The DLF Indian Premier League, one of the biggest cricket extravaganza in the recent times, has started today!
Mumbai Indians has won the first match of the DLF IPL!! Though I dont have any team as my favorite in particular and am not really tracking the event for the teams and the matches, but there are many other reasons which I am tracking the event for!
The design of the event, the execution and specifically the activity happening on the internet with respect to the event. While driving to work each morning, I hear Coca Cola’s ads on the radio and the disclaimer at the end says www.dillidilse.com and today finally I got the time to catch up with the web site.
Including interactivity and creating an advertising cum promotional campaign with an objective for making the message viral is an one of the best possible ways today to engage your target audience. With Social Media changing the rules of the game, such a campaign was on the cards!
But showing a bottle of Cola getting filled surrounded with cricket – Hmmm, I have my doubts!
The color and the design interface looks good, interactivity has been taken care of, to the extent that you can move the cards on the home page as you feel like. The entire concept sounds good, but I still am negative on this going viral and far from establishing Coke as the official drink for the DLF IPL (though this may not even be Coke’s vision) this is purely my thought on the platform and business objectives and value related to it.
I remember reading a case study while the Beijing Olympics were on, when people were not sure whether Pepsi or Coke was the official drink of the games!
A simple intuitive Strong Call to Action interface would have been better!
The campaign is engaging to the point that I would like to know the Delhi team, but am I really interested in knowing if a player is a Libran and what his interests are?! Would I share this information along? NO!! Virality is a far off dream, though it may work for Coke, as it would spend big marketing dollars in employing big online marketing agencies.
I remember a couple of previous viral campaigns which I blogged about previously, with simple, 2 static flash based web pages, but a high Call To Action! They clearly never gave you an interruptive message at your face to go and buy the product, but were high on Brand Establishment and brand recall!
The message being delivered by Coke can be much enhanced and the whole campaign be leveraged towards a higher engagement value with the end consumer, carefully working on the market segmentation, and understanding the message that the consumer is looking out for.
Looking forward to some exciting action at the DLF IPL!!
Yes the title of the post is correct and well, I am writing one after a long time. There has been lot of action lately in the social media domain. While working towards refining Social Media metrics and measurability and making things more transparent and understandable for the client, I have been working towards synergizing Social Media with the business objectives for my clients and the journey has been fairly fruitful.
Have stumbled upon a few tools which I found fairly interesting. In this post I am sharing with you a search engine which I digged, DuckDuckGo !! Yes, that’s the name of the search engine, and No, I havent lost my senses!
Strange name, but effective results. Far from the advertisement laden Google results, DDG comes fresh with a new interface and search results which are in contexts better than Google search results. The way DDG classifies search results and shows you the official site for yoru search result (if there is any existing) and then shows the rest of the results is amazing!
Who created DDG?
DDG is the brainchild of MIT grad Gabriel Weinberg, who is self funding the initiative!
I support Weinberg when he promises “less garbage” results. While I am writing this post, I have explored DDG for almost a couple of hours now and I do appreciate the design!
Design – what has it got to do with a search engine?
When you have just a text box on the landing page, what do you need to do with the design of the page? I found it highly intuitive and intelligent of DDG to be giving the user the option of clicking on the many options of internet web sites available on the right sidebar of the screen of your search results.
So, lets say, if I search my name: paritosh+sharma
The first result that comes is my official site:www.paritoshsharma.com followed by the other search results. Now I was fairly amused by the deep search results that I got while doing a name search.
Okay, so I got the search result, now what if I need to see the presence of the searched item on Social Media?
DDG has very intelligently placed links on the right sidebar of the page, which link to various social media channels and other popular sites and an automatic search query goes to the channel which gives the searcher access to your social media profile on the channels directly.
Thus with a single click on the YouTube icon, I reached to my channel on YouTube
Though not a Google yet, but DuckDuckGo is soon predictably going to prove to be a toughie in the search space, creating its own apprecaitive user base.
Indian politics is suddenly going the online route, there are parties who have launched their web sites, and well, for once if you are on the internet, you would not have missed the Google Ads which splash all over the internet, saying Advani as PM!
First things First
I really am not a keen follower on politics and what happens around, but NOW its that time of the year, when I VOTE, when I EXCERCISE my POWER given to me by the constitution of India and choose the future which Leads India.
I saw LK Advani sharing his views on the Varun Gandhi hate speech issue
And well, I decided, for sure, this is not the man I would like my country to be led by! A man who cannot stand up and take responsibility is not whom I WILL VOTE for! Just playing around with words without coming on a final conclusive stand is not something that you would be able to attract the youth of India with.
You get VOTES in south India, depending upon how Good the saree that you distributed to the Ladies is and same goes for the menfolk with their dhotis
I was travelling to deliver a lecture at one of the most premier institutions of learning in India a couple of days back, and I was lucky enough to share the space for 4.5 hours with a gentleman from a reputed IT Giant in India. Being from Bangalore, he commented
“In South India, people vote, on tha basis of the quality of the Sarees distributed to the women, and the quality of the dhotis to the men, and well, to top it all, depends upon how good the chicken biryani was”
I was amazed at this comment. The most learned class votes for FREE sarees and Dhotis and some food? Talk about Indian politics!
Will I VOTE?
YES! I always have! And I feel its time for all to be aware and decisive and the decision should be based upon, NOT the sarees and the food or the money, but a decision on awareness, on the fact that whatever you leave now, your shildren will be getting it later!
Social Media and the Changing Political Scene
The world of Social Media has changed the landscape. Its a complete shift from people just voting because there families have been supporters of ‘A’ political party, to taking an informed decision! Initiatives like Jaagore.com and Lead India (The Campaign by the Times Of India, Times Group) have refreshed the concept and put in people the quest to know and GO OUT AND VOTE and VOTE the RIGHTEOUS LEADER of the FIRST LOVE – INDIA!
Meena Vaidyanathan (Head, External Communications) HCL presents on how HCL created a highly successful campaign, branding the company in the corporate space, by leveraging the power of Social Media.
According to Meena, there existed a big potential clientele in these markets for HCL, but the problem statement was without spending zillions of dollars in advertising budgets, how to effectively reach to these potential markets and still be as effective, by investing smartly?!
And HCL came out with an innovative solution!
The solution was Social Media Marketing! (I am happy) doing this post because as OMLogic, this is what we do, I am a Social Media Marketing Evangelist, and at OMLogic, we work closely with clients in creating Social Media success stories!
If you don’t have a defined objective for Social Media, you are wasting resources for your company says Meena, well, Meena I couldn’t agree less on this:)
Chosing the right Social Media tool/channel
We decided on Slideshare as a tool, we discussed with senior professors from established universities and after intense discussions and brainstorming we decided upon Slideshare which was the perfect tool for us to realize the full potential from Social Media for the campaign that we were looking for.
Employee First, Customer Second
The campaign as Meena remarked has been highly successful. Selected as one of the best campaigns to be discussed at Davos and other major case studies to be taught at Harvard. Meena speaks about how the entire campaign was positioned to create the outreach and shared how they strategically created the content for the presentation which she terms as generic in nature.
Meena shared a few statistics with the audience which simply said that one of the major aims of getting people to a microsite especially created for the campaign was superbly achieved. More than 50,000 hits on the microsite is what we achieved in almost a months time. Our focused leads have increased from 40 to 60 leads a month, which we are satisfied with.
We created business, bagged a few major deals
Nokia and another big client is what we bagged from the campaign, though not specifically only from slideshare, but the entire campaign which has been on for quite sometime, but took the viral route once we decided on Social Media as a medium!
it is never a one man show and never a one stop game
We have a community page on Facebook and have a focused campaign at Linkedin, which is in line with the overall focus of the campaign.
Meena ends the interactive session with a high recommendation for Social Media Marketing, especially for startups and emerging companies who are looking to create tangible value and business results with a realistic budget and cost.
Presenting the Second Blog Camp Delhi, LIVE, hosted by the Indian Blog and New Media Society!
I am here to present the First from India, Online Platform for Taking Events and Conferences Global!! OMShare
Ajay Jain one of the founding members of IBNMS is not owned by anyone, its all of us working together and we have the volunteers coming together. We have technical sessions by our in house technical experts ad we are all going to be around to help each pther here in this conference or un-conference to be precise.
Truly an Un-conference. We also have DFC (I met a guy from the community and well would love to know more about them) taking a 3 hour session talking about photography in the afternoon. So if you are set out to buy a camera they are the people to talk to.
So I have completed my session, and am back at LIVE blogging the event!
Now we have Jasmeet talking about Mobile Blogging, Jasmeet is from Nokia. Jasmeet is the founding member at rediff.com and this is his first foray into Mobiles. Jasmeet is here to talk about the next coming medium.
The world is changing
So we are now talking about history of how we all reached here!? So, the world is changing okay…what is change, Jasmeet defines it for the audience! We are talking about Traditional media now. And well, Jasmeet says, for us the whole medium changed! The primitive way of doing business was not accepted by the emerging entrepreneurs.
So what’s changed?
Jasmeet talks about a 3 pronged strategy:
Access
Reach
Engage
If you have to play your game, you have to have this ammo with you! We started getting users from the community we started getting into the community mode and the whole game changed. Well, and now comes the same words that I have been hearing everywhere 1.0 and 2.0
There was a lot of types of content being churned out by users and hence we started thinking about platforms. Jasmeet smartly talks about the 2.0 domain, and he has rightly used the engagement model and presented it to the audience in an amazingly simplistic manner. Jasmeet is now answering a question from a participant on Ad networks.
Fortunately for us the mobile ecosystem is ramping up very fast and we are happy to be in this country!
Types of content, its an interesting perspective into personal content that Jasmeet has provided here. Content formats have changed. Why has this happened?!
Your main home page has changed to your page, if you havent realized it yet!
The fundamental reason of why webmail was created has changed! Hmmm…interesting download Jasmeet! Since the power of the mobile has come into play, things have changed and the concept of blogging in the traditional way would change as well!
The POWER of Social Media
Jasmeet gives the real picture of Social Media to the audience and I think all are in tune! Well, the definition of PRESENCE has changed! Well, and the good or the bad part is is that its going to change again! Sharing his experience at the Mobile World conference Jasmeet gives a new starting and emerging point on the best device that you have with all all day long – your mobile phone! Well, Jasmeet gives a whole paradigm shift in the usage of phones for what you do.
GPS
Traffic alerts
Finding friends
Extending your navigation to your car
Well, so the change is fundamental! And what do you do with this information presented to you?
Search
Locate
Choose
And now here is the scary part – well, in one integrated way, whatever happens on your mobile since the moment you have connected to a buddy, everything is trackable! Jasmeet has just now given an amazing usage of the maps that we use in and out! So, people beware of your bosses
Lastly well, a powerful point made by Jasmeet, is COMMUNITY!
We are set for a good good community ride! I agree no less Jasmeet!
WordCamp India was a great event, at least in terms of the fact that it was a start for us. The First from India, and at this platform, I thought I would present how WordPress as a platform, helped me and my company, when we launched the First from India – Online Platform for Taking Events and Conferences Global!
And since I have been getting requests from people, to upload my presentation on the blog (I already have 60 views and 3 downloads) in a day! Thanks all
Ankesh Kothari, speaks about talks about how to turn a blog into a Business, and he starts with a story, of a boy and his shoes.
A lot of people out here have been blogging but they still dont have the ideas of really hoe to convert a blog into a business
How many have a blog and it is not active anymore? – Well not many in the room.
Ankesh says there is no incentive in taking the blog further and that is why this happens. there could be different sorts of incentives. Monetary, Fame and the rest…
Why relying on Ads is a BAD IDEA?
You can compete with New York Times, I’ll show you how. Can you make your blogging Worth YOUR While?
You are probably working from yoru kitchen table so competing with such big companies is a scary thought…Ankesh shares the story of Car manufactures, GM and what made them do this, and Ankesh gives his thoughts, on how to really implement it into your blogging!
The Tripod strategy for blogging by Ankesh
The strongest, most geomtrical figure in nature is a triangle…if you have the three prong approach to your blog, well it would be stable, just like a three legged table is! It will take you at least 2-3 years for you to make money from your blog.
How do you get Ads, ehen your blog is NEW?
Find out who is advertising on your competitors website, and hit them on the charge structure. Out of 5 such advertisers, definitely 2-3 of them will test your platform for their Ads. Say if 100 people visit yoru blog 1 of them will end up buying your 10 dollar product and this money, should really go into your advertising budget, which would fetch you more business.
How do you go about creating a front end product on the very first day?
Create an audio product – Ex: an interview a personality for your blog. You can have a 45 minute to a 1 hour audio product which you can get rolling within a day. Play on pricing, its important to price and position your product right.
The third prong – keep creating products (these may not really be manufactured by you) you could just act as a successful integrator. Ankesh is a great chap, who is open in sharing the real time examples of products that he is working on in his presentation (which I’ll get for you guys, exclusively on this blog!!)
If you have this three pronged approach, you will have an upper hand over the other bloggers. My blogs become profitable and sustainable within the first 100 days. And hence competing with Gawker Media and NY Times, is really not a great deal.
How do you market your Blog?
Guest posting
Digg, SU, twitter
Networking: forums and events
PPC
Affiliate programs
Ankesh shares a story of “the most known bank robber in the US history, who is being interviewed by a journalist” and the journalist says, you’re the smartest guy I have ever met. You may have become a senator. And Billy answered in a simple way that is: “I target banks, because that is where all the money lies” Interestin Ankesh!!
Go where your audience hangs out – marketing Prong ONE
Chase your prey – marketing Prong TWO
Content is the king – GOOD content, though
Crappy content can make money, there are examples, but you just need to be plain simple lucky for it
Ankesh ends the session with a 100 day plan strategy for your blog!! Do the most of the work in this time and keep on with your momentum. Give yourself time and keep going strong.
So Matt starts by clicking a group photograph, and hey Mattm I really love that camera
State of the word
This is the first time Matt has been to India.
To contact Matt, find him here:
m2mullenweg.com
Twitter: photomatt
In the beginning Matt had a movable type, blog, which was hmmm…well….lemme see…gosh, were blogs like this?
And now Matt talks about how things slowing down, with all the HTML, taking up, Matt says, I am a typography geek. I submitted a patch on sourceforge and I was zapped and I felt great! And my entire involvement with open source, is the feeling, that so many people are using your code!
On Jan 24, Matt wrote a blog post, on the blogging software dillema! and Hence was founded WordPress. Mike who is the Co-founder WordPress, whom Matt never met for over a couple of years, and well, the rest they say is history!
And so was born WordPress!
The last year for us was really amazing, people from all over the world started getting involved. We had two major re-designs. The average WP blog has 4.96 plug-ins involved. Couple of weeks back we crossed 4000 plug-ins.
I think the concept of personalization is the most beautiful thing that software provides!
WordPress 2.7.1 has had almost half a million downloads since the past 11 days. This is about 2.5 times any previous update. Matt is amazing, he says the direction that we are taking WordPress to, is like Firefox, as a great Open Source project.
Nothing that we have done with WordPress is original, many people said there are many
Hindi Blogs, is what Matt is talking about now. I was surprised when WordPress had languages as wide as hindi, tamil, telugu, marathi and many more…Its really amazing, and I had no idea of this!
Once I added all these languages, there are 11,651 blogs which are written in multiple languages
There are 4.2 million unique visitors in the past 30 days!
WordPress Themes, Matt now emphasizes on User Generated versions. Well, and Matt now shows the first version of WordPress, which was pretty primitive, and then we had a major re-design with version 2.5!! Well, we added the color Blue!!
We then released the version 2.7 in december, the most successful release for WP so far!! Better navigation, and some of the nest features!!
We focused on the number of clicks and we worked on this amazing technology, using “laser eye mapping”. We are able to time every single action of the user on WP. Hence making every single action faster!! (I say amazing work Matt, I really didn’t know of this)
WordPress 2.8
Deadly – Ugly – icons!! WordPress users are Smarter and Sexier than the general audience ….am already feeling good
WodPress 2.8 is still open to suggestions and we are inviting suggestions. We are working on more widgets, making WordPress more and more Faster!!
One of our greatest DIFFERENTIATORS!!
Our dashboard, well, Prologue, would pretty much take it away!! – Food for thought, !! Matt is amazing !
Have you heard abotu BuddyPress
Well, its your own Social Network on a blog!! Its neat and its cool, that’s my first reaction to it. Its perfectly scalable. And to know more about BuddyPress, you can go to this test site: http://www.testbp.org/
What’s coming in 2009?
Well, taking a step back occasionally, sometimes we should do that. Where are we going, what would WP be in 5 years!
Software should be:
Humble
User Driven – WP ideas forum, what’s important to you
Agile
Plugins and themes
Global
Every country
Every language
Every culture
Accessibility
And that is what we are trying to fit into the WordPress platform!
Matt is an amazing guy, and I am amazed with all the innovations which are up for grabs. Gosh and there are fake WordPress logos…well, Matt jokes about the various versions of logos present and well, tells the difference, which came out when he was in Indonesia.
Freedom
Freedom, is what Matt is talking about now! there were 100 people working on the WP 2.7 version, and well, why do they do it? Matt pushes the envelope for innovation further and really creates with the entire audience the biggest answer that they were looking for!!
And the answer was to the question, which is asked to Matt most often, and that is: “How do we contribute to WordPress”??
Matt, was pretty open in saying that people should share their knowledge on their blogs, spread more and more openly and really take things to the next level!!
Okay, after an interesting Key Note by OM Malik, from GigaOM, we have Shreyas from RadioVerve talking about how to convert your own Radio Site using WordPress as a platform.
Building a Radio site on wordpress
I absolutely LOVE WordPress, Shreyas
(Pretty interesting concept Shreyas, using open source codes, and other innovative stuff)!! Radioverve is a platform where anyone could come and listen to some of the best Indian Music – alternate, rock, and the other genres!!
We wanted to improve upon the concept and continue to add something new to the already existing web site that we had in 2004, which was a text pattern site. And we decided upon open source. Shreyas is an itneresting presenter.
We wanted something which most people are aware of
So I loved the support of the community on my questions, and putting in each saturday and sunday leaving our social lives behind, and 6 months of work made us this: And Shreyas shows the all new evolved RadioVerve, on WordPress platform.
We have nine RJ’d stations and we are working with a whole wide section of people. Okay Shreyas, I think Im in love with the site. And the WordPress theme you have implemented is amazing
Shreyas now discusses the Lessons he has learnt !!
Dealing with multiple databases
Okay, so now Shreyas is talking about some php codes and some technical lingo, which I really am dumbfounded with So…but Im amazed at the simplicity with which Shreyas and the RadioVerve team has created amazing customization through WordPress.
I think i’ll start making music again, and put em up on the site
Now the best thing about WordPress is it can be customized to any extent, which I agree on with Shreyas!! Amazing cuztomization Shreyas. I am a fan!! Kudos.
Shreyas opens the session for discussion, and I must say, Shreyas, you have touched some real cords!! I think Shreyas is an amazing guy, he is open to sharing all his open source knowledge, with the room here. For all the Social Geeks go to Github.com, and you would get amazing source codes, with which you can work magic on WordPress!!
Yes! New Delhi, is proud to be hosting WordCamp India, at Adobe’s Noida, the venue for which is displayed below:
If you are a WordPress fan (which in all probabilities, you would be) this event is a must attend! Matt Mullenweg the creator of WordPress, is touching base in India for the event. Also, One of the respected Industry bloggers Om Malik (GigaOm) is touching base from Frankfurt as well.
The event sure is creating enough waves around to go un-noticed. This is one of those parties which are worth a dekko, as I am personally excited about meeting Matt and catching up with some of the best Bloggers around.
I personally extend my invitation to bloggers who are really interested into UI (User Interface) and Messaging, and how it changes users perception, to mail me at: paritosh@paritoshsharma.com and I’ll feature you at my blog: http://www.paritoshsharma.com/category/blog/
"We thought we understood social media marketing and seo optimization fairly ok but after our one on one session realized many of the fundamental mistakes we were making plus learnt many new tools. Overall an investment I would recommend every entreprenuer to make"
- Nidhi, Founder CEO, Pinnacle Works
Yes the title of the post is correct and well, I am writing one after a long time. There has been lot of action lately in the social media domain. While working towards refining Social Media metrics and measurability and making things more transparent and understandable for the client, I have been working towards synergizing Social Media with the business objectives for my clients and the journey has been fairly fruitful.
Indian politics is suddenly going the online route, there are parties who have launched their web sites, and well, for once if you are on the internet, you would not have missed the Google Ads which splash all over the internet, saying Advani as PM!
