service: Comcast had brilliantly used twitter to its favour by completely turning around its bad image by active twittering to all its customers. Just ensure that while answering customer queries the right thought leader is answering them.

12. Thought Leadership: If there is someone in your company who is an expert in their area of work, empower them to tweet. Let them represent your company.

13. Corporate communication: Very short company announcements can be easily tweeted, but again double check what you want to tweet that can engage your community of followers.

Stay Tuned and watch out for the next wisdom series as I will discuss the Do’s and Donts of Twitter.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

1. Plan your corporate twitter strategy before taking the plunge. Be clear on your business objectives.

2. Assess your organization’s willingness to twitter. Is your corporate culture open to honest conversations? Are your employees ready to use various social media tools such as blogs and wikis? Is the organizational culture open and honest enough?

3. Focus on the people and not the technology. It’s the people who connect and bring communities alive. So, don’t overlook their preferences. Have a business purpose and brainstorm it with your group. At iridium Interactive, my core marketing and creative team is on a high everyday about exploring new dynamic social media tools for different client needs. We had our share of run-around of getting buried under so many apps. But, we made early mistakes and learned not to get carried away before rolling out any tools. We questioned asked ourselves, “Who will use it?” How can it support or generate useful conversations in the business? How can it give employees better access to leadership and make them more engaged? How can we measure the ROI?”

4. Surrender control and allow access to the employees as equal partners in the communication process. It’s no longer about the push but the pull. This cannot be a standalone tool restricted to only a few people in the organization.

5. Create an Internal Sandbox for your company to allow your employees work around and play with this social media tool. This encourages their acceptance.

6. Create a Twitter Policy before giving access make to clarify and moderate what the employees can say and can’t say. Setting up ground rules while planning the strategy.

7. Do not obsess with numbers from the beginning. Work on the purpose first, have a case and then determine the results. Measurement is key to success, but enter the sandbox first and feel the sand…..play with your Twitter  followers!

So, time to get on-board into Twitter along with your company and get ready to take-off into the social space….or shall I say galaxy. Start with a crisp brainstorming to establish the purpose…fill the white-board, begin engaging your people.

Look out for the next wisdom series tomorrow about the business benefits of using Twitter….keep your 140 on!

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam

Why Twitter?

Twitter has become a phenomenal success over the last year although it has been around since 3 years now.  Popular social networking sites like facebook and twitter were struggling to find a standing three years back with tough competition from gmail and yahoo. But now they have surpassed these internet giants.  Mainstream Media is now defined by Social Media. Dosent it make one wonder why such a sudden interest in social networking or social media among people?

Celebrities, political figures, companies, NGO’s all are tweeting about their current and even future incidents on a real time basis. News and events get posted first on twitter then on other networking forums. The key is to start online conversations instantly to influence your listeners.

Twitter has taken over several areas of the society already, here are some real life examples:

Election results first come out on twitter. Celebrities cover their every move on twitter so that their followers can keep a track of their movements. Plane crashes, stock prices are posted on Twitter seconds before they actually happen. This is the influence of twitter on our lives.

Twitter’s Unwritten Rules:

Want to make the most of twitter for all those who are contemplating to leave or have just got their new twitter ids, follow these ground rules and there will be no looking back in creating your own audience.

1. Engage in honest conversations- people wont be interested in fake identities and status updates for a long time.

2. Say only what you truly believe in.

3. For companies: never fudge your identity and industry.

4. You do not have to follow those who have followed you. This may be contradictory to the usual decorum in twitter but attaining the 1:10 ratio of following versus followers ratio cannot be achieved if you start following everyone who follows you. Analyze the people who you want to keep a track of and take your decision accordingly.

5. Actively listen to conversations happening around you then contribute in those discussions before leading your own conversations.

For companies who have chosen twitter, the foremost important thing is to LISTEN first. Proactively listen and understand what your stakeholders – customers, employees, and associates are talking about your company and brand on various social network forums, blogs. There is no limit to listening. The more you listen the more you understand the chatter around you, your company and brand.

After listening and understanding the context of the comments and discussions around your company and brand you are ready to join these discussions. Participate but do not push your marketing efforts. Listen while participating in sensible and transparent comments and discussions with your audience. This is pave way in creating a community around you from even the remote places in twitter.

Once your have listened and participated whilst creating a band of followers, you can now slowly push company news, updates, events, links and even company initiatives to create more faith in your already loyal audience. But be sure your are posting information and updates relevant to your audience. Now is the time to Lead your followers with your thoughts.

You can tweet anything as long as you engage your listeners with conversations that are of some relevance to them.

Twittering is all about influencing your audience. Stay tuned and Subscribe to this blog (so that they will come to your email directly) and keep reading this Wisdom Series on Social Media.

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

What is Twitter?

Twitter is essentially one very large continuous conversation being had by millions of people as we speak. In the last year itself, the usage has risen by 93%. This microblog is designed in such a way that the conversation is narrowed into two principal groups, the followers and the followed. You, as a user, have a choice who to follow and who follows you. It is advisable to have a high ratio of followers v/s followed , say 1:10 ratio is excellent to get your voice echoed beyond your immediate network.

This then narrows down to third and final basic stage with the type of conversations you have and with whom you’re having it with. It’s completely open to however you want to use this new toy. If you want to keep your feed as broad as possible, then you have that choice, but if you want to narrow it down to your specialism, your interest or hobby or corporate sphere then you can do that too. It is, like any social networking site, it’s for you to tame it the way you want.

Why should I sign up for Twitter?

Many communication experts and Marketers  have been asking me why they should sign-up? “What’s the point?” In many cases it’s a valid point. A recent survey reveals that over 60% of online users who sign up, leave Twitter in a month. This may be due to their short attention spans or the inability to comprehend what it can do. One of my colleague at iridium Interactive was sharing that its not different to the SMS that we send and thinking in 140. But, take a deeper dive and you might just find a layer or two of digital pie that suits your corporate palette and the benefits are vast and untapped. So, take the jump and take-off your social media.

You might find this short video helpful with due credits to Common Craft.

Subscribe to this blog and keep reading this Wisdom Series on Social Media.

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