Chicago taxi driver Rashid Temuri has built his business by using Twitter to let people know his whereabouts, receive discounts and book a ride. Temuri, who also broadcasts his location on Google Latitude and Find My Friends, says he gets up to 95% repeat business via his Twitter account, giving him an advantage over less plugged-in cabbies. “It’s been working out way better then I ever expected,” he says.
(via SocialMedia Smartbrief)
Add comment January 9th, 2012
Following study was conducted by Maritz Research in 2011.
It’s no secret that social media has revolutionized how consumers communicate with businesses. Instead of complaint letters exchanged over weeks, a quick 140-character tweet can garner a direct response within minutes. A recent poll conducted by Maritz Research and its social intelligence arm, evolve24, found that frequent Twitter users who have used the social media tool to complain about their customer experience with a company overwhelmingly want those companies to be listening to their comments. And, these tweeple want their public complaints addressed.
According to the September study, while only 1/3 of these respondents actually received some type of follow-up after they tweeted their complaint, 83 percent of survey participants who received a follow up to their tweet said they liked or loved hearing from the company they complained about. And just under 75 percent of those people who received a response were very or somewhat satisfied with the response they received. A little more than 15 percent said they were either very or somewhat dissatisfied with the company’s response.
For the two-thirds of respondents who didn’t receive an answer to their complaint, a similar number, 86 percent, also would have liked or loved to hear from the company. However, a striking 63 percent said they would hate or not like it if the company contacted them about something other than their complaint.
“In today’s business environment, social media is having a profound impact on the level of service customers expect,” says Anthony Sardella, senior vice president and managing director at evolve24. “Businesses cannot effectively compete without being tuned in to social media to improve the customer experience. But they must get the messaging right. The best brand marketing provides responsive customer service, and does not use a customer experience event as an opportunity to sell something.”
While the study reinforced the trend of using Twitter as a way of getting a company’s attention, Sardella says all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Consumers expect companies to understand their individual wants and needs. If that’s responding to a complaint via Twitter, YouTube or the old-fashioned phone call, businesses need to have the right tools ready to listen, understand and respond,” says Sardella.
In September 2010, Maritz Research acquired evolve24, a business analytics and research firm that uses traditional and social media to measure perception, reputation and risk. Through their combined capabilities, both companies offer business clients customer experience research that is more relevant and actionable, helping companies improve their businesses and their bottom lines.
Methodology:
Maritz Research conducted its Twitter study between September 9 and 12, 2011, during which it surveyed an online panel of 1,298 US consumers, who had pre-identified themselves as Twitter users who frequently tweet, had complained via Twitter about a company with whom they do business, and who were at least 18 years of age. The survey had a maximum sampling error of 2.7 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
Add comment January 7th, 2012
Gooru is a free platform for students and teachers to access standards-based online resources in organized “playlists” for learning. Created by a Google employee, it’s run by a nonprofit group called Ednovo. Students can access “ClassBooks”—collections of textbooks, videos, and assessments—on any topic, and they can interact with their peers and teachers while studying. Teachers can search for standards-aligned web resources organized into “ClassPlans,” which they can customize and share with the larger community. In short, educators can use the site to search and teach, while students can use it to search and study; the website’s tagline is “learning is social.”
(via eschoolnews)
Add comment January 5th, 2012
Make no mistake, the coming year will bring much change to the fast-paced mobile tech landscape. Companies will continue to battle for consumer dollars as both computing and mobile broadband advances put even more power in the devices we carry around with us and even the ones we wear.
(Via Gigaom)
Add comment January 3rd, 2012
2011 saw a lot of excitement over M2M (machine to machine communications) and the Internet of things. That it might also be looked back upon as the year when mobile telcos came to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t and couldn‘t control (monetize) the smartphone and its apps may not be coincidental. M2M is seen as a long-term revenue earner for mobile telcos and a natural fit. They are not going to let this one slip away without a fight.
Why now? Mostly because the cost curves for the necessary embedded modules are going in the right direction and there’s a rising realisation of the scope and value of large scale M2M deployments. That in turn is leading to more optimistic forecasts from market watchers and more excitement in the telco camp over the number of potentially connected devices out there to be joined up and the revenue to be made. According to the wireless analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of cellular network connections worldwide used for M2M communication was 47.7 million in 2008. The company forecasts that the number of M2M connections will grow to 187 million by 2014.
New findings from ABI Research show that operators are offering incentive deals to application developers to stimulate the uptake of the M2M market.
US mobile operators AT&T and Sprint have recently struck deals with wireless embedded module vendors to provide modules for M2M application developer partners at discounted rates.
Small but useful concepts are being developed by both small and big players in India and some that I came across included mobile devices that are connected to tablets through wifi or otherwise over a long distance and being used for monitoring temperature in pharmaceutical manufacturing units in Uttrakhand region of India; similar such devices are being tested to keep a watch on patients/ old age people in hospitals/ old age homes; same devices with little tweaking can be effectively used in defense storage and research too; systems have been developed to control lighting in various parts of buildings or complexes with controlling capabilities through android and iPhone apps over tablets etc.
I believe 2012 is going to be the starting year for increased usage and developments of M2M based systems.
(Ref: Excerpt from telecomtv)
Add comment January 2nd, 2012
This article first appeared in iMedia this year but a recent incident made me re-produce it here for our audience. I was recently approached by a friend in an Indian coporate training company in Delhi. She asked me as to how she can update her company pages on facebook and LinkedIn which were actually made by some ex-employee of that company. Thus, I would like to pen a few of the reasons from the original article about why Businesses can’t trust Facebook. I am quite sure some, if not all of our audience would be able to relate to examples below readily. I would also appreciate if you can share your thoughts and comments in response to this post.
All Facebook pages are assigned directly to Facebook users. In other words, the fate of your company’s Facebook page is in the hands of the person who added it. That’s extremely short-sighted and that’s what happened with my friend’s company pages too. Aside from sole proprietors, most companies don’t belong to a single person. Since you’re not allowed to register a non-human on Facebook, you’re forced to have it under an employee.
What happens when that employee leaves? We’ve already seen how difficult it is to get back control of a lost Facebook page. It can take a long time, may require some legal wrangling, and will required that person adding another person on the staff as an administrator.
You might think the solution would be to have multiple administrators on your staff or with the agency you might be working with. Wrong.
When Facebook sees suspicious activity on its Facebook pages, it disables every administrator’s account. That, in turn, would disable the account of the current person dealing with the issue. And, that, in turn, would disable all of his/ her personal pages too and applications.
Aside from not knowing what might invoke Facebook’s account disablement, there are other factors you don’t have control over. When Facebook changes its layout, you have to fix it. When Facebook is broken, you can’t fix it. When Facebook changes its application programming interface, you have to reprogram yours.
An additional hole in Facebook’s use is that you can tag anyone or any business on any place or in a status update, and that entity is notified. Some of my friends do this to notify me of a video, photo, or site they want me to look at. It’s annoying. If I’m tagged, I should have the opportunity to review and approve that tag before it goes public.
The road to get your account re-enabled is a black hole. You’re asked to submit a form requesting your account be re-enabled; however, you’re not provided any support, any timeline, or any guarantee that it will be turned back on.
Imagine that! All of your work, your content, your fans, your pages, and your applications, all gone at the blink of an eye — with no recourse for your business. Companies spend thousands on Facebook Ads to grow the following on a few of their pages — and all of it’s gone when the account is disabled. When account is finally re-enabled (with no communication from Facebook), republishing of all of pages is required.
Imagine if you had built an application and utilized Facebook’s log-in API so that users of the application could log in with their Facebook ID. That application would be totally out of service.
Per its terms of service, Facebook can also remove your ads for any reason:
Posting videos? Music? Photos? Did you read this in the fine print on Facebook?
You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.
Wow. When your company spends thousands of hours on a new campaign that goes viral, it’s nice to know that Facebook can use that content however it would like. Kind of scary.
Facebook advertising and applications have done quite well for many companies. The problem is that some companies are literally built with Facebook as the sole foundation of the consulting, products, and services they provide. This is known in the technology industry as a “single point of failure,” and it makes your business totally susceptible to Facebook.
Have you worked for a year to build content and a following? That’s worth no more than $100 to Facebook:
WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY LOST PROFITS OR OTHER CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THIS STATEMENT OR FACEBOOK, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. OUR AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF THIS STATEMENT OR FACEBOOK WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100) OR THE AMOUNT YOU HAVE PAID US IN THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS.
Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has chronicled Facebook’s privacy changes alone:
Facebook privacy policy circa 2005: No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
It includes iterations from 2006, 2007, November 2009, December 2009, and culminates with this:
Current Facebook privacy policy, as of April 2010: When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.
Facebook might state that you own your content, but the fact that it owns access to it puts your business dead in the water when it’s not available.
Most of us don’t see Facebook doing anything wrong by dominating the internet. Since it’s a freeplatform, we generally don’t have any legal recourse, either. While we aren’t paying for Facebook in dollars and cents, we are paying for it by risking our privacy and information and handing over our content — and now our businesses — to a company that can turn us off with the flick of the wrist.
A couple of months ago, Facebook opened up your profile a bit further by enabling developers to directly access your mobile phone and your address. Did you know that? Would you have joined Facebook had you known they were going to sell your data, exploit your content, and make billions of dollars all while being able to shut off your access at its own discretion?
Is this the Facebook you joined? It wasn’t the one that I did.
Are you willing to bet your business on Facebook and the numerous risks that come with it? My own response at this point would be, “Absolutely not!” We should all be skeptical of businesses that own so much of the market that they can destroy the competition or even their own customers without even flinching.
If Facebook is your primary means of generating traffic and revenue, begin diversifying your investment in other strategies as well. We insist that our clients use Twitter, invest in search, develop their own blogging strategies, and own their own content on their own domains. You should too.
Add comment December 22nd, 2011
(This article was first produced on iMedia by Scot Wheeler)
Once again, ‘tis the season for predictions. My list of 10 predictions for 2012 follows, but before that I’d like to briefly explain how Scot arrived at the predictions below.
Background
2008 and 2009 were the first two years that saw business really began to take social media seriously, so the theme for that time really was just “what should I be doing and how should I do it?”
These were the years in which social media strategies began to emerge, and businesses began to build out their presence on the major social networks.
In 2009 and 2010, companies who had invested in getting their social media approaches up and running began to look for ways to develop focus and evaluate results. The listening platform industry, led by Radian6, grew rapidly to meet this need. During this time, social media measurement became all about volumes of conversation, sentiment of conversation, key topics of conversation and as the holy grail, influencer identification.
2010 saw the more widespread adoption of Facebook insights, and the corresponding emergence of the “direction, volumes and mash-up metrics” (such as Klout) school of measurement to supplement the limitations of listening platforms’ ability to also evaluate quality and impact of engagement across major social networks.
Even with reporting on volumes and tone of conversation, growth in likes, views, followers, retweets and the like, and changes in company Klout score or another such “proprietary” metrics, as we entered 2011, company management was still asking its digital teams what social media was really doing for the business. Thus 2011 became the year of “social media ROI”.
Suffice it to say that this focus on ROI, though a logical culmination of several years of management questions around the value of social media, misses some of the most valuable aspects of social media.
Limited Focus
Because many digital teams that now work in social media have traditionally had the ability to measure their work in terms of direct referrals by running segmented analysis on unique visitors’ paths to online conversion, these teams may over-rely on direct attribution or referral to some conversion outcome (leads or sales) as the best method for measuring their work in social media.
While I certainly appreciate and support the commitment to measurement shown by these teams, I am afraid that this approach can nevertheless devalue very important factors in driving market share, purchase consideration, retention and loyalty. When the measurement of value is just about direct contribution to sales (as it is in most ROI models), the value of contributing to factors such as awareness, affinity, trust, satisfaction and endorsement can get lost.
Predictions
Specifically because social media – along with much of the mobile experience and the customer servicing side of websites – is all about affinity, trust, satisfaction and endorsement, I predict that in 2012:
1. Reality will bite back on 2011’s heavy focus on social media measurement that focuses almost exclusively on ROI.
2. In the coming year, smart companies will stop wondering if social & mobile have value, and will simply accept that these are now fundamental channels in the marketing mix.
3. Smart companies will understand that of course social and mobile can contribute to their marketing efforts, and probably in ways that can’t always be measured in direct financial contribution.
4. To find these points of value-adding engagement, measurement of social and mobile will begin to evolve to focus on finding and valuing the supporting contributions of social media to brand affinity and purchase decisions.
5. As such, social and mobile engagement will need to be considered with all other marketing channels in marketing mix modeling and evaluation, and these models will need to be refined to consider a ratio of impact to investment that differs from traditional channels.
6. To maximize this impact, measurement and techniques for real-time optimization of social media engagement will begin to be developed and utilized by leading firms.
7. For this to happen, smart businesses will begin to sit down and think realistically about what expectations they can have around social media.
8. As a result of these conversations, expectations around direct sales contributions will begin to recede (though not disappear), while more realistic expectations around awareness, endorsement, etc., take their place.
9. The lines between social, mobile and traditional web-based digital will begin to blur, as will operational silos around these. Social and mobile strategies will also continue to merge with television and print advertising.
10. Really smart companies, especially those with a strong capability or opportunity in providing ongoing value to customers digitally, will begin to see their end-to-end marketing mix as an integrated channel for inviting customers to engage in voluntary experience collaboration. They will need to organize themselves in order to really walk the walk.
Add comment December 19th, 2011
Before I jump on the post on above topic, I will first give an example of where I got the idea of putting this post up here.
Last week, I happen to interact with Viren Bhandari of Inflavo of Poland who is planning to enter Indian market space with solutions like f-commerce, re-commerce and m-commerce. I told him that f-commerce is still not available in India as most companies who are trying to run facebook commerce are directing users to another site of theirs, for payments. To this, he said that when their clients take f-commerce solution, they automatically get option of directly loading their to be sold products from mobile to their f-commerce sites, which I feel is a great option. I am looking forward to his entry and his offering of these solutions in Indian market, which I feel many would like. This is far more than entrepreneurs, picturing an object, loading it to their sites on their pc, and then posting them to facebook.
With consumers increasingly using their mobile phones to access Facebook, the social media giant is reportedly readying its first mobile advertising initiative.
Many consider the combination of mobile and social media to be the Holy Grail of digital advertising. The news that Facebook will launch a mobile advertising strategy brings mobile, social media pairing much more into focus and follows closely on the heels of Twitter’s introduction of ads for its mobile apps.
Facebook is looking for ways to monetize its huge base of users. Advertising is probably the best option because many of the people who use mobile social networks fall into younger age demographics and are comfortable with accessing content on a free basis and generally are quite difficult to reach through more traditional advertising channels.
Facebook could certainly be a strong player in mobile advertising and has the potential to make significant revenues from mobile advertising.
Taking on Google and InMobi of Indian origin
Given the significant size of Facebook’s user base – with numbers of 800 million users and 350 million mobile users – an advertising play makes sense for the company.
Reports began surfacing this week that the social network giant will introduce a mobile advertising play by the end of March. This will put it into competition with Google and InMobi – the leaders in the space – although there may be enough room for all as growth continues at a brisk pace. This is a space that will be able to support multiple payers for the next few years ahead.
Another mobile advertising option also makes an already complex ecosystem even more so from a marketer’s point of view. There are already lots of players offering different solutions and this causes complexity for advertisers.
EMarketer estimates Facebook will earn $3.8 billion worldwide this year in advertising revenue, up 104 percent from $1.86 billion in 2010. However, Facebook’s ad revenues have been hampered by marketers belief that the ads are not effective at driving clicks and that they can engage consumers on Facebook without the need to pay for advertising. A mobile advertising play could help Facebook drive further growth from advertising.
In-app advertising
The benefit to advertisers in using Facebook could come from the substantial information the social network has on its users, which could be used to help advertisers target potential customers. The big advantage of Facebook is that it could provide one of the missing pieces of mobile advertising which is targeting. Mobile advertising has struggled to become a major platform because of the issue of relevancy. Facebook has very detailed information on it users that could help advertisers reach their desired audiences – this would be a major advantage.
However, Facebook would need to tread carefully with how it approaches the use of customer data because privacy advocates and regulators are keeping a watchful eye on mobile’s data collection practices.
In-app advertising is one potential area of opportunity for Facebook.
Facebook recently revamped its app for Android to make it quicker and easier to use as it looks to attract more developers. Thus, Facebook is in quite a strong position to become a strong distribution channel for mobile apps & this would offer a chance to do in-app advertising.
Add comment December 17th, 2011
Google, India, Rajan, Anandan, Google India Managing Director Rajan Anandan gave a fascinating talk to a Geeks on a Plane India group this week, giving a snap shot of the data that is driving the consumers, entrepreneurs, trends and investors in the rapidly growing Indian web and mobile markets.
Anandan says: “We’re probably in 1996 in the U.S. in terms of the Internet market in India.” Here’s the stats from Anandan’s deck accompanied with some comments from me in brackets. India has:
Some Internet sites that have found success in India:
Considering numbers above, anybody feeling that e-commerce is here and now and they will miss the boat if they don’t enter now can re-think as even if they start 1-2 yrs. down the line, they would be good as internet penetration is still low and more purchase is happening in COD mode than online mode. But, if people feel it would be good to have presence now online so that they are ready when actually penetration rises, then my personal suggestion would be to have enough cash to be able to sustain until then.
For some time, people willing to enter e-commerce have been asking us if they should have wapsite or an app, we have been advising them to have wapsite now and apps soon as in long run leaving either will be a wrong decision.
What do you think about e-commerce state in India? I would love to see your comments…
(via GigaOm)
Add comment December 15th, 2011
Everybody and their grandma in India now knows that Indian e-commerce market is set to explode – it is expected to go from current 7 billion dollar (of which 6 billion is online travel alone) to 40 billion by 2015 – ie in 3-4 years.
In view of this, dozens of new ecommerce startups have launched in India and some of them are increasing market share at a breakneck speed. Some of these include Flipkart, Snapdeal, Exclusively.in, yebhi.com, babyoye.com, myntra.com and several others from large brands as well as startups.
But Indian ecommerce is not like that in the West – where online credit card payment and cheap shipping are the order of the day. India has presented these online commerce vendors with its own unique challenges – eg. :
Above list highlights some major challenges for the Indian ecommerce players. Enter Indian Jugaad – or Indian version of “make it work somehow“. New services like Gharpay and chottu.in have been launched to tackle the COD cash collection challenges, as well as product delivery in some cases. These services are building networks of collection agents in various circles or cities and provide Cash on delivery collection services as well as product delivery for the major vendors like Redbus.in, Myntra and Flipkart. Within months of launch, these services have signed up many leading online vendors as customers.
Well – one has to admit – when it comes to India, it is all about “Jugaad Karo“. In India, if there is a problem, there is always a “Jugaad solution” lurking somewhere – it is upto creative entrepreneurs to find such gaps and exploit them to make new ventures.
Add comment December 14th, 2011
