Paritosh Sharma speaks on Social Media and Mobile 2.0 for Businesses at OMCAR 2009

June 8th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

Paritosh Sharma speaks on Social Media and Mobile 2.0 at OMCAR 2009

I take pride in presenting my talk at OMCAR 2009, a hugely successful event which was held by OM Careers in association with TiE, Delhi at Amity University, Noida.

I am humbled by the response received by the delegates and some amazing insights from the fellow speakers.

The rest of the video parts would be updated soon on the OFFICIAL OMShare YouTube channel!

Thanks,

Paritosh

Social Media Marketing and Mobile 2.0 for Your Business (Paritosh Sharma) at OMCAR 2009

May 28th, 2009 § 7 comments § permalink

Sharing my talk which I delivered at OMCAR 2009 – The Online Marketing Summit, New Delhi. I am glad to get the feedback that the talk was well received and thanks to all the people who shared their feedback!

This session was blogged LIVE by: Deepanwita Chatterjee, from team OMShare.

Post tea, peppered with some avid networking, we gather for the next session, ‘Making SEO, PPC, SMM & Mobile Work Together’, presented by Mahesh Murthy, CEO Pinstorm and Paritosh Sharma, (SMM Evangelist, OMLogic). I am LIVE Blogging the session and I can’t help notice the excitement that has been generated in the room at the announcement of the session

Paritosh starts the session by explaining that he will be discussing his views about SMM and how   business can benefit from SMM.

He starts by displaying a slide with a picture of a colorful grocery store with blue and red boxes.
I specially like the story telling method by which he makes his point. He says that once he went to buy a product of his favorite brand and that brand was not available so he had to settle down for his second favorite brand. So inspite of being a brand loyalist he had to settle with his second choice.

SMM can be explained in two words – message and media.

Paritosh makes the session very lively by citing an example of advertising for a bicycle manufacturer. He quotes 3 example campaigns

  1. A description of the specifics of the bicycle
  2. A picture of the bicycle
  3. A video of a woman riding a cycle showing how easy to ride

No need to mention the third method clicked. What really worked is the content, the message, and the media.

He cites another example of the inventor of sliced bread. The person patented it, advertised it still it didn’t catch up for 15 years. Another bread manufacturer came along and packaged the sliced bread in the right manner and it appealed to the user.

He rightly makes a point that there is no single rule for marketing. Advertising on SlideShare may work for a business and YouTube for another. It is important to understand the needs of the client and the client’s client.

He is explaining that the way to go about it is to create a message and target it to the right set of consumers.

He goes on to cite another example which triggers a lot of laughter – TataSky did an adult site, the moment anybody clicks on the site the questions like age and gender comes up which create the impression of the contents within. But the moment you click it it says ‘dude a paap hai’. The campaign sure has been done in a very witty manner which creates a huge recall value.

He also cites the example of jaagore.com and the ‘pappu pass ho gaya’ campaigns about which we all are well aware of. Both the campaigns and the were huge successes and the radio campaign ‘dot is hot’ was a runaway success as well. Jagore.com was a purely online site, and the message ‘chai peke jaago’ was very intelligently done. Kudos to the tata guys!

Television is a passe. There was a time people bought advertising space. But now people are spending more time on the internet on Orkuts and FaceBooks.

The audience silently agrees to that.

Paritosh says that SMM is more about customizing, customizing according to the needs of the customers.
He goes on to elaborate the four steps of creating a campaign.

The first step is to listen and learn. Even the customer is not clear about what he wants from SMM.

The second step is to audit and analyze the customer’s business model, whether SMM will be good or PPC.

The third step is to develop and test.

The fourth step is to execute and monitor. Metrics are difficult in SMM. But it is not that difficult if you understand the business perspective of the client. And till the time there is no metrics, one can always customize metrics for the clients.

He adds

Position your brand right. Do it with the right medium and to the relevant section of the audience online. And that’s where the PPC and SEO’s come into action.

He is now telling us about Skittles where every page is a social media, on one page there is twitter, on another YouTube and FaceBook on yet another. There is nothing good or bad it is about.

He then shares about Webchutney.com. On the home page, there are two tabs saying ‘I have 5 mins’ , and ‘I have plenty of time’, clicking on either takes the user to separate pages. He cites an example that if one sees a YouTube video of a bicycle gear that she likes and on clicking on it she is taken to the home page of the bicycle website, then one wouldn’t be too happy about it. The concept of separate landing works. I can’t help thinking that yes, that has happened to me many times!

He makes a point by reiterating that markets have evolved overtime and its time that one starts marketing to the innovators and early adopters. They are the ones which will take to your product and will do a much better viral campaign on the internet rather than the late adopters.

You have a great product…. You have identified the target market…
and people are talking about u….. and before the fizz goes out, market it…

Paritosh wraps up the session saying

The riskiest thing that you can do for your brand is to be safe.

Even if anybody writes anything bad about your brand, one can be alerted by a google alert and can pacify them.

Thanks for the useful insights Paritosh, it was great listening to you.

One of the most interesting sessions I have blogged. Thanks Paritosh

Thanks Deepanwita for blogging the session for me :)

How Startups and Emerging companies can benefit from Social web and Enterprise 2.0 – NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0 (39th session)

February 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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/