Social Media Club Chennai

It was a great experience speaking at the Social Media Club Chennai. In a small group it’s easy to interact and form stronger relationships with people in the group. At the SMC event, I met some wonderful folks! A detailed post on what I spoke about is coming up soon! But before that, here’s the presentation I made.

Social Media Club Chennai

The new Google interface: Part :2 Image search

Google has accomplished one herculean task using the new interface- feature discovery. Though *most * of the search options were already available in the old interface, users were contended with basic search. We all know how Google makes money through ads ? Well, the new image search interface has enough space only for two ads unlike the old interface which had three! Some of the old features like search using color, size and type of images are all easily accessible now.

Search Using Color and Size

All search options

Google has rolled out these changes across 37 languages! I haven’t seen the mobile version yet, which has been launched in the US. Google has a blog post on these changes here.

The new Google interface: Part :1- Changes in Web search!

I’ve always loved Google (who doesn’t?) as an employer as well as a innovative technology company. Google has made a lot of changes to it’s otherwise simple interface yesterday and I HAD to blog about it.

Some overall noticeable changes on web search are:

1)  The new sidebar with many options

2) The lighter/softer  logos (that reminds me of logos on the Tshirts we had at Google ). Not sure if this is easy/hard on the eyes. It’ll certainly take a while to get used to.

3) The site-links seem to be buried in the snippet. It is not loud as it used to be.

4)  For results from the same pages, indent has reduced to a large extent

5) More content above the fold. This makes it look cluttered although the idea of this new design seems to be retaining simplicity while providing more features.

If you want to do this comparison yourself, the changes have been done on the .com TLD and the old interface is still on, on .co.in TLD.

Very exciting changes to the Image search interface, coming up in Part:2 of this post.

Srilankan airlines site -domain-squatted?

The last time I traveled to London, Srilankan airlines had the best fare.

Yesterday, looked up on Google for their official site and noticed that the first two results from the domain www.srilankan.lk were parked. Adding to the confusion was the ‘wwi’ subdomain and srilankan.aero which now seems to be an exact replica of www.srilankan.lk. Today both the sites load, just fine.

I looked up on domain tools and both the sites are owned by Srilankan and hosted on the same nameservers.

Wonder if  the site was domain-squatted or someone just forgot to re-register the domain after it expired!

5 easy do-it-yourself tips to get started on social bookmarking

Who should use social bookmarking sites ?

1) Users who want to keep track of news and articles pertaining to their areas of interest and share their own

2) Businesses that want to promote their brand through publishing articles or promoting already existing press releases and content

For users who want to use social bookmarking as a way to keep track of their bookmarks and share interesting articles or news items with other users, it’s fairly easy –

- Sign-up with any social bookmarking site and use the search button to find topics of your interest.

- Add friends who share your interests.

- Do not  sign up for too many such sites at the same time. You might end up not following any of them.

Social bookmarking sites are considered a gift to online marketers.  Bookmarks not only get traffic to a site, but also valuable links that can help search ranking.For ranking though, the site must not have a NoFollow attribute. You can promote a story, press release, article in your area of expertise and someone else’s review of your product or  brand. Remember, more and more eyeballs to your article translate into visibility and traffic to your website.

What I have here is a list of 5 do-it-yourself tips for anyone to get started on social bookmarking -

1) Identify sites that you want to get listed on –

Some parameters for evaluating a site are:

a) How popular is the site?

b) Quality of links on the site? Spammy links might mean that search engines give very less importance to links from the site.

c) Is the viewership on the site relevant to your product or service?

2) Make a quick list -

Although your analytics tools can tell you where your traffic  is coming from, it’s always good to know which ones are NOT popular. The obsessive organizer that I am, I always make an excel tracker that has the following fields – Social Bookmarking Site, Vanity URL, What type of site? , What are we submitting? , Which product are we promoting?  and Category/Tags?

3)  Optimize title and description -

It goes without saying that if you are trying to get the most relevant audience to read your articles, optimization is a must.  Make the description more entertaining.  I’m not an advocate of SEO optimized descriptions for social bookmarks, only reason being, for your article to be liked and bookmarked, it needs appealing descriptions. Over-optimizing content might lead to the article being monotonous.

4) Act ALIVE -

Many companies hire consultants/agencies to kick-start their online marketing programs. If they work on a cost per result basis, more often than not, in the time agreed upon, they are going to exploit all ways possible to improve your web metrics. Post a contract, the onus is on the inhouse marketing team to keep these programs going. Responding to comments on your bookmarks, commenting on other relevant bookmarks, being proactive in adding your articles etc will make your account more engaging and authentic.

5) Be quirky –

Don’t shy away from sharing off-beat stories which even bear a remote relevance to your subject. The second spot in Digg as I type this post, is ‘The crying sumo baby contest’ !

Social Bookmarking Site

URL

Type

What Are We Submitting?

What Are We Promoting?

Examples (From Intuit Sites)

Category/ Tags

The wrath on Social Media

Well, that sounded dramatic! It’s not so much of a ‘wrath’ as much as an ‘apprehension to invest’.

In a conversation with a friend who owns a start-up I happened to talk about the possibilities that social media marketing would create for his business. To him social media was a ‘good-to-have’ marketing technique and not an essential. That perception is not uncommon in this part of the world. But, marketing leaders across the globe are willing to invest only in forms of online marketing (PPC for instance) where revenue realization is straightforward unlike Social Media . Given the state of affairs with the economy, can we blame them?

The apprehension to invest in social media stems out of three main reasons and I have tried to answer these basic questions -

1)      Lack of control over what is being said about the brand:

As much as this is true, one should also realize that even when there isn’t an authentic social media space for your brand, users will talk about it anyway. Users on forums, blogs, product review sites and social networking sites are constantly scrutinizing and evaluating products and services. It’s easier to control what is being said through a corporate social media account than being scrutinized in common forums.

That said, can we ever control someone else’s perception even in the real world?? Addressing concerns and engaging constantly is a good way to manage perceptions.

2)      Ambiguity in calculation of ROIs:

That’s what people from the hi5 or Paltalk era say. Agreed, you can never measure ROIs from social media unlike banner or PPC advertising. But people in the online industry have smartly defined parameters for social media marketing. My favorites are brand metrics, customer engagement and retention. Most times something as granular as number of re-tweets for your tweet can be highly useful. Drawing parallel from TV advertising, TRP would usually correspond to traffic to a website.

Mashable has a great article on Social Media ROI -http://mashable.com/2009/10/27/social-media-roi/

3)      When I can advertise on social media sites and find my target audience, why build and maintain a community?

Whoa! Now that’s a tough one. Having a full time resource for social media is rarely in anybody’s agenda. If you are a brand that has a huge user base/product, building a community that thrives on its own is important. It does do good to your product-support budget.

There is no limit to what social media can bring to your business. From real time customer feedback to carving a niche in a specific area, this media is all you need!