Mediaboss Marketing

For businesses, it's ad-vantage point on social platform For companies trying to reach out to more of their audience, creating a page on social networking sites has become vital to connecting and communicating with fans Priyanka Joshi / Singapore Jun 11, 2012, 01:49 IST

Pranshu Diwan, who runs Travel Another India, a tourism outfit, found that his company could tap a wider set of travellers looking for offbeat destinations on the largest social networking platform Facebook. By creating a page on Facebook, the business now interacts with an audience of about 50,000 followers who share their experience on the social platform. With over 50 million users from India, networking, sharing and recommending restaurants to holiday destinations to their friends, Diwan and many other small business owners have found Facebook as the new-age means to promote their businesses.

In turn, Facebook, too, has upped its offering. The social networking major has launched a series of webinars designed to help small and mid-sized businesses understand and use the new Facebook product offerings, such as Timeline, Offers, Sponsored Stories and real-time Page Insights. Kirthiga Reddy, director (online operations and head of office), Facebook India, says, Timeline has been rolled out to all brands and in India most of the companies have done a great job of moving to Timeline. The success of SMBs on Facebook can be judged on the basis of the popularity of the page and how much business/inquiries does the brand generate through its Facebook page. As of end-March 2012, there are more than 42 million pages with ten or more Likes. Diwan of Travel Another India reflects on the changes, While it is too soon to determine the effects of the new marketing features on FB platform, nevertheless we have seen an increase in interest on our page. The new timeline view allows people to better scroll through posts and enables better highlighting and tagging of key stories. Facebook platform and metrics help us quantify which stories, photographs, posts are more effective.

For companies trying to reach more of their audience, creating a Facebook page has become central hub for connecting and communicating with fans. It makes sense for home business owner, Bhadra Shah, an Iyengar yoga teacher in Mumbai, who chose voluntary retirement from a leading insurance company to pursue yoga. While he started with friends on Facebook and how Yoga could help them. Shah then got requests for private classes and small-group yoga sessions from friends on the social networking site. Today after 15 months, Shah runs seven private yoga sessions for high flying executives and has regular yoga training camps.

It was a similar experience for Ashwin Menda, a mumbai based caterer, who today spends 6-8 hours on his Facebook Page to connect with prospective clients every day. Word of mouth publicity on Facebook worked for Menda, especially when it came from clients. Better still, when people post pictures of food items cooked and served by the caterer, it further helped Mendas business. On average, Facebook enquiries generate close to half of his business and the repeat customer base comprises mostly of clients who came to Menda via Facebook.

Marketing is much flatter now," notes social media expert Guy Kawasaki in a webinar. "Word of mouth is now what makes products tip. Social media websites, he argues, present personalized customer service and thus are the quickest way to communicate with your consumers.

While Facebook is the de la creme of social networking sites, theres no denying that Google+ is close on its heels. With over 100 million users on Google+, it is time small businesses start channelising the social platform as part of their marketing game plan, list experts. A big reason, they claim, to be active on Google+ is the boost it gives small businesses online presence through Google search popularity and page ranking. Jason Hennessey, CEO of EverSpark Interactive, a search engine optimisation company explains in a blog post why Google+ is not to be ignored. The more frequently you add content to your page, the more frequently Google will crawl your site, and the higher you will rank in searches. Adding more contacts to your Google+ circle will also help to push your content higher and connect their blogs and sites with yours, he noted. In other words, the more you become engaged with Google+ and the more people you havefollowing you on Google+, the more promotion your content will get acrossthe Web.

Prabhu Ram, general manager (research and consulting), Cybermedia Research, reasons, A majority of the established social networking platforms have developed a unique positioning for themselves among users. For instance, while Linkedin is used for professional networking and lead generation, Facebook is preferred for social networking. As per our survey results, a new generation tool like Google+ is being used in both professional and personal settings within a short span of its launch.

Meanwhile, Facebook is already out with engaging marketing tools that can be deployed by business owners easily. For example, the new Pages for businesses have features that allow business users to express what their brand stands for. Another new feature, Real-time Page Insights presents data that is now more actionable, so businesses now have a better window into whats working and whats not on their Page, and how to optimise quickly. The effectiveness of Timeline and the marketing tools can be measured by increased engagement and the number of likes on the brand pages. Additionally the new insights feature also helps brands to understand and connect with their fans better.

For now small business owners and social media experts conclude that while Google+ has its benefits, it just doesn't match up to Facebook today. Unless you have the time to spare to run a Google+ page, it's likely not worth the effort because the ability to engage consumers is so limited, and the breadth of audience is too. But they also dont deny the fact that Google+ could close that gap over time.

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For businesses, it's ad-vantage point on social platform

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Govt info officers urged to use social networking

ILOILO City Philippine Information Agency (PIA) Region 6 Director Janet Mesa urged government information officers to use online social networking in information dissemination.

Move on to social networking through the use of the internet and be on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Open your municipalities to these new exciting outlets of information and use them effectively to disseminate government information, said Mesa during the induction of the new set of officers of the Association of Government Information Officers in Iloilo held at Damires Hills in Janiuay, Iloilo.

Mesa also urged them to be consistent in their attendance in meetings and submission of accomplishments of their agencies and local government units for dissemination.

Mesa said a municipality is active and efficient not only because of the leadership of the local chief executive but also because of the information support given by the information officers.

The more you talk, the more people will know and support development, said Mesa as she congratulated the new set of officers headed by Juvy Gaton, head of the Information Division of the Department of Agriculture Regional Field Unit 6.

Janiuay Mayor Frankie Locsin inducted Gaton and the other officers that included:

* David Israel Sinay of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources 6 vice president for National Government Agencies

* Susan Jovero of the municipality of Pavia vice president for local government units

* May Castillo of the Department of Social Welfare and Development 6 secretary

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Gov’t info officers urged to use social networking

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice to the Union Government and social networking sites Facebook India and Google India on a petition by the former Bharatiya Janata Party ideologue, K.N. Govindacharya, which accused the two sites of not verifying details of its subscribers, using the users' data for commercial purposes and evading taxes on their operations in India, and the government of not taking any action against them.

Issuing the notice, the court directed the respondents to file replies to the petition in four weeks.

The petitioner submitted that of the 9 million users of Facebook, 5 million are Indians. The social networking site was transferring their data to the U.S. for commercial use without paying any taxes to the Indian government on their operations here as per the Double Tax Avoidance Agreement.

He urged the court to direct the government to ensure the compliance of the verification norms for the users of the social networking sites, as was being done by mobile companies, to pre-empt security threat to the country.

As per the records of Facebook, about 5 to 6 per cent of their accounts are fake or being operated by anonymous users because the accounts were opened without the user details having been authenticated, the petitioner said adding that while the government had framed detailed guidelines for Know Your Customer' norms for all sectors and more specifically for verification of mobile subscribers by telecom companies the same was not being implemented by the networking site, thus causing the biggest security risk to the nation.

The petitioner also raised the issue of invasion of privacy for the sites' users as their data were transferred to the U.S. for commercial use.

He further submitted that Facebook had allowed children below 13 years of age to open accounts possibly one-third of their registered users just to exploit the online gaming market and increase advertisement revenue. Facebook's gross revenue for last year was about $37 billion but it was not paying due taxes on their Indian operations as per the provisions of the DTAA.

The petitioner urged the court to stay the operation of services to disingenuous users of Facebook, Orkut and other networking sites and direct the government to stop opening of further accounts by these sites without necessary verification.

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Notice to Centre, social networking sites

Tucked away in Manhattans SoHo neighborhood near New York University, Foursquares new digs make a much better home to its staff than the companys previous headquarters, which it shared with the Village Voice (and quickly grew out of ). Photo: John Francis Peters/Wired

Until now, Foursquare has been more like a Hollywood caricature of a social networking business than the real thing. It has a carousing, socially popular founder. A goofy-sounding value proposition involving badges, mayors, and check-ins. A lofty venture capital valuationand reportedly, little revenue. But the fresh redesign described to us by CEO Dennis Crowley and outlined below aims to change all that, making the check-in service attractive to a whole new class of consumers and, just as crucial, providing advertisers highly targeted access to those consumers.

If all goes as planned, Foursquare will finally do what Crowley says the startup has always wanted to do: Get past awarding badges like Player Please for obsessive check-ins and provide people with more actionable, easy-to-understand information to help them make decisions. The company says its goal is to make the real world easier to use. Rather than simply recording where you are, Foursquare wants to help you decide where to go.

Foursquare has always been of some use in making plans, if only because it shows you where your friends areright now. That lets people, as Crowleys former NYU professor Clay Shirky puts it, literally see through walls I am standing here and my friends are 55 yards in that direction.

Foursquare's new iPhone app, rolling out Thursday, makes recommendations more accessible, pictures larger, advertisements more visible, and social elements more prominent. The check-in button, at the top right of each screen, is intended to be more clickable. Images courtesy Foursquare

But Foursquare wants to go further, helping its 20 million users easily see where their friends have been, what they did, what they ate, who they were with, what it all looked like, and what it all means to someone standing on a particular corner at a particular time with a particular hankering.

It wasnt just a novelty trick of knowing where your friends are. Crowley says of Foursquares original iteration. The intent has always been to predict where people are going, what is the most interesting thing I should know on a Tuesday afternoon, in some place I have never been.

All the check-ins, all the mayorships were a way to get the data to do that.

Its like the Karate Kid, Crowley says. You think you are painting the fence, but you are really learning karate. Thats what we were doing.

Now that Crowley has accumulated extensive user data over the last three years, hes launching new features to make us of it. Those features begin rolling out for iPhone and Android users on Thursday and for BlackBerry users in a few weeks.

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Social: Foursquare’s Plan For Relevance and Riches