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.

Curiosity in the Social and Digital Day and Age!

"At the end of everything, there lies an inherent element of curiosity within everyone. One that we as humans are willing to explore beyond our known capability..."

The original article was written for Business2Community

Today, every bit of advertising and marketing that is shoved down upon our throat has an element of curiosity that everyone tries to explore as marketers. What is more baffling than anything is the fact that they know, as humans, we are bound to go click on that link, go visit that Web site, go download that app, play that game, check out the new social network, go view that video that everyone else is talking about! 

Everything from a small engagement to a great idea always relies on exploring that element of curiosity among their audience, however very few realize that it's not always about the idea itself or the fact that 'curiosity' will keep it popular or gather the eyeballs that they aspire to gain! Forget about curiosity in day to day marketing or advertising, we have the element of curiosity in every aspect of life that keeps us pushing hard, hard at our job at our work and at every aspect of our life. Heck we even went to Mars, all because of this curiosity!

In digital advertising and social media, we've done and dusted the exploration for curiosity for the sake of curiosity, right from the uncovering of campaigns, to puzzles, to mysteries to treasure hunts and more importantly the 'Like This' to Find out 'That.'

But the true element of engagement is driven from something more than just titillating those consumer senses and driving more in providing quality communication and create something that adds more value, than just relying on the curiosity of your consumer. There has been a lot of time that has been spent in research, there certainly has been a lot of time spent in understanding your consumer and what drives them and most certainly their curiosity! But today we need more time to understand what keeps that curiosity going. It may not always boil down to a fluke that ended up becoming popular for a unique reason, but also depend on that method to madness on why it became successful in the first place. Be it Psy and his Gangnam Video, The Harlem Shake, a Kolaveri Di or greater campaigns of the likes of Blend It, Old Spice, Tippex or many more... 

Understanding what keeps your consumer driven when it comes to something beyond that curiosity! Yes everyone quotes Steve Jobs today, now that he's gone and they may be right, just as he was, 'Consumers don't know what they want.' 

But they certainly have an element of curiosity, which can be fed by us marketers, and the key lies in resonance and driving that curiosity further than just what the product messaging is or the core communication of the brand is. 

To me it is more about the philosophy behind what you are trying to sell, rather an idea and a belief that they are willing to buy! 

Image Courtesy: Genelu.com

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.

Consumer Trend through Social

An interesting behavior that always was popular and will be popular is identifying or creating consumer trends through behaviors within the market in any industry. That is a popular process and there are billions of dollars spent on making sure that any particular brand actually goes ahead and gets its consumers and target market right. 

Today Social allows a very good opportunity to identify that trend. Certainly it's been a popular aspect with the likes of Big Data and social media monitoring / online reputation management existing in that space. But the more fascinating aspects of consumer trends is through deep rooted study via tracking and identifying consumer behavior through understanding what they want what they like, what they do what they share with others and most importantly what their tastes are. 


Certainly this process is of an interesting order and a lot of brands and a lot of research goes into identifying individual customers and understanding their behavior. Unlike generic results via social media monitoring this would involve deep and further study on specific customer behavior. This is a space that will certainly go to the next level and brands will start getting into it via social all the more. Social media ethnography as it would be popularly known is certainly looking interesting and general interest about it is picking up. 

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.

Consumerism and Advertising: Building Brands as Products, not Commodities

The original Article was written for Social Samosa 

Consumerism is increasing day by day especially when it comes to mass marketing and advertising being shoved down consumers’ throats. It isn’t any different on social media either. As a marketer, it is important to introspect if your consumers are really listening to what your communication is, or if they have become zombies brainwashed to buy your product. Do they rely solely on brand recall without having knowledge of or believing in what they are purchasing? Market trends keep shifting and a brand that has strong recall today can be history tomorrow.

So, the real question is how do social media marketers or advertisers communicate with and engage consumers without really having to generate the hype of consumerism around them?

I’ve always believed that communication is always about the consumer, whether in social media or in mainline communication. Making the product stand out in your communication is more relevant than just influencing the consumer or key influencers surrounding him. The communication should not only seek to break the clutter but should also make fundamental sense.

A very good example of this is L&T Insurance’s ‘Likh Ke Doge Kya?’ campaign. I had the opportunity to listen to Ms. Deepali Nair of L&T Insurance speak at the Computer Society of India IT 2020 Conference, about how they worked backwards on the entire campaign, tailored it to suit Facebook first and then ran it on television. It was an interesting campaign and very successful too.

It wasn’t about what consumers want, but what consumers aren’t really asking for. In hindsight, I am sure that, ‘Likh ke doge kya?’ is a question they always ask insurance providers. It also takes a look at how fallible the whole insurance business is, especially when it comes to claims, terms and conditions and queries. In this case, it wasn’t about shoving another insurance product that no one knows about down the consumer’s throat, but about making a firm commitment that queries would be responded to within X amount of time, and they would give it in writing. What stood out in the campaign was the promise of execution – exercising ownership and being accountable.

So, what should we, as marketers, be doing?

Research what consumers don’t know

Keep doing your research. Don’t stop doing that at all. But change the way you do it. It is about time we started looking beyond what the consumer is telling us and try to gauge insights by reading between the lines – what the consumer is thinking but not saying.

Of course there will be rants, cribbing and negative sentiments on social media. Invest time in resolving those. But don’t miss out on what the consumer isn’t telling you. And yes, by all means, classify your consumers based on demographics, but don’t obsess over the behaviour and decision-making of your target group. Yes, consumers may not know what they want, but you do. It is all about thinking backwards.

Don’t listen to what they’re saying. Listen to what they aren’t telling you.

When it comes to social media, ORM has always been the tool to listen to what the consumers have to say about brands and what consumers have an opinion about. But it doesn’t mean that ‘listening’ only involves market research, gauging sentiments, categories and keywords. Try to analyze what is lacking in the market. As advertisers, we may not have a control on the product, but we always have a control over the positioning.

Don’t give them a reason to talk! Talk to them!

The trick is to engage consumers by being proactive. Do whatever it takes to ensure that you are there as a product and brand to listen to what they are thinking and not saying. Before discussing the product or brand, ask them interesting questions. Use promoted posts to create a focus group testing within your communities. Yes, focus groups aren’t always accurate. But, be blatant about the questions that you ask – questions, the answers to which, you, as a consumer, would know but perhaps, hesitate to speak up. Consider crowdsourcingas an option but don’t feed your consumers, let them feed on the existing situation.

Don’t just shove a product down their throat! Ask them why? Why are they really using your product, as opposed to any other product? Do you really know what your differentiators are? Have you used the product yourself? Have you sat through the product brief and tried to identify if there is any difference between your product and any other product that the consumer would know about? No? Well then, do that. If there are no differences and you are just another competitor, it is more likely that the brand recall, advertising and how far your reach goes will be decisive factors for the consumer in making a purchase decision.

But if you talk to your existing communities, you will get the answer. Use that to your advantage. Create a campaign on any social media platform using any tool available to find out WHY does your consumer buy your product? Based on the responses, engage with the consumer accordingly and use it as a reference point for your next communication.

Trends change but buying behaviour has one element that will always remain constant – the ignorance that drives those trends. Use it to your advantage. What I am trying to say is perhaps futuristic but very simple. Every campaign, advertisement, billboard or hoarding that reaches out to the masses is reflecting the consumerist sense of behaviour, which is today, what is making the product or brand irrelevant. But social media has the power to change that – by genuinely engaging with the consumer. This change will not only benefit consumers but also, create a larger and more profitable market in the long run.

Interestingly, the other day Gautam Ghosh pointed me to this blog about ‘Collaborative Economy‘ by Jeremiah Owyang, suggesting how brands are already creating a shared market space amongst consumers and using it to their advantage. Rather than over-spending on products that they don’t need, consumers have let better economic sense prevail and have decided to share their needs. And that is what consumers would prefer in the future.

So what will make or break your brands is, ‘Is your brand truly unique and doesn’t need a recall to be purchased by your consumers.’

Do you know of any brands who are doing this well? Let me know.

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. 

Consumerism and Advertising: Is Your Brand Only a Commodity?

The original Article was written for Social Samosa

Consumerism? What’s That?

Here’s what Wiki says:

Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the purchase of goods and services in ever-greater amounts.

It is certainly something that drives all of us to constantly keep buying and have the craving to buy time and again. With a bend to figure out, what to buy, when to buy, how much to buy and how often to buy, consumerism has certainly been part of our lives since kingdom come. Interesting to notice how it is primarily driven on the basis of what others are buying and on the sheer influence of a majority of factors in the market. Have you’ve watched this movie ‘The Joneses,’ You’ll know what I mean…

Some key factors that affect the purchasing decisions are:

1. What purchases are happening and what the market trends are.
2. How buying behaviors are affecting lives of people in your region.
3. How advertisers both on Social Media and offline are influencing the consumers.
4. Price point and offers / how much more do I get if I buy this today.
5. Finally there is the ‘I need this because I ‘NEED’ this.

Yes, a minimal thought is given these days by consumers on ‘need to have’ as opposed to ‘want to have’ because of the ridiculous amount of money brands are spending on advertising, giving deals and discounts and a lot of other factors to increase consumption and consumerism. That is also rolling out on Social / Digital Media. But in the bargain, the true question to ask is… 

Are your consumers really listening to you? Or have they become zombies who are brainwashed to buy your product based on incessant levels of advertising? As an advertiser or marketer we certainly need to create the ‘want to have’ aspiration for our buyers. But as a product builder, it’ll always be the opposite of it unless, you are someone like an Apple Inc.

It is always a good thing to really reach out to your consumer and engage them within your community and target group. It’s also important to focus on the ‘Big or Small’ whatever data you analyze and engage with them one-one. Being there for your consumers, rather than shoving something down their throat through sometimes insignificant or even irrelevant forms of advertising, including Facebook andLinkedIn media buy. It is ironic that the same marketers and advertisers are consumers themselves at the end of the day be it on digital, social or mainline media.

Speaking of which, there’s an interesting story I have to tell. One that I observed in a grocery store while I was out to buy a couple of things to eat as a consumer. I usually get a lot of insights out there. Some things that you could really use as a marketer/advertiser especially if you want to understand your consumers better.

So here’s what happened:

I was waiting in the queue before checking out with my purchases. There was a father who was with his 2 year old son in front of me and there was a mother with his 9 year old son behind me in the queue. (Approximate ages of the kids)

Scenario 1

The father ( approximately 37 years old) had a fairly empty to medium filled trolley. He had picked up an ordinary packet of candies maybe worth Rs. 20 for his 2 year old kid. Then the kid saw a big Dairy Milk in the rack, which probably is worth Rs. 30/40 bucks. As soon as he decided he wanted it, the kid wouldn’t let go of his packet of candies either, suggesting that he wanted both. But the dad, persuaded his 2 year old to trade the packet of candies for the Dairy Milk!

Scenario 2

The mom (approximately 34 years old) was waiting behind me, her trolley was generally full of stuff that you’d buy to consume on a daily basis, the vegetables, the packet of cereals, milk, butter/cheese, eggs, a huge bottle of cold drinks, some fruits, and probably a few cosmetic items. Her 9 year old son walked in from behind and he had 2 bars of Snickers, the smaller ones which would probably cost Rs. 10/20. She just told him to drop it in the trolley with no questions asked. So, what does one intercept from this observation? Many things probably and different people would come up with different interpretations. But one good thing about both the scenarios playing out at the same time was that it probably gave me a pretty hands on perspective on this buying behaviour.

This is what I can speculate.

Father knows Dairy Milk and has a better brand recall about the product. Keeping in mind the Indian parent buying behavior especially when it comes to chocolates I’d like to say Dairy Milk is always viewed as a premium brand of chocolate, no matter what it costs. And hence the intuitive need to haggle with a 2 year old kid to get rid of the candies packet.

In this case, Snickers, it may not have had a bigger brand recall with the mother and she wouldn’t really mind his kid buying those two packets as they anyways looked small.

These were my first two thoughts on impulse to interpret the behavior that I witnessed.

But if you come to think of it, there could be a multiple amount of permutations and combinations that might have affected the purchasing and influencing decision.

For example, 

1. What is the mindset of the father/mother?
2. What is the spending power of the father/mother?
3. What was his original intent of entering the grocery store and what he was willing to spend on extra purchases?
4. How strong are their impulses, their gender and age and the kind of purchasing patterns they have etc.
5. And of course, it would very well happen that the father and the mother both were just giving in to their kids demands, only difference in both of their behavior could have been the fact that the brand made a difference in their purchase.

So whether it is purchasing necessities, requirements or luxuries and indulgences, in our day to day lives, we all and I mean all of us consumers in the current economy and the conditions in India and worldwide are always affected by brands and brand recall certainly carries a lot of weight when making our purchases. I mean, that’s a given and I don’t even need to talk to this audience about it. We all know that.

Be it in mainline advertising or Social Media, our lives have dwelled within the breakup of our Target Demographic, the kind of things he/she buys, what age group he falls in and speculating what kind of things he/she likes, who are his primary/secondary influencers and what additional things are they interested in. That is our life 24×7, 365 and we all burn the midnight oil trying to decipher the consumer as if he/she was some code or a pattern sitting in front of our MacBooks, Desktops, iPads and laptops like the ‘operator’ from the Matrix.

Very few brands, let’s say Apple and mainly thanks to Steve Jobs, will take a call and say ‘Consumers don’t really know what they want.’ and if we were to do something that would appeal to them, then we aren’t really making a dent in the universe. We are mainly subverting our product to fit in and shove it down their throat for their consumption, actually consumption till the point where they actually puke until there’s no return.

So what am I trying to get to?

A few fundamental questions that I’d like to ask myself when it comes to Social Media or any form of marketing for that matter. I remember about a year and a half I wrote this blog post on brands getting their communication right.

I read that again now. Interesting to note that, this doesn’t change even today. But yes, I’d like to differ on one perspective.

Consumerism hasn’t yet reached its tipping point and most certainly all the things that we have been doing in the past will continue to stand. But what will make us and our brands more than just a commodity and as products to ‘stand out‘ is how we productize our services and servicize our products, something I learnt from The Purple Cow. Remember the irony I brought out in the beginning?

So the questions that will still linger in one’s mind are :

1. Do consumers make decisions based on brand recall and communication?
2. Or consumers have their own wandering mind which no matter how hard we try, we cannot decipher and the trends will keep shifting depending on the herd mentality of the consumers.
3. Lastly, how do we really communicate to the consumer especially when we don’t have control most of the times over the product as marketers / advertisers

In a separate post, I have answered these questions in a different way, one that’ll help your brand be more than just a commodity, be it on social media or offline. I have written about how we need to build brands as products not commodities.  

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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.

Facebook’s Open Graph: Making Droids Out of Humans

The original Article was written by me on Busines2Community

I’m sure this is something that has been spoken about many times before especially when Facebook’s Open Graph was launched and a lot of products enabled the embedding of open graph into their APIs, and specifically ensuring that a lot of verbification happens on the go. Every product that has been launched within the start-up ecosystem has ensured that their app or product has an element of verb and being hooked on to their users in terms of ensuring that every time they use the app, automatically the action is shared on Facebook.

Fast forward to last week. I was just generally going through my own timeline for Facebook. I’ve been very sporadic as far as my use on Facebook is concerned. Generally speaking, my overall consumption and sharing on Facebook has reduced over a period of time now. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for that, and yes, day by day, Facebook is really becoming a repository of meaningless content mostly not so much worth curating even. 

Of course, the kind of information that is already managed via my lists and by blocking / hiding feeds from unnecessary feeds is already taken care of. Yet, there isn’t a lot of information that I share myself and a lot of times users are sharing what’s happening in their lives.

Which is where, something I noticed on my timeline made me go back and think about how this Facebook Open Graph has changed the ball game already with how people are sharing information on their timelines. Soon enough, this is probably something that will determine how people will go about interacting with their friends or rather interacting with friends through applications.

Take a look at some of my recent updates.

Facebook Updates of the Open Graph Culture:

• I biked 10 kms via Runkeeper
• I read Steve JObs on GoodRead
• I checked in at McDonalds, Mumbai
• I am watching The House of Cards on GetGlue
• I pinned Paris to ‘Places I want to Travel to’
• I viewed ‘How to Sell Better’ on Slideshare

It’s already happening and very few of us realize how that is affecting our content sharing and consumption behaviours, but soon enough the Social would actually move towards A-Social and very cyborg like connections that we are heading towards. In fact, moving forward, with the introduction of Google Glass, this would be something that would completely change the game.

Going by how human intelligence is striving towards making everything automated and we are all becoming bots or droids of various products sharing various updates through so many social apps, it’d be hard to find a manual update and most interaction on Social would be droid like and less social in its truest sense.

What do you think?

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.

Social Web on the Go – Is Social and Mobile the future?

The original Article was written by me on Social Samosa

A very interesting and certainly very intriguing concept is of course how the shift of consumption of media is on the go. A lot of consumer mindset is of course shifting towards mobile. Many folks have even completely shifted their marketing strategies to mobile. Mobile internet is slowly getting big.

I was down in Singapore a month or so ago and I noticed that trend already existing and was  very big there. With an internet penetration of 90% and above and Social / Digital media penetration of around 60% a lot of it there is via mobile.

I can see that will soon be the state of Internet in India too. Mobile and tablet devices reach consumers where PCs and Laptops don’t. Depending on the kind of brands that are very active on mobile campaigns it’s to be seen how that market shapes up.

But one thing is for sure, especially with more mobiles and tablets sold more than PCs and tablets and with the telecom industry booming in India, brands need to really give that importance to their consumers who are mobile and going to get mobile.

With premium services like Facebook mobile advertising, customized targeting via mobile or email as UID. Also with the new Facebook newsfeed coming into focus, mobile will play a key role in how brands will strike that first mover advantage or for that matter how many of them will start recognizing that sooner than later and transform their consumption patterns for users on mobile.

Something like customizable content for mobile would make amazing sense for your consumers.

For instance the recent announcement of Flipboard giving an option to users to create and curate their own content in form of magazines makes for an interesting use case of how mobile can be really used to drive customized content consumption.

Or using an app called MobileRoadie (www.mobileroadie.com) to create a Social media app for content consumption for niche audience of your content.

How much longer before Social and Mobile integration becomes stronger? Is social and Mobile the future? What are your thoughts on this?

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. 

Facebook Graph Search: Changing the Meaning of Brand Affinity?

The original Article was written by me on Social Samosa

From the time it has been out, a lot of people initially had misunderstood ‘How Facebook graph search could be the next ‘Google Killer.’ By now we all know how it is truly not going to be a Google Killer per se. And in fact how it should be rather perceived as another tool within your peer user group to help you find interests supposedly based on common interests of your friends or what your friends have liked within your network.

Fortunately I had the opportunity of getting it and trying it out and by now most of us also would have had a chance to try it out. And certainly, it is quite intuitive within the context of the Facebook ecosystem and the way it queries search results is something which will bevery useful for brands who want to create contextually aware engagement with the users of their specific demographics.

So I take a look at the bigger picture and how it will affect brands and what is it that brands should really ‘do’ when it comes to Facebook Graph Search.

So, what does Facebook say about FGS to brands?

The search bar first returns the top search suggestions, including people, Pages, apps, places, groups, and suggested searches. People can search for things like restaurants near them, hotels in places they want to travel to, photos posted by Pages they like, or games that their friends like to play.

These search suggestions take people to a unique results page. The results returned are based on factors that include information that has been shared by your business and the connections of the person searching.

As has been the case for some time, we may also make search suggestions in the search bar that then can trigger web searches. Web searches will display Bing results and Bing ads, similar to results on Bing.com.

Pages and apps can still use sponsored results, which appear to people whether or not they have Graph Search (sponsored results have been globally available since August 2012). There are no new ad formats available today.

What do I say?

While all of the above is a great way to look at FGS and eventually may work wonders probably if the understanding of ‘Like’ on Facebook really meant what it says it is. Or Relationships are the way app developers build in their apps, pages while using Open Graph.

If “Facebook had launched in 2013, and immediately graph search was introduced, then the concept of ‘Like’ would be much deeper than it is meant to be amongst users as of now.

We all remember how ‘Like’ wasn’t even ‘Like’ before and how the ecosystem changed your ‘Interests in your about me / profile to actual Fan / Brand Pages and tagged them as ‘Likes.’

And that in my opinion is the ‘One major fundamental flaw in this entire aspect and eco-system.’

This also means, we can’t go ‘Back to the future’ and fix this! This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to try out or experiment with it. After all that’s why it is in beta. However I thought about certain aspects of this and tried to give some deeper meaning and thought to the brand, while I completely understand that not everything we do in advertising or social media should be scrutinized down to the tee always. Sometimes you just got to go with your gut, and I’ve done that many a times.

Nonetheless a perspective that I had to put out there through this blog and probably some of the questions that I’ve got in my mind would have answers out there amongst all of you.

“What does a consumer/user have in mind when he goes on a ‘Liking Anything Spree?’ Also, when the initial ‘Like’ button was brought into effect, what guideline did it give to the consumer especially when it came to ‘Liking’ Brand pages? Now I’m not saying that consumers have been tricked into this or are gullible enough to fall for this shit.

So it is as important for brands to know this concept before they actually start beefing up their profiles and ensuring that

We need to discount for some of those ‘Fans’ and need to ensure that when we do the new media planning campaigns, especially the ones that involve Facebook Graph Search based options when they roll out. Brands need to understand that ‘Just going on about’ getting random Likes due to search may not be as good as first,

To be absolutely sure what information will go away corresponding to the TG being influenced by FGS

Ensuring that the existing communication and information that is on their page is optimized for that.

Lastly, making sure that the information updated on your page should be more transparent, complete and avoid truthiness of any sort.

Of course, there’ll be a lot of gaming that might happen. Again we all know how SEO/SEM page rank algorithms and Panda worked and how Google keeps taking the edge away from marketers.

For all we know, an average Facebook Joe likes just about every damn thing on the face of the earth or did so up until now… Understanding relevance in the economic circumstances is least of his concern. Adjudicating whether the brand is good or the fact that he has an affinity to the brand because it is good in terms of its service / value that they provide is the least of their concern.

Some questions we ask ourselves if the consumer has reached that deeper level of understanding and even if he hasn’t, just like we do television ads, Facebook media buy is always lucrative and about truthiness. Well, mostly…

In today’s world ‘Brand Affinity’ is a very tricky business. As I might have spoken about it before, especially with convergent media focusing a lot on crisper communication, shorter retention span and most importantly lines between mainline, digital and social blurring inthe world of marketing, it becomes harder to really set pace with the consumer especially when it comes with creating ‘Brand Loyalty’

That is when brands especially if they are competing with each other, start adopting many tools, many machines of communication, trickery and forgery to blur these lines and resort to say a form of ‘truthiness’ which a lot of us know emerged way back in the ‘Mad Men’ era and has continued from then till today. Advertising has sowed a seed that has become very difficult for ‘Brands’ to undo and actually communicate what their brand really stands for or be percieved as.

So just as it does with ‘advertising’ / ‘branding’ same se tof rules apply to utilizing social search tools such as FGS or for that matter ‘enabling brands being socially searchable via Google+.

So today if a Facebook User really ‘Likes’ a brand… There’s more to the fact that he’s actually ‘Liked’ THE BRAND… Nonetheless, brands of course get satisfied by that fact and would even go to the extent of considering it a ‘Real feedback’ for their purpose. No deep diving or meaning or consideration into the idea of whether the audience they are dealing with on Facebook are really the consumer or aficionados who are their real ‘advocates’.

So this is what I ask

Is it a challenge for brands to really understand their brand affinity. And will that really drive further and get a brand to be more closer to a consumer via Facebook Graph Search, based on its relationships with the open graph of consumers, and consumers friends…

While we all know from a broader picture even from a tangible or intangible means of looking at Likes to drive ROI or for that matter brand awareness is still as native as

‘How many people ‘Like’ your page?

‘How many people are ‘Talking about your page.’

At least for a majority of the brands, and I’m just being the least unassuming based on my interaction within the business.

So what do you think about this whole situation with FGS Now? Especially when it comes to it driving ‘brand affinity based on search within Facebook ecosystem.’ Will FGS drive it or brands have to do much beyond just looking at FGS itself being the promoter of their brand within peer groups?

Do share with me your thoughts…

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.