Media & the power of social networks.

The impact of the social media on traditional news media and the societies they serve is enormous. While the traditional media houses claim to be embracing the social media power by of twitter accounts of their star journalists and integrating tools of SM within their programming, they seem to be battling a new age business model in journalism, which moves away from the massive “organization” set-up to a more nibble organizations set-up which takes it’s power from crowdsourcing.

Wikileaks is a shining example of this new age of journalism. Read more about Wikileaks.

A significant number (almost 50% of broadband users world wide) confess that mobile or online is their main source for news. There is opportunities for organizations like Wikileaks to move from only addressing the “long tale content” to even main stream news content and needless to add that they cut across to reach audience across the world.

While there are those who would still think that citizen journalism would not overtake traditional journalism – I differ in my views. I would expect the emergence of a large number of “content” specific platforms – which will aggregate content, which even the traditional media would need to feed on.

Meanwhile the following stats should reinforce the view on the rise of sites like Wikileaks.

While you can read more about Wikileaks here, it is however, what is quite interesting to see how the traditional press is worried about it and how petty can an organization like CNN be – instead of focusing on the serious issue of thousands of deaths of civilians in Iraq, they decide to focus on the irrelevant issues prompting the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of an interview with CNN in London. 

Almost looks as if the CNN is running a government agenda. 

Integrating Facebook into your email marketing campaigns

Integrating Facebook into your email marketing campaigns � SimplyCast: Interactive Marketing Blog

I thought it would be good to share this as a simple yet power tactic to integrate your regular email campaigns (which tend to have a very very low response rates - sub 0.1% in cases) with the powerful ability to create shareable content.

Consumer Involvement Theory - insights for advertising communications

Consumer Involvement Theory - insights for advertising communications

Here is a good note / post on how to approach brand communication based on the level of consumer involvement in the purchase cycle. Experiential communication methods make a lot of sense in high involvement categories (both B2B & B2c as well as Emotional and Rational). Even in case of impulse purchase it is BTL communication methods which make a difference more by way of effective last mile tactics.

Google Instant..

I had written an earlier note on the impact that Google Instant would have on the brands and their strategy on SEO and SEM. Found this very relevant article on the same subject on fastcompany.com. Read the article here.

Google Instant - game changer for Brands and their agencies.

Google Instant – Google’s new, very quick, letter-by-letter search result offering, would have huge impact on brands and their online spend strategies. Almost instantly the user behavior has adopted to “acceptance of suggested search terms”, this was something which was completely missing earlier.

The results seem to be driven by user history and geo-locational logic and therefore a boon and a matter of concern for brands who are vying for attention and click thrus’.

Just typing “a” in India (ND) throws the following brands up.

The Instant would have an impact on the entire logic of SEO. Previously, search-engine optimization for brands was about making sure your web pages rose to the top of Google’s results once someone had typed in the company’s full name. Now, it appears that a brand that wants to remain top in Google Instant also needs to see a critical mass of repeat visits in relevant locations in order to shore up their results. SEO will have to become a more local, retail-oriented endeavor.

While at the onset, the differences seem trivial but they will get critical as soon as one starts to look at consumer search behavior while using a mobile phone, where in keying is is tedious and hence instant suggestions would be taken quicker.

Brands that can ensure constant presence within search results for just one- or two-letter searches can expect to substantially more hits than those that require a full word for relevant results. Add this to the location-aware mobile ads run by Google, and one can visualize the SEO relevance battle turning very geographically driven.