New Media, Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Well, to start with, I was talking online with one of my friends who is pursuing her HR in Canada this morning. We generally talk about lots of stuff, and today she remarked ‘why be such a pessimist’? And well I realised yes, that’s it!

Being a Social Media Marketing Evangelist –

What do I do she asked, and I started giving her all the fundas and tips and tricks on all what goes on and is going on and what’s the way ahead: which I wrote in my previous post: what would Social Media be in 2009 and then it struck me are we going the right way?

What is Viral Marketing? How do you define the success of your Viral campaign? How do you creae that Oh! So awesome viral message which your followers would take forward?

I know these are common questions anyone can think of, but what I am stuck with is this: Does your Oh! so Viral Campaign really markets you out?

Well, and the next thing I did was to Google on the topic and what I found was this: a classic Seth Godin post, what is viral marketing, Seth raises a very crucial point here:

There are two kinds of Viral marketing:

• The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.
• A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself. Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.

- text taken from Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html

And I was amazed to think how my thought process connected with Seth’s

Well, What I have been rattling my brains over is does your Viral campaign really achieves your marketing purpose?

And Seth does answer this question in a really effective manner: He says Virality is not a feature that you attach to your campaign.

The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.

What do I feel?

Well, Viral Marketing is not  a value-added-service. In fact it is in-built. Its inside your offering. So the game changes here.

The Game changes here – for marketers

For all those marketers who have been selling over time and doing all the things possible to reach to the clients, trying to customize the offering according to the needs, and expecting WOMM (word of mouth marketing) to happen, the game has changed.

There have been a number of Un-successful attempts at Viral marketing. To tell you about an interesting one I saw a few days back is the “AdultDost.com” a Viral Marketing message for Tata Sky done by a media company. Well looking at the name doesnot it sound like an adult site? And YES! the message works!

You think it is, and you go there and well, the rest is “I went there, I liked it and I am blogging about it”

Its not about creating that message, It’s about: Creating a message that would be of value to the target market that you are creating the message for!

Go Viral…this new year.

WEB 2.0, Yammer, Mashup, Dapper, Pipes, Widgets, Open API’s, WOMM…

Greek, does it sound?

Well, the 39th session of the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0 (Emerging Companies Forum – Marketing) was a big draw, which had people belonging to a wide strata of the industry, participating with varied interests.

The session was chaired by Mr. Jay Pullur, the Founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies Pvt. Ltd. a technocrat and visionary, building teams from the scratch has been a key trait that helped Jay in establishing Pramati technologies, a company known for its innovation and quality.

The session started with Jay introducing innovative products from Pramati in the form of widgets which they evangelized as integral tools for building simple yet highly efficient methodologies for leveraging WEB 2.0

A formal kickoff then followed with Jay presenting the participants with a presentation which was a two sided discussion, with the participants engrossed.

Jay started with defining young companies. A statement which laid the foundation for the discussion “big companies already do all the old stuff well and in good scale”, made quite an impact in the participants and the focus hence shifted to how startups and emerging companies (young companies) could leverage WEB 2.0?!

WEB 2.0 and that too in 2 hours, well Jay smartly divided the presentation into Three (3) parts -:

1. What is this new WEB?
2. What does it mean to us?
3. Why is it challenging?

WEB 2.0, a new style of working!

WEB 2.0 is more about user participation, peer production and not just simple one way publishing.

Social Media
Two simple words, yet they made every mind in the room actively interact and participate. Well why someone would not be interested when you hear “the traffic on my web site has grown 25times over the past 20 odd days, due to the implementation of this FREE widget”!

‘FREE’ strikes! And it struck!

The greek words which we started this post with now started making sense, Mashups, Dapper, Intel Mash maker, Yahoo Pipes are all WEB 2.0 tools which are the most innovative and effective tools in leveraging WEB 2.0 for the organisation.

Marketing Opportunity – Widget

How does FREE stuff adds value?
-    Social Networking Applications
Jay provided with examples from some applications that Pramati did for the recently concluded Olympics at FaceBook, which generated quite a response all across.

Open social platforms were again an interesting topic of discussion which generated quite an interest in the room. Various platforms were discussed. Including the free google platform, open API’s and web services.

Extending the discussion, Jay proved how widgets could be effectively used in the promotion of products.

2.    Strategy needs understanding of distribution models and uptake of new offerings

“Marketing is changing faster than ever”
-    Jay Pullur

“Usefulness is no longer the only thing that matters, it’s the experience that does”
-    Jay pullur

“Indian startups have not really kept the waves”
-    Jay Pullur

An interesting discussion ensued within the participants, which had WEB 2.0 researchers’ sharing their experiences into what they felt was lacking in the Indian startups and how could the power of WEB 2.0 still be leveraged.

Jay mentioned the Enterprise 2.0 platform which he simply explained as a very complex combination of openness and privacy.

The change in the WEB 2.0 space was very intelligently put across which had the participants in splits and was really a thought provoking idea…”who thought a simple application like twitter could ever work”?
Well, since people today are interested into other people’s lives, thus it’s not just working; in fact we all are Tweeting, day in, night out.

Yammer, Crunchbase, Semantic Web before the participants could say why English suddenly has become out of focus again, Jay explained the various tools and how they spell magic!

PART TWO
The session was now much more interesting as now Jay kept his point through which he gave what the audience wanted…good, but what does it mean to us?

1.    Specialize and grow on the fast track, remarked Jay

With a reference to the blue ocean strategy and other such methodologies, Jay was instrumental in providing the audience with methods of marketing new products and service offerings through WEB 2.0 tools.

PR2.0, Blogs, WOMM (word of mouth marketing) etc. were the cited examples

Beat the downturn, commoditization and Market pressures, remarked Jay

PART THREE
Why is it challenging?

1.    Competency bar is growing up

Before the participants could voice their concerns of implementing such WEB 2.0 strategies, Jay was quick in adding the various challenges that could be faced.

“Invest little to gain a standing” – the statement clearly reflected Jay’s long term standing in the IT industry. The experience was speaking for itself.

Post the formal discussion, Jay shared his experiences with the audience. What was engrossing was Jay’s openness in coming out with the go to market strategies that Pramati implemented while they were in the process of launching their Enterprise 2.0 solution.

Lesson well learnt, and such discussion was received with great response by all present.

The session concluded with a Q&A session and the forum opened for networking which also had Jay interacting very openly.

RocSearch also has done a report on Leveraging User Generated Content – An anecdotal assessment on what works for marketers and what does not…download the report at Rocsearch_leveraging-social-media_may-2008

Link to the post at the NASSCOM EMERGE Blog: http://blog.nasscom.in/emerge/2008/09/15/how-startups-and-emerging-companies-can-benefit-from-social-web-and-enterprise-20/