Linkedin tools to help small businesses

Linkedin.com is adding tools to help small businesses connect with their audiences. Read this post if you want to take advantage of linkedin.com's new offerings for you.

Gaga's media storm

Lady Gaga's new album had the dubious distinction of almost crashing the amazon.com servers. She also created a marketing tour-de-force online that heavily relies on social media. Read about the spectacular marketing show behind Born This Way here: How Lady Gaga Created a Web Marketing Spectacle for Born This Way

Great Social Media Resumes

Recruiters and HR professionals are some of the most connected networkers on linkedin.com. I suppose it is natural that they will go where the talent is. The past two months has been a sharp rise in chatter levels from this class. The number of jobs on offer, and of course the ocassional moan of not finding the right talent, are going up. If you are looking for a change now is the time. You can greatly help your cause by doing two simple things:

a) Get on linkedin.com and start connecting fast.

b) Take a look at this post on mashable, and see if you can do something with your resume. 10 Creative Social Media Resumes To Learn From

Happy hunting.

Putting social media in prespective

After all the hype and buzz around social media, finally a post that puts it all in perspective. I enjoyed reading Why I will never hire a social media expert and agreed with most of what Peter Shankman has to say...except that I don't really believe social media is ONLY about marketing and customer service. Those are very important elements of social media, but the phenomena also extends to areas that are traditionally not the domain of marketing of social media.

Stuff like what Nike and Starbucks do, crowdsourcing of ideas and concepts are also social media. Co-creation of content, that is so popular these days, is part of social media...so relegating it to the realms of the marketing and customer service is probably doing it a disservice.

Social media has the power to impact and fundamentally alter all aspects of corprate functioning. It is upto us to define its relevance and take advantage of it.

Case Study: Maruti Suzuki Ritz

Maruti Suzuki Ritz’s “Live the Moment” campaign (on air since December 2010) tries to strengthen the positioning as the car with the right balance. Just like its target group (the young and upwardly mobile) desires to have the right balance of purpose and fun, Ritz stands for the right combination of space, mileage and style. Among the most innovative auto brands on social media, Ritz, for the first time in India, announced to give out a brand new car as a prize. Maruti Suzuki’s objectives of this campaign are both to increase the impact of Brand Ritz as well as making profits.

About the Ritz "Live the Moment" Contest
Maruti Suzuki kicked off the contest by creating a microsite (http://livethemoment.ritzbymaruti.com/), inviting users to submit entries for the “Live the Moment” campaign.  To participate in the contest, the users had to share a story or moment that would attract their social network to vote for them. The entries were to be in the form of a text message along with an image and/or video, thereby making each entry a piece of shareable content.

Ritz on Facebook

The Facebook account of Ritz (www.facebook.com/ritzbymaruti) has more than 1.5 lakh fans who have uploaded over 1,400 photographs of their cars. With a secondary reach of more than 18 million FB users, the Ritz fan page is the fourth largest auto Facebook page in India. The page attracts a whopping 1,12,000 active monthly users, accounting for a post every 5 minutes, each enjoying 30,000 impressions on an average.

Constant moderation, along with engaging both prospective and existing customers by listening to them and answering their queries, keeps up the pace of user activity. Around 70 discussions and 170 user-generated posts have been managed to create the ‘community’ experience.

Micro-Engagement: The Key to Ritz’s Social Media Success

Answering each and every query in a personalized way, Ritz has been able to strike the chord with its audience. The Admin personally replies to all posts on the Ritz FB wall. With more than 3,500 followers on Twitter, micro-engagement through updates, retweets, replies and direct messages has become the best way to receive suggestions from users. A lot of followers on Twitter have been persuaded to join the Ritz fan page on Facebook.

  

Keeping it Simple

Registration is the last thing users want to do online. So, the challenge that Ritz had to face was making the whole process so simple and quick that it would encourage participation from users who wanted to share their moments. The micro-site for the contest was optimized and designed in a way that visitors could instantly enjoy the experience. Social media supported the successful execution of this vision. Says Pallavi Khare, Brand Manager (Ritz) at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, “Users do participate if you make the mechanics simple and use the latest technology to enable social integration and create a seamless experience.”

An email connect, along with a social media connect, was integrated into the promo site. Then, the functionality further simplified user experience by enabling users to log in from any of the social media or email platforms they want to, submit entries and share their posts on any social media channel. At the same time, the application allowed a user to use Facebook, email or Twitter to connect the entry submission with their personal profile and appeal to his/her social network for votes.

The campaign has also been running on other social media platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Orkut. Ritz also has a large YouTube following with over 14,500 views so far on the official You Tube channel of Ritz which is www.youtube.com/marutiritz. The “Live the Moment” contest now has a bank of about 50,000 moments, constituting an online property that is integral to the personality of Brand Ritz.