Is social media the end of paid media?

My answer to the question on Quora: Is Social Media the end of paid media 

No, it's about being smarter and being more focused as many have pointed out in their answers. Recently I read an interesting blog about  Facebook Organic Reach Plummeting. What's more interesting is the comment thread and as many would have pointed out in the thread, Facebook as such is a big challenge, but traditionally Google has found a really interesting way to integrate all these attributes and making paid media better overall. The key is of course to find these aspects and fine tune it and ensure that throughout all media you are using these tactics. Rinse - Repeat

1. Focus on Acquisition and methods to directly reach out once you've paid for Social Media.
2. Targeting should be integrated via all other mechanisms too.
3. Drive optimization through focused rather than spend money on bombarding across all channels and media.
4. Learn what your user behavior is and customize your spends.
5. The goal should be to get them back to your properties and engage with you on your own turf. Advertise to get them off of FB and onto your site to download your whitepapers, watch your videos, sign up for your newsletter, buy a product from you, attend your conference, etc.(As mentioned in comments)
6. Convert your fans and followers to an owned list or something you control.
7. "I think most business owners have no problem with paying Facebook for advertising, I believe the primary problem is having to pay to get new fans, and then pay again to reach the same fans you just paid for. Then repeating this cycle again and again. Most small businesses are willing to pay for Facebook advertising, but they simply cannot afford to promote every single post." Interesting comment on the blog by Zach. 

This basically is a problem with Facebook and the same is very well addressed via Google media buying and adwords. 

So if you look at it overall,  the thing Facebook avoided for a long while and now suddenly is trying to get at (Extort brands via strong ad tactics) will cost them for sure, while Google will smile their way into advertisers' pockets.

 
Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 15 years. He has worked with and built India's largest digital agencies from the ground up and been part of their acquistion journey. Social Wavelegnth (now Mirum, part of the WPP group) and Kinnect, now part of the Interpublic Group (IPG). He's also been a public speaker, keynote speaker at various large panels/events of the likes of BBC Knowledge Summit, Blockchain Summit Bangalore. And has been a guest lecturer at IIM, Symbiosis, Indian Institute of Digital Education.

He has been blogging since 2005. And also been author at various publications, that include Startup India by ZDNet, Social Samosa, Lighthouse Insights.  His passion for Writing, Advertising, Creativity, Digital, Blockchain and Future Tech is what drives him each day.

Using Quora to Market Your Business

Original article written on Social Samosa

Quora is quite a rage when it comes to driving loads of knowledge with a pinch of perspective. It uses Social Networking to classify various topics of interest in order to open an avenue to many intelligent minds across the world so that they are able to share their knowledge, opinions and most importantly create a channel to discuss topics of interest with a dash of first hand experience from users who’ve been there and done it all.

Come to think of it, Quora provides a lot of insights and knowledge and probably bears a close resemblance to Wikipedia (minus the perspective element), stock exchange or some other business community forums and curation tools including the likes of Reddit and Digg.

I would have said, Yahoo answers, a decade ago, but as much as I’d like to compare it to the only former alternative that many say would come to this social networking site, it quite frankly doesn’t make the cut and a lot of us know why. So much so that even LinkedIn Answers has shut down and Quora is ruling the world when it comes to providing perspective driven knowledge to many users across the world.

So how, you may ask, can businesses take advantage of this amazing site? I’d like to share with you some aspects that would help businesses grow, build their communities, create awareness amongst niche audiences, provide help with research information that you want, and a lot more.

Building your Brand on Quora

One of the best aspects of Quora is the fact that it gives each and every one an opportunity to create their own brand and provides such perspective about several aspects of what’s happening to the brand and the company which may not necessarily always be  found on press releases or on the company website. Add the brand name and Quora in your Google alerts and you’d be surprised to find out what kind of buzz is out there about your business.

The key, of course, is to be able to monitor how many questions are being asked about your brand, company or anything that’s related to what your company does. Go ahead and answer specific questions that may have been asked about your company. If you’re the community manager for your organization, take up the responsibility of researching upon specific questions directed at your organization.

Run them by relevant departments, and go ahead and provide inputs to the readers and the audience who are clued in to that question. Other than that you may also choose to focus on topics that could be of interest to your target audience. For example, there are many topics that would be relevant to your industry and that’s your cue to go ahead and be the expert on behalf of your company and help the community members.

Researching perspective driven insights for your brand

Yes, you have Wikipedia for a lot of the questions that you are looking for, in general. If you’re working on making a document, trying to analyze certain elements of the market for your business or say you’re looking for experts to help your brand out with respect to research related aspects, then Quora is the right fit for you.

Of course, while a lot of the World Wide Web is a great resource for knowledge and information that is abundantly available out there, Quora will allow you to find and sort information, people and, of course, a lot of material knowledge based on real time, current and perspective driven insights which you may not find elsewhere. Reading someone else’s answers based on their personal experiences gives you the perfect dose of granular details that might be hard to find on any other source across the Internet. So that’s quite the added advantage you get for doing your homework on the right platform.

Industry trends from the experts

While Quora has a collective base of domain driven knowledge of various business related topics which marketers can use to their advantage, it is also full of genuine experts who share their vision without particular perks for themselves, sharing expert opinions that would matter to your brand.

Most importantly, there is a great chance you could find great curated content that would help you prove a point or two if you’re doing research for something niche and particular within your target group, product or to help you market your brand better.

Competition Analysis

Typically I wouldn’t say that Quora is the best platform to find out what the competition is doing, however one edge that Quora might get in this aspect is to research and get to know what other competitors are focusing on, especially if there are answers about their company and inside news / strategy that is being shared on their work.

User cases that are shared on Quora by competition or what the competition has done being out in the public domain could be the best  way to understand, analyze and figure out how you could use that to your advantage.

Traffic, Eyeballs and Audience

One of the major advantages about the Quora ecosystem is you’ll get to know exactly what kind of an audience is viewing a particular question and how popular the question is. There are also opportunities to promote a particular question or an answer to a certain set of people within your following. This will give businesses a clear picture of how you are targeting the right kind of people whom you need to reach out to via your opinion, content and expertise.

The credits, as a currency, typically give you the opportunity to target your specific answers which could contain links to your website, or anything information worthy to allow people to benefit from and at the same time drive traffic towards your specific links. A lot of times, SEO and indexing is highly driven via Quora. If you choose to answer the right question, there is a huge probability that the same question might be the query of many looking for answers through Google and the top result then would be a Quora answer.

Some of these aspects are of course intertwined and there is an element in Quora which empowers brands and businesses to drive their communication, messaging and more importantly allows them to engage with the very specific niche community which you wouldn’t find on other social networks as easily as you think, even LinkedIn for that matter, especially if you have B2B brands. But the most important element of using Quora for business is the attribute of knowing that the consumer of your content is highly intellectual and at the same time a curious kind of a person.

The kind of content you share for your business or personally needs to be out there with a certain level of accuracy, insight, perspective and more importantly be helpful to those who are reading it. And if you’re the one who’s consuming content, you need to understand that while most of the perspective driven insight could provide you with some real answers to the question you’ve asked, you also need to account for the margin of errors and the holistic picture that it is able to provide you.

Having said that, while the benefits of using Quora are many, do consider using this social network as an extension of all the attributes you would use under ordinary circumstances. 

Image Credit: Social Samosa

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 10 years, and has been blogging since 2005. He has worked with the likes of Social Wavelength, now Mirum India, (A JWT Group Company) for four years and now Heads Learning and Development & Analytics at Social Kinnect: A Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai. His passion for Advertising, Creativity, Social & Digital Marketing helps make a difference for the brands they work with.  

How would you persuade anyone to use a 'Social Media Website?

This was an [A2A] I received on Quora for this question

If you were in charge of my social media website, how would you persuade people like yourself to use it?

The Web site he has is frendsdom.com

[A2A] I've been part of promoting a few Social Networking sites and early adopter to enterprise social networks within my organization, so from my experience penning down a few things that would / would not work especially when you want to thrive among a competition of social networking sites as such. Personally I'm of the opinion that there's too much connectivity and too much networking happening. People should reverse the trend and offer products that are more niche and closed group and non-intrusive per se.

1. Social Networking is out there. I don't need a new network to connect on to the same people or for the same purpose. (So after facebook, orkut, hifi,myspace etc. Why did twitter,foursquare, goodreads, Quora, whatsapp, (closed social networking), G+, Line, Kakaotalk, Sina Weibo etc become popular? For their individualistic reasons and problems they solved. What's different from others? Try to make that possible.
2. As far as promotion goes, don't shove it down their throat. It should be intuitive and give me a reason to use the network than just using it because it's there.
3. Again, points (I don't think that's a good idea, unless it's in real time value of some sorts, yet it could sometime feel overwhelming at times.)
4. As Abhirup Dutta mentioned it's important to answer the "problem statement" that inspired you to create this site as the solution.
5. I saw this: "Find People: Find people of your interest from anywhere in the world." at the very bottom. I think this is something you could really rely on and revolve your entire network per se around this fundamental aspect.

What it is is less important more than what it can offer and what it drives. Build your product, offer the problem and promotion becomes easier then. Rest is business as usual.

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 15 years. He has worked with and built India's largest digital agencies from the ground up and been part of their acquistion journey. Social Wavelegnth (now Mirum, part of the WPP group) and Kinnect, now part of the Interpublic Group (IPG). He's also been a public speaker, keynote speaker at various large panels/events of the likes of BBC Knowledge Summit, Blockchain Summit Bangalore. And has been a guest lecturer at IIM, Symbiosis, Indian Institute of Digital Education.

He has been blogging since 2005. And also been author at various publications, that include Startup India by ZDNet, Social Samosa, Lighthouse Insights.  His passion for Writing, Advertising, Creativity, Digital, Blockchain and Future Tech is what drives him each day.

Best ways to promote & run a successful Blog

This is an edited version of my answer to the question What are the best ways to promote and run a successful "Mom Blog"? on +Quora   

The Answer

I've been blogging for around 8 years with two blogs and I can share those experiences with you. 

I believe these experiences that I've encountered for almost a decade will pretty much help you to promote and run a successful blog for sure. 

Below mentioned are my two blogs

Travel Tales... - My travel blog

Srini's Stuff - My Personal Blog mainly focusing on Social Media and technology

Blogging originally was primarily to maintain web logs of your activities and used essentially by coders and designers who knew HTML and coding to keep a log of their activities on the web log in order to keep a diary of sorts about their activities. 

But we all know how that has witnessed a great change over the last decade and how the connection economy has flourished to such an extent that someone like a Seth Godin promotes runs and in fact maintains a daily blog without even having such a wide and active presence on Social Media. 

That's another fact that his streams jump in via widgets on his blog and that he's a famous author and a successful entrepreneur. But the crux of the matter here is that with a consistent approach towards ensuring your digital efforts is what makes it or breaks it to run a successful blog. 

Here are my pointers to ensure that your Blog works out well :) Rest is up to you on how you go about executing the 'plan' and 'strategy' to ensure this happens for sure. I'd like to break it down in Two Parts

Part 1 - Content Creation

1. Story Telling

One of the most important aspects of Blogging or for that matter any form of content creation in today's world is to ensure that your blog content has a short, sweet and a flow oriented story telling approach. That's the best way one can ensure you garner more readers. Have you watched Marley and Me? Confessions of a Shopaholic? Julie and Julia? Why do you think the readers related to the bloggers/writers well in those movies? Story telling was one primary reason.

2. Focus on Visuals

Visuals on your blog are the key elements. Everybody of course loves content, but if you add a bit of visuals on the side which make content consumption easier, then your job is half done. Also, your SEO, and indexing becomes a lot stronger if you add relevant tags to the images. I've had a spike of 1000 hits on one particular day only because of contextual tagging on one image that was No. 1 for that search on that particular day on Google.

3. Thought provoking/invoking

Does your content make your reader think? Does it give them an opportunity to relate to what you are saying? 

4. Formatting and Design

Now isn't that the most important element of whatever you do in life? Steve Jobs and Apple is the best example of this attribute. After all the best presentation always strikes a chord with the readers. Uncluttered designs resonate well with most audiences. 

5. Building a niche

Ensure that the content you create is strictly resonant with your specific target audience. Try to provide a unique form / unique content and unique way of creating and telling your story, one that other 'blogs don't focus on. Build on that niche. It's not important that many people read your blog, but many 'important people' read your blog and recommend it to many others. 

6. Be Consistent

Keep at it. Try focusing on a long term strategy and create architecture for your blog. Define your tone of voice, author profile and generally layer out how your blog should sound like. Try to tell stories as often as you can, but not so often that readers stop waiting for that next blog or lose interest in your blog. Also, it’s easier to be consistent if your blog is crisp, to the point and more importantly something that relates with the target audience. 

Part 2 - Content Promotion

1. Promotion isn't SPAMMING

If you understand this thumb rule, you'll be doing everyone around and yourself a big big favor. One of the most common mistakes that people do while taking this job on! They end up sending email invites to any lay person without understanding if he/she could actually relate to their blog or for that matter even care to read that content. Be smart; find the right audience, right forum, and right tools to reach out to your audience.

2. Converse with People

Very important aspect of promotion and marketing that people don't tend to pay much attention to. Before you converse though, one needs to listen! So listen to what people are talking about. i.e. look for conversations in forums, twitter, web and everywhere else. Once you get a conversation, and then engage with those users. Don't PROMOTE OR PLUG your blog immediately. Start conversing and IF IT FITS the context, and then subtly tell them about your blog.

3. Community Management

Create communities, empower people to join your groups and communities. Join other relevant communities on digital/social media. If there is an opportunity tie up/ partner with relevant brands, bloggers, influencers who can give you a wider platform to talk to new people and tell them about your 'Blog' Try finding relevant 'Blog' communities.

You can join communities on LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, Web forums. You can also try sponsoring physical events

4. Active Social Presence

Ensure that your Blog has a Social Identity and an active social presence. This is quite a given and an age old technique. Agreed that you don't necessarily need to spread yourself too thin, but ensure that your blog is up on relevant social networks and that it'll give you more opportunity to manage assets and create more communities and grow your circle of social influence. Try Social Bookmarking as well. Using @Blogger for your blog is the best choice you've made, now flourish that with a further presence on Google+. Helps index your blog on Google searches to a certain extent. Also posting frequently on Google+ having conversations there would help you even more. :) 

5. Media Buying and Planning

Of course, once you've done with organic routes to be able to reach out, try various media buying tools; advertising options i.e. Facebook Advertising, Google Ad words and sites like Outbrain.com Outbrain is quite an interesting product in itself. It has a good reach and has great reviews for its greater reach and presence across bigger blogger networks in terms of contextual advertising. 

These are some of my inputs, hope they help. If anyone else has more insights, would love to hear from you guys. What say?

Cheers

@srinistuff

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 10 years, and has been blogging since 2005. He has worked with the likes of Social Wavelength, now Mirum India, (A JWT Group Company) for four years and now Heads Learning and Development & Analytics at Social Kinnect: A Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai. His passion for Advertising, Creativity, Social & Digital Marketing helps make a difference for the brands they work with. 

What's the best/unique way for Lead Generation through your website?

This is my answer to What's the best unique way for Lead generation through your website on +Quora

What could be better than providing an eBook? At least that's what most people are doing nowadays.. The How Tos, The Social Media Guides, The Guides to this or that... I'm not such a big advocate of this strategy, however there is an audience which seemingly falls bait for this kind of tactic and it does seem to work. In the longer run, people will realize that it is information which is just compiled off the internet and that same information can be easily available 

However I have some suggestions of my own to ensure that you create a good Lead generation aspect. Maybe unique, maybe something very simple and doable, but whatever it is, they are certainly tried and tested. 

1. Create Applications that drive engagement

In today's day and age, rather than the same old Content Marketing strategy a lot of consumers of the social web or the social era are beginning to be enticed by engagements. They like to interact and not just listen to broadcast messages. So create applications which will empower website owners to 'ask for ' not forcefully capture users data. Of course this means the user agrees himself/herself to share that data. And if the application has an engaging drive and interest, he may also recommend it to relevant users. That takes care of you word of mouth strategy and trying to make it spread faster than you can generally.

2. Create data trends or interesting patterns.

Yes I agree with what Tom Webster says 

"So much of what we see passing as studies, ‘research’ or anything in Mashable that says ‘study’ in brackets, is produced primarily for content marketing. Data that’s produced for the purposes of content marketing is inherently incurious. It is not designed to increase your insight, it is not designed to help your specific business to do better. It is designed to get you to click on a link, to watch a video, to become a lead somehow. So that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, that just means it’s heart is not the same place as your heart is.”

But at the same time if you are looking to generate leads then yes, this is the appropriate way. Only ensure that you give out the disclaimer stating something which affirms this fact and people know whether to actually spend time in looking at those trend patterns and if it is really relevant to them. They'd be your genuine leads.

3. Create Real Value even before they become leads

9 out of 10 times conversions of visitors to leads depends generally on how good the product or the service that you provide is. One of the most interesting ways to really add value even before they become leads is to give them a sneak preview of what your product or service can do? Show case something really interesting or an example of your past work that has worked out before. Heck use Social Tools on your website to get other people give testimonials (Facebook connect/badges) Facebook Recommendations or if it's a product integrate it into the Facebook's Store where if someone uses it on the web he / she will get a prompt to actually rate your product or application on Facebook. This way people will know that your product is really good. Demo these aspects through social integration.

There are a lot more ways that one can understand how leads can be generated through your website, but I'm all up for transparency, creating value through persistent efforts not only in just the content aspect but also making your website as social as possible. Use Social Web as a tool and make the people do the work for you and that won't happen unless you have a really good product or service. So work on that too. Once that's taken care of, everything else will fall in place. A clear six degrees of separation has worked wonders in the past.. So why not now?

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 10 years, and has been blogging since 2005. He has worked with the likes of Social Wavelength, now Mirum India, (A JWT Group Company) for four years and now Heads Learning and Development & Analytics at Social Kinnect: A Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai. His passion for Advertising, Creativity, Social & Digital Marketing helps make a difference for the brands they work with. 

How is the blogosphere like a giant social network? How can Bloggers benefit?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Blogosphere: How is the blogosphere like a giant social network and what might bloggers do to benefit from this? on Quora

What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up?

Answer to a question I asked on Quora while doing some research for Facebook Global Pages! I intend to write a blog about my findings later on. But thanks to Jack Lindamood, Software engineer at Facebook who worked on Global Pages at Facebook. Thanks Jack for the detailed answer. It was very helpful!

Read Quote of Jack Lindamood's answer to Facebook: What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up? on Quora

What's the best way to market yourself (or myself)?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to What's the best way to market yourself (or myself)? on Quora

What does a non-celebrity have to do to get famous on Twitter?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Twitter: What does a non-celebrity have to do to get famous on Twitter? on Quora

Why should I bother investing time in Quora?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Social Media: Why should I bother investing time in using Quora? on Quora

Is social media ROI calculation even possible?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Social Media: Is social media ROI calculation even possible? on Quora

Why should I provide my knowledge to Quora for free?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Why should I provide my knowledge to Quora for free? on Quora

In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia? Or vice versa?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Quora vs. Google and Wikipedia: In what ways is writing for Quora more fun than writing for Wikipedia? Or vice versa? on Quora

What should every Indian know about Indian Mythology?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to India: What should every Indian know about Indian Mythology? on Quora

Why do we have only few temples to Lord Brahma?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Indian Culture: Why do we have only few temples to Lord Brahma? on Quora

Asuras drank alcohol (Sura) and Suras (Devas) stayed away from it. In that sense wasn't Indra (Sura being his favorite drink) a defaulter?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Hindu Mythology: Asuras drank alcohol (Sura) and Suras (Devas) stayed away from it. In that sense wasn't Indra (Sura being his favorite drink) a defaulter? on Quora

What are the basic lessons from Mahabharata?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Mahabharata: What are the basic lessons from Mahabharata? on Quora

What is the significance of Nandi Bull in Indian temples?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to India: What is the significance of Nandi (the bull) in Indian Temples? on Quora

What are some fascinating stories about Lord Shiva?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Indian Mythology: What are some fascinating stories about Lord Shiva? on Quora

Why is Lord Shiva called the "Destroyer" of cosmos?

Read Quote of Srinivas Kulkarni's answer to Indian Mythology: Why is Lord Shiva called the "Destroyer" of cosmos? on Quora