“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.

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

Image Source: farfromtimid.com

However quite often other website owners insist on having a reciprocal link which can make a website look very incoherent. To overcome this, the concept of ‘daisy chaining’ has evolved.

Daisy chain as the name suggests is the series of associated things or people or experiences. As far as social networking is concerned, it could be anything from a network of ads to network of people having or working towards common interest. For instance, for a company involved in incurring revenue out of ads published online, it can have a network in place .Those networks typically exist in innumerable amount. So the daisy chain that we are talking about is the intertwine of network of networks which works in sync in providing the default advertisement (in this case) by searching from the most primary ones to the most distant. This chain/series of ad-networks working in tandem to post a relevant ad is nothing but the DAISY CHAIN.

Daisy chaining or swarming techniques can be used to enhance results for better search engine placement. A daisy chain is formed when you link a number of web sites together in a chain so that each one is connected with a link to the next one and eventually you connect the first website to the last website to complete the circle. The effect is that when a search engine spider connects with any one of your websites, it will follow the links to all the websites in the chain.

Once you have created a daisy chain you can easily convert it into a wheel by linking each website in the chain to your main website, so that the links are like the spokes of a wheel. The secret to obtain better search engine placement is to ensure all the links contain the keywords or keyword phrases that that you are targeting in order to obtain top positions.

Are you daisy chaining??

DIWALI KEE SHUBH KAAMNAAAYEINONAAASHAMSAGAL
SHUBH BIJOYA DASHAMI

EID MUBARAK
MERRY XMAS

It might be premature OR belated to be wishing. But there are teams across the country and across categories keeping their eye on the clock ticking for the festive season. Hence, it migt be pertinent to come up with some steps and pointers to help brands shape up their online presence for the coming season.

Many consumer brands spend their entire year of marketing and operations planning for the festive season – be it Diwali, Dussehra, Eid, Onam, Durga Puja etc. If they are national brands with a pan India presence, then the marketing teams are busy preparing the ammunition for each of the above festive seasons – largely because they have a disproportionately large share of their business volumes driven by this ‘festive season”.
Getting your online plans ready for the festive season is equally important – lest you should miss the proverbial festival bus.
Most of these pointers also apply to B2B brands and their sites. Although they needn’t implement them immediately, B2B designers might want to work on them when business is slow and they have more time on their hands.
1. DROP THOSE HUGE BOUNCE RATES
A website is like a corporate office with a million front doors: clients and customers can enter anywhere. The homepage is typically the main point of entry , so you should definitely check to ensure that the homepage design matches upto the customer expectations with respect to its easy usability and content. But care has too be taken to not overlook the other entry points of your site.
Organic landing pages on sites often are often not attended to..these are the pages where users to the site land when they arrive at the site from links placed from other websites or reach the site through organic search listings (as opposed to paid or sponsored search advertisements). Due to the lack of attention to these organic landing pages, the visitors are often disgruntled and lead to having high bounce rates
(“bounce rate” is the percentage of users who exit after reaching only the one page where they entered the site).
To improve performance on the organic landing pages, the following simple steps are useful:
• Analyse the website logs – identify the top search/query terms that drive SE visitors to the site.
• Study the pages that serve as entry points for these visitors.
• Analyze the search phrased and terms to determine users’ intended goals.
• Mend the pages suitably to address visitors’ intended goals with better content.
• Put calls to action and links in prominent locations where the visitors normally seek (rather than having them on the generic navigation areas).
• Watch bounce rates decline. (If they don’t — try another fix; you may have to conduct user behavior mapping to identify how people interact on pages that are particularly promising, but perform poorly even after many fixes.)
As many of the tools for server log analysis identify entry pages, it is tempting to use these tools to simply work on those pages that serve as the most popular starting points. The above detailed approach is advisable as it studies the reasons for the visitors to the site and their search queries etc.
Moreover, the visitors through the engines are more serious than those through content sites. The former are more action -oriented than the latter.

It is important to reduce the Bounce rates for the Search Traffic than for the Content Site Traffic.
2. Paid Search Advertising
• The sponsored search ads are growing leaps and bounds. More brands are seeing the potential of having a presence on this ‘channel’ than ever before. Although search ads are highly compressed into small boxes, performance can be improved by tweaking the textwords creatively – and this simple step can significantly improve the CTR for the campaign as well as the conversion rates.
• The cost per click is most likely to increase during the key season – with brands bidding with each other for those select keywords and terms. It would be useful to experiment with alternative wordings during the offseason while you can still bid for the clicks at a lower cost than during the season.
• The cost per click can imcrease by as much as 8% -20% during the peak to non-peak season.
• Expect competitors to increase their bids for the most lucrative keywords once the shopping season gets underway. Hence, plan ahead as to how much you can afford to bid and retain the desired ROI.
• Prospects might end up waiting for 2-3 weeks or more between an initial visit and an actual purchase from the site. To allocate ROI fairly, cookie your search engine users when they arrive on the site and then track your sales back to the keyword that initially brought each buying customer to your site.
• Avoid the tendency of driving visitors from your search ads to your homepage unless it is intended. Instead, drive the traffic to pages that are relevant to the search ad placed. Typically, you can at least double your conversion by directing hits to pages targeted to users’ interests.
3. Improve the Confirmation Emails
Online Shoppers need to be comforted and be told that they have succeeded in completing their purchase online. This is part of the user experience and a means to improve customer delight. They need to be hand held so as to allay any fears that they clicked the Buy button in vain, or that their purchases are not going to be delivered on time. And people are never more anxious to be informed than during the festive season when they’re typically shopping at the last moment, having purchases sent to different addresses, and will be seriously embarrassed if the gifts to their near and dear ones don’t arrive on time.
Improving the usability of the confirmation email messages will both improve customer satisfaction and keep people from calling customer service to ask about their order’s status. The cost of fixing these messages will be recovered many times over in reduced call center costs and also in retaining the customer in the future.
4. Make your site relevant for the season
It’s often a nice touch to deck up the website to match the mood and occasion – such as Onam or Dussehra or Diwali or Eid. Small but important steps that help strike an emotional chord with your visitors.

These are not earth shattering requirements – nor do you need big marketing budgets to work on the above pointers. These steps are as important if not more than just monitoring the GRPs and CPRPs of your campaign this season.