Ghosts of Brand’s Past

Not sure if Dell would like it, but despite doing so much on social and digital media, it is still remembered for the mistakes committed in handling social media crisis.

I was invited for a social media knowledge sharing session and opening notes mentioned how some companies have been proactive – Starbucks while others like Dell had no choice but to enter social media. 

“Don’t fool yourself that “it’ll all die down”

Before they became the shining example of social media goodness that they are today, Dell made many mistakes in handling crises. From the emergence of ‘Dell Hell’ and numerous ‘I hate Dell’ blogs to the exploding batteries saga, Dell would probably be the first to tell you they learnt a lot from those early days. You can’t just ignore a crisis and hope it’ll all go away, it won’t.

Source: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4829-when-social-media-attacks-learn-from-others-mistakes?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic

Dell’s social media engagement was initially forged by crisis — from the “Dell Hell” summer of 2005 to the fl aming laptops in 2006. But from these trials, Dell emerged as one of the most engaged and active companies in social media, with an engagement score of 123 in 11 channels. Their best practices pertain primarily to how to extend and sustain engagement across the organization.

Source: The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged? – Wetpaint, Altimeter

I would say any publicity –positive or negative helps a brand in long term. Negative brings you in eyes of customers and gives you a chance to put forward your point of view. It helps when people talk/search about you. It’s a trigger that helps your brand perform and correct mistakes/blunders!

And positive is anytime welcome. That too helps a brand work harder to maintain the positive sentiments.

This makes a good website…

What would you do with “brought friends”?

This service will guarantee you a slew of new followers in the time stated or we’ll provide you with a further 20% at no charge. In other words, we’re so confident that we’ll deliver on our promises or you’ll get 20% more followers than you’ve paid for in the end

Will this help? With Dell story, people have started viewing Twitter as money making machine instead of a communication tool.

Is this the future? How do we measure popularity with such bought/brought “friends”?

Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are communities that thrive on conversations and personal interaction. I do not go to facebook to become fan.. I go for interaction, I might become a fan, but that is a personal choice.

If community too becomes a number game where someone can pay money to get 10,000 twitter followers/facebook fans, where is the personal touch?

Are we at the verge of Social Media bubble burst?

Our Idiot box is online

Television serials online – started probably with Hulu and have now reached India with sites like Star TV and Zoom streaming complete programs online. 

Star TV has introduced Star Player on their site (www.startv.in) – a great online video entertainment tool that streams shows of the Star Network (channel V included).  Though I have accessed the site from home broadband only (I work in office ), its interesting to see quick streaming, good quality video along with social media networking elements – allows you to rate/comment/chat/search similar shows.

What also adds to their advantage is the fact that they have created small capsules of the programs with mouse-over write-up.  So, if you have missed or want to view a part of the program, this helps. 

And best is that the site is not overcrowded with ads! That gives a clutter-free and premium look to the site. 

Overall, I found this very impressive! 

What can they do better? Well – few things for sure. Instead of using the main area on homepage for one program promotion, they can create a small video/slideshow of new programs – that could help them promote more than one program. All genres would find interesting programs being introduced and so, pardon my saying, but Star TV’s ”saas-bahu” serial image could be improved.

 

Startv.in

Compared this to Zoom – I think they are in different space all together. While Zoom is a channel website – showcasing schedule, image gallery, news and gossip, celebrity pics and video as well, startv site is focused towards online video entertainment.

Both have their niche defined, but if you ask me, I liked startv website more.

http://unhub.com/pallavi

Unhub – my personal toolbar. Useful? Yes.. How much.. Yet to explore! But interesting name – was planning to create an identity on hubpages when I heard of this! 

With so many new and innovative tools available, am sure few years from now, all of us could have our different “home” applications. As internet and profile presence becomes more and more fragmented, such aggregation hubs would continue to emerge!

ePR…Social media marketing.. online reputation management.. now what..

Most of us start the project with a bang! Here we are starting this project that would change the way we are perceived in the market.. we go whole hog – empanel an agency, ensure we provide all the information needed.. and keep checking Google for results.

 How often do we measure the value received. I read a lot about measurement – am quite fond of that too – still, many times I too believe that the project is successful just because the agency reports say so.

 Few small things that we can do at our end to cross check -  besides Google search!

1. Footfalls
   1. Create landing pages for key products/topics and monitor them regularly – brand mentions, if get converted into footfalls on the site add to the tangible benefit. 
   2. Provide additional information, contact and an asset that you want users to know about  – white paper, webinar signups/links, newsletter, demos, etc
   3. Measure Inbound links – see the kind of pages/sites that are linking to you.
2. Eyeballs
   1. Monitor Google and Yahoo alerts for you and compete.
   2. Monitor Social media mentions – mention on blog posts, micro-blogs, answers, tagging and sharing sites. Many sites can help you in social media search – http://socialmention.com/, http://www.whostalkin.com and more – I find these 2 interesting.
   3. Content/mention on other web sites and publications. Try to provide links to the company site from the main body, not just contacts.

Let me see how well this works and keeps my enthusiasm going– this is my Q1 of these reports!

Your profile on Google

Almost 2 yrs back I had posted – “MySpace..Facebook..Yahoo360….. Signs of Social network fatigue?” and then saw the rise of aggregator services. A single sign-in platform to manage various social networking profiles.

Similar thing has been done by Google – a service which was much needed and since this doesn’t compete with the organic search result ranking, makes sense for those who have been trying to get on first page of Google.

 This can make your profile easier to find and as this as a specific URL, makes it easier to send it out as a link- something that LinkedIn has done very successfully. 

Soon, instead of going through the top 10 links, users might be scrolling down the first page results to see who you are in your Google profile – all information in one place.

 All they need to do is to have a preview of 2-3 important links in the same page. For me, they would be my Digerati forum and LinkedIn content preview.

SEM Strategy – in a nutshell

1. Identification of Keyword/key phrases

 

Ask SEO agency for

Your SEM strategy

Demand analysis Search volume Competition Estimated Google Adwords daily clicks Potential SEO volume. Average PageRank for the keyword Performance analysis Average position Click volume referred from search Click quality Outcomes (sales, registrations or leads)

Demand analysis  Use SEO to target the key phrases with high search volume and popularity. For best impact, select words that are popular enough and have average competition rate Average Position 1 ad slot for Google receives approx. 5% clickthrough rate, so this can give an idea of the total expected SEO volume. If the average PageRank for the given keyword is much above the site PageRank, then it is unlikely to be able to compete using this particular keyword. Hence the keyword should be discarded. Use PPC to target the niche and rare keywords as it is often impractical to use SEO for the full range of niche phrases Performance analysis Create benchmark for the agency - Current Rank across Search engines - Actual monthly SEO volume   - Relevance  - Conversion (contact us, subscription form, downloads)

 

 2. Internal ranking factors 

Recommendations for  Amount of text on a page Number of keywords on a page Location of keywords Text format – Title tag; alt tag etc Directory structure Navigation menu format # keywords/keyword phrase per page

Keep page size between 500-3000 words Keywords density should be between 5-7% Keyword location – closer a keyword to the beginning of a document, more significant it becomes for the search engine.  Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. Hence Use keywords in headings. Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Title tag – 50-80 characters from the TITLE tag are displayed in search results and so limit the size of the title to this length. Avoid subdirectories Avoid javascript/flash/image menu. If that is mandatory, create a sitemap with html links to the pages. Try to follow the rule – One page – one keyword phrase Internal linking – not more than 50 links on one page.

 

 3. External ranking factors 

Index coverage Link building strategy Submission to general purpose directories DMOZ directories PR and Blog strategy

Link-building – Quality is determined by context, relevance, and popularity of the linking page, as well as the link text. Focus on Natural link-building using quality content Ensure Inbound links are from relevant sites that have high PageRank.

SEO Notes – Understanding search engine working

All search engines contain the following main components.

1. Crawler program to follow the links on each webpage. Its task is follows the links and scan the documents and web pages.
2. Spider is a program that downloads web pages on instructions of crawler. It does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page.
3. Indexer analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider. It parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.
4. Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages
5. Results engine – extracts search results from the database. Is one of the important components as this determines which pages best match a user’s query and in what order the they should be listed.
6. Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Vote ME!

Am very optimistic about this election. Each time I voted, I did it ONLY for the party and never for the candidate. And obviously Independents never got my votes as I didn’t “know them”. I neither had interest nor opportunity to know any of the candidates.

 

But this election is different! It surely is! Not just big parties, every candidate is out to woo the youth where they “hang around” – Yes on Social media networks..

 

India has some 714 million eligible voters. So why has reaching to some 21+million who are online and eligible for voting become so important? Is this number big enough to make a difference?

 

Has Obama campaign influenced them? Or have they realized that youth votes are needed as majority of those online belong to this category.  Or should we thank NGOs who took on them to pull youths to vote!

 

L K Advani is reaching out to youths through his website (http://www.lkadvani.in) , live chats, Facebook, Orkut and YouTube, while Narendra Modi, uses tools such as podcasts, Twitter, Google SMS and widgets.

 

Rahul Gandhi has his own site – http://www.rahulgandhi.us/ (why .us?? I thought we were to use .in and is on Facebook .

 

Surprisingly, lkadvani.in has higher reach and pageviews than rahulgandi.in despite Rahul  being projected as Youth neta.

Is there some thing lacking in his effort to connect?