Never Ending Thoughts…

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of any web campaign. In fact it’s striking to see that it took over two decades for Social Media Marketing to catch on the Web. It has been there ever since, through conferences, meet-ups, focus groups, etc.

In this article I’d like to talk about two great technology tools that has changed the way Social Media Marketing started on the Web. These are the Twitter Sharing Button and Social Bookmarking Sites. Both these technologies started at almost the same time and greatly complement each other. If carefully used together, they can help you create a great viral campaign within minutes!

Social Bookmarking

The concept behind social bookmarking is really very simple. You probably are aware of bookmarks in FireFox, IE, and other browsers. People bookmark their favorite websites and pages in their browsers so that they can quickly come back and have a look. Social bookmarking gives a more “social” angle to it. Instead of bookmarking in your local browser, social bookmarking allows you to manage all your bookmarks from a single website. This way you can access your bookmarks from anywhere! In addition, you can follow other users and stories and share your bookmarks. This is an excellent way to spread some information, share a link with others, and gain knowledge in the topics you like!

Social bookmarking really became a “must have” in the Social Marketing space when companies realized how important it was for them to be discussed by various users on a bookmarking site. The more users on a bookmarking site were sharing and bookmarking a company’s news, the better it was to be able to reach out to more visitors. As companies realized this immense potential of social bookmarking, they started paying more attention and looking at trends of what gets shared and what quickly spreads, and what just dies out.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of social bookmarking sites. So you must first find out the bookmarking sites that are relevant to you; where your visitors go and would possibly share your posts or links with their friends. Once you have done that, you must closely monitor the activity and see how users react to the information you release, at what time are you able to create the maximum impact, what gets shared more, etc. Remember, Social Bookmarking is Not Web Directory Submission. If you will just add a link there it will get buried under the thousands of new links that get added to a social bookmarking site. So instead of wasting time adding links to hundreds of social bookmarking sites, simply pick the ones that are relevant to your business and post relevant content.

http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

I recommend looking at http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

Twitter Sharing Button

Twitter Sharing Button is another marvelous tool in the hands of a Social Media Marketer. Unlike bookmarking, the sharing button allows throwing a quick tweet on your twitter home wall. From there it further percolates to your twitter followers and to their followers (if they re-tweet it) and so on. The important difference here is that Twitter is Not a Social Bookmarking Site. It is only a medium to quickly share some information with others; something that you’d probably not go back and search for in your twitter account. It’s typical use is to spread some real time information quickly amongst your “Twitter followers”.

Business use Twitter Sharing Button in their blogs to allow readers to quickly share the blog or a post with their followers. This is an excellent way to quickly spread some information and has become a default tool in the hands of marketing managers.

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with Social Bookmarking

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with great Social Bookmarking can create a lot of marketing buzz for your business, sometimes even for free! Imagine this: You post a great blog and book mark it so that your friends view and like it and book mark it too. In addition you put a Twitter Sharing Button on your post. This way, the readers who like it quickly share it with their other Twitter Friends. When the friends read it, they book mark it on their preferred social bookmarking sites and that way your post not even spreads within hours, at the same time it’s gets persisted and bookmarked by more people than you could ever do with a limited budget. Think about it!

Google DFP, as we all (well… most of us) know, is the “Self Service” Ad platform by Google. It was originally called DART and was part of the suite of products by DoubleClick (the company that Google bought… uh… Of Course!). Unlike the Google AdSense service, with DFP, you as a publisher get full control over when, where and how your various Ads would be displayed. DFP comes as a hosted solution for small businesses and a fully in-house deploy-able solution for big corporations.

In this article, I’d like to share my thoughts on the basic essence of a product like Google DFP, and see if it’d make sense have something similar in Facebook. I’m very new to DFP though; so if you have some great thoughts, please feel free to pitch in!

[column width=40%]

[adnet key=MjAsYWRuZXQgMjUweDI1MCwzNCxDaGFydU1vbmdhLDY0LDM%3D /]

[/column]

[column width=60%]

The Need For A “Self Service Ad Server”

There are several reasons why someone would want to host an in-house server and manage all his/her Ads through that instead of going with a hosted solution. One of the main reasons that come to my mind is the ability to store all the traffic data in-house. Many companies for example would be paranoid about Google acting as a middle man and storing all their website analytics on their cloud. While ellipsis AdNet does the same too, but the difference is that we give the traffic history back to the publisher.

[/column]

Another main reason why I think someone would want to host an in-house Ad Server is that when the traffic processed by the publisher is large enough to the point that it makes no sense for a third party like Google to route and manage it. Personally I feel that it isn’t true and the only justification I can see is that after all Google needs to make some money to keep the product running and keep themselves profitable. And after some point there is just not enough ROI and Google would rather have the publisher themselves take care of all the traffic in their data center. So this is another reason, which is perhaps imposed by the Ad Solution Provider and not the publisher.

Advertising on Facebook

Now let’s talk about advertising on Facebook. I think to better understand the philosophy of how advertising works on Facebook we’ll have to step back a little from our current discussion of DFP and Self Service Advertising and understand the concept of Internet Marketing in general. Let me start with this: The one thing that people forget when using Facebook or Google is that they “just another website” on the Internet. In other words, they are a “private property” on the Internet – and so is just about any other website. And thus, if you are “advertising on Facebook”, or for example “advertising on Google”, you are really advertising on “a website” – not really on the Internet!

Having said that how is Advertising on Facebook different from say Self Service Advertising? It’s pretty different. As you can imagine that when you Advertise on Facebook, Facebook owns the rights of all the artifacts. It’s their website, it’s their area. Yes, they do allows “loaning/leasing” portions of their website for advertising, but that doesn’t mean that the area is yours for ever.

I think this is the basic essence that many website publishers forget when using Facebook for monetizing via advertisements. For example, imagine a fan page on facebook that you have started and have been really successful building a good fan base. Now you’d want to “advertise” there and would like to monetize from it. But guess what. It’s not “your domain”. It’s still Facebook’s domain. Facebook is paying for all the servers and maintenance to make sure that your fan page remains live. And so they have all the right to control what kind of advertisements show up on your fan page (if any).

So the best model for advertising on Facebook that would work will be perhaps the one where in Facebook would collaborate with high traffic fan page owners and perhaps let them have share of the pie. I don’t think such a solution exists right now but that’s something that Facebook should think about (if they aren’t right now). Won’t that be pretty much similar to the “Google Content Network”? I believe so; perhaps its smaller version in some sense because Google Content Network pretty much spreads all over the Internet and allows third party domains to leverage Google and host Ads using their AdSense technology. I don’t think that is relevant to Facebook, because Facebook.com is Facebook’s property. The only way Facebook can perhaps make a “true Content Network” is probably by partnering up with other Social Media companies, but that’s a totally separate discussion.

Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook?

Now that we have understood the fact that when you are advertising on Facebook, you are really advertising on a private domain, and so Facebook has all the right to own every thing that is displayed there; the question is: Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook? I think the answer (based on the solution and the infrastructure that Facebook has right now) is No. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong! but I think that the only reason “Self Service Advertising” was introduced in this World was when there was a need to move the Ad hosting infrastructure to the publisher. This is typically done when the publisher is processing enormous amount of traffic (as discussed earlier). However, as we know, in case of Facebook, it doesn’t even make sense because you are not really moving out of the Facebook.com domain. What do you think?

A true “Google DFP Like Solution” for Facebok: How would it look?

While this discussion needs a whole lot of time, I think in a nutshell, if Facebook opens up its channels and provides APIs to easily integrate the World outside their domain (and I’m not talking about the OAuth Integration), there are several ways by which Facebook should be able to off load the enormous bandwidth that some of their fan pages must be eating up today, and provide some sort of “Self Service Platform” to their “premium publishers”. Of course such a technology solution doesn’t exist as of now and at the same time when it comes it’s going to change the way people look at “Self Service Ad Platforms”. Until then we’ll have to live with what we have!

There are over 100 social media networks in the World. Let's forget the bottom 97; and you are left with the two main networks that pretty much define the current social media landscape. Yes I'm talking about facebook and twitter. And now we have Google with the Google+ creeping into this landscape.

In this article I will show some of the examples of how the growing number of Social Media Networks is causing headache, confusion and (for lack of better terms) lot of wastage of money in marketing.

While I have some ideas of how this can be minimized, but hey, I'm no "guru" here. So if you have a better idea, please do share!

The "What Message Goes Where" Problem

The biggest problem that marketing managers face is that how do you figure out what message goes on which Social Media Network. Simply copying and pasting the same message on all the networks might not be the best idea. The reason is that all Social Networks have their own "theme" and if your actions are not in sync with that "theme", you are bound to fail on that network. Starbucks for example does a wonderful job in managing their facebook and twitter pages. They use facebook for mainly having their fans share their thoughts about the company and their coffee. While they use twitter to mainly spread information about various company promotions and events. This works perfectly because they fall in line with the basic them of these Social Networks. For example, facebook is perfect for sharing ideas between friends while twitter is perfect for sharing quick information and running viral campaigns. Starbucks surely understands this and uses both the Social Media Networks accordingly.

The Problem Of Finding The "Non-Followers"

Managing hundreds of thousands of comments in various Social Networks can become an involving activity. Due to this many companies end up just barely managing their own company pages and Social Media accounts. There are hardly any good solutions available right now that allow companies look around in other forums and groups in various Social Networks where people might be talking about anything negative about the company. In essence, the problem of managing the followers is so involving to solve that companies hardly get a chance to follow what the "non-followers" are saying about them. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions available to solve this problem. My best advise to solve this problem is to perhaps provide incentives to your "followers" so that if they find something negative going on about your company, they can be rewarded to inform you about such instances.

The Problem Of "Consolidated Reporting"

Twitter sends out a notification whenever a new person starts following you. facebook sends out weekly statistics about your Ad spending. Every Social Media Network has its own reporting mechanism. This creates a very annoying problem of reconciling and consolidating all these reports. As per my knowledge there are no good solutions to solve this problem. Most companies have their own home grown methods to reconcile and consolidate reports. Obviously this comes with its own associated costs and the problem of keeping up with ever changing reporting formats. Perhaps all Social Media Networks should come up with a common reporting format so that consolidated reporting solutions can be built on top of that.

These are obviously some of the problems of Social Media Marketing. What are your thoughts?

After three attempts, and self learning, I seemed to have found the Twitter Recipe that works for me. And I am going to share some of it with you today. I could have shared it all but then, to be frank, most of it is philosophy; and will perhaps take lot of time and wine sessions to fully throw over the table.

Twitter has definitely proven to be a true viral news platform. The 140 characters limitation enforces the originator of the news to be precise and concise. Sharing the information is as simple as a “one click” re-tweet! I don’t think it can get simpler than that! Anyways; This article is not about what Twitter can and cannot do. It’s about the people who use twitter. It’s about the people like you and me who either follow or have followers and are using Twitter mainly as a channel to spread and share knowledge.

One of the main things that I found on Twitter is that many people just blindly follow. Heck, many “people” on Twitter aren’t even “real people”! Many are just apps and bots that are constantly sniffing for material that their “masters” have programmed them for! When you see 10,000 followers in your Twitter profile and realize that 8000 of them are just apps and bots, believe me the “social” angle just goes down the drain.

So I think what matters on Twitter is not how many people are following you, but rather how many people are you following! When you follow someone or some feed, do you follow it because the material amuses you? gives you peace and harmony? makes you laugh? makes you think? I take Twitter just like any other channel of information. Just like today on my TV I have 100s of channels that I am subscribed to and I watch based on what I want to; I think the same philosophy goes for Twitter.

That brings the discussion to the point that when you follow someone on Twitter, are you really following them to increase your user base hoping that bots and other random people would see that and start following you? Or are you following them because you genuinely like what they say? It might not be the matter of whether or not you actually truly “believe” in what they say; However the question is really about the real reason behind your action of following other people on Twitter.

I believe that once you carefully start looking at it and selectively pick the people and feeds that you believe to some extent and think are useful sources of information, Twitter will be more beneficial for you. Twitter is not about increasing number of followers; It’s about enjoying the information that you love and believe in, and sharing that information with others who you think believe in you and love reading your material!

Or is it just the Friday / Weekend Fever kicking in me? What do you think?

Happy Friday!
GT

Article Marketing is one of the proven techniques of spreading the word about a product or a service. There are so many variants of this concept that are available that it can easily span into a full book. You can have someone write articles about a product, write reviews, feature comparisons and what not. At the end of the day, the technique is pretty much simple. You or someone writes articles about your product or service. Articles are circulated across to target readers. But wait. What about “effectiveness”?

What is “effectiveness” in Article Marketing?

The answer to this question pretty much differentiates the “pro” marketing managers from the “not so pro” ones. Everyone can run an article marketing campaign. But then how many campaigns actually help you track the effectiveness of your article marketing effort? For that matter how do you even measure it in the article marketing scenario? Here’s what I think can be measured:

A. How much traffic are the articles bringing to you?

You can measure the traffic coming from articles by checking your website analytics reports. But then what about the articles that were distributed in print format during a conferences? What about those pdf’s that you emailed your target audience? To be able to find the true effectiveness of any article marketing campaign, you need to take into account all the channels that you will be using to spread your articles and a closed loop mechanism that allows you to track exactly how much traffic you are able to generate from your article.

B. How much is it costing you to run the campaign?

Good article writing can cost you some good amount of money. Be it in-house, or out sourced, the articles you write need to be quantified in terms of how much is it costing you either on weekly or daily basis or on per article basis.

C. Is it all worth it?

Once you can clearly identify how much traffic your articles are generating and how much is it costing to write articles you can find the “true cost per click” that’s coming from the article you just spread to your target audience.

This simple case study shows how companies are already doing this using ellipsis AdNet: http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/adnet/article-marketing.pdf

Comments and Thoughts are Welcome!

So now every one has bought into the concept of Social Media Marketing. Everyone knows how important it is to have fans on facebook, followers on twitter and everything around it. But then why are more and more people questioning the importance of Social Media Marketing? I think the reason is the fact that it’s really hard to measure success from most Social Media Marketing efforts. So in this blog I have tried to cover what I think are some of the factors that you should consider while working on your Social Media Marketing effort, and these should help you truly measure the success of the same.

Are You Reaching out to the “right” Social Network?

The right social network for you is the one where your customers and prospects are. Now remember that we all are humans (wow! like that was something to remember? …) and we don’t stick with one social network. For example, almost everyone is on Facebook and almost everyone is on LinkedIn. However most of you would be using Facebook to keep in touch with your friends and family while LinkedIn is generally kept for business relationships. Similarly there are various social networks that are targeted towards a specific group of people with common likings, for example books networks, movies networks, etc. Your first goal should be to identify the social networks that are relevant to you.

If you are not reaching out to the right social network, your success would be barely good to measure. You don’t want to depress your self or your manager, do you? Definitely not your manager!

Is your marketing message consistent across the board?

This might not be true for everyone, but to my surprise many companies still somehow forget about this until quite later when they hire a marketing consultant who tells them this simple thing that I’m telling you for FREE! Keep your marketing message consistent across the board! What does it really mean? It means that when you send out a coupon on one network, send it out on all networks at the same time. If you advertise about your service on one network, send it out on the other one too, and most importantly, keep the advertisement as similar as possible. In other words, keep the same theme.

The more consistent your message would be, the better it would be to measure success and figure out which network really does help you get more leads and more sales.

Is Your Social Media Marketing able to help you reach beyond your current market reach?

What demography does your product cater to now? If you are at a stage to expand to further boundaries, does your Social Media Marketing Campaign help you do that? Does your network have current happy customers who could help you get leads through referrals into countries or states you haven’t ventured yet are are willing to find a way to enter into?

This is another very important aspect that you should evaluate. The idea here is that your Social Media Marketing effort shouldn’t be focused towards being social with your customers, but also being able to socialize with others who might get interested in your products or services and help you extend the boundaries of your business.

Last but not the least : How much sales is your marketing effort generating?

It’s very important to measure that in the end how much sales is your marketing effort generating. It’s one of the most difficult ones to do too. And the reason is mainly because most companies don’t have a clear traceability system around Social Media yet. Partially the problem is the fact that Social Media is still in its infancy and might take several years to mature. Many companies are still learning the ins and outs of this new way of communicating over the Internet.

The sooner you realize that you need some way to tie traceability with your Social Media Marketing campaign, the easier it would be to evaluate overall success of the campaign. Because now you’d clearly know how much it cost you to run the campaign and how much recurring and new business you actually made out of all this.

Have you lately evaluated your Social Media Marketing effort? What was your experience?

livingsocial and groupon both have redefined the way coupons were used. By making coupons more easily accessible and making the consumer experience much more simple, both the companies have definitely helped lot of people save lot of money. At the same time they have helped small businesses get the volume of business that they were never able to achieve before using either of them. So really it’s a win-win situation for both parties – the businesses and the consumer. Well, hold on a minute. It’s not really true in all the cases. But yeah; Let’s talk about the “ideal scenario”. Sure we have heard a lot of bad things about the model these companies follow that quite adversely impacts small businesses; but hey, this blog is not to figure out what they are doing right or wrong; Rather, we want to see which one of them does a good job for generating leads; if they really do that at all! In order to do that we will evaluate both the companies on some basic aspects of lead generation

Targeted Lead Generation

Both the companies give almost the same kind of experience to the end user. While I haven’t personally used either of them to promote any of my business, I have certainly tried out both the interfaces from a customer’s standpoint. And from what I have seen myself, I can tell that both of them mainly filter leads for businesses based on the location where the consumer resides and some basic criteria like likings, age, sex, etc. For most businesses this is not enough to be able to call a lead as “targeted”. The problem for both livingsocial and groupon is that due to the inherent aim of being extremely simple for clients they can’t come up with extremely complicated and detailed profile creation. So they have to come up with a trade off, which they are doing. So I would say that both the companies do provide some level of targeted lead generation, but not enough to be able to make every type of business happy.

Integration with existing CRM

livingsocial and groupon do a fairly good job attracting customers to a business through coupons. But there is not much beyond that. This is pretty much like “buying traffic on the Internet”. Since there is no full integration with businesses available (as of now at least), there is no easy way to track down which coupon was bought by which customer until businesses record that information when the coupon was used by the customer. This makes it impossible for the concept to grow and be utilized in businesses other than the common brick and mortar shops.

Cost and Quality of Leads

One thing that we hear over and over again is that both the companies do a good job bringing customers to businesses but they do a terrible job actually making the businesses grow and generate good profits. Most of the coupons are at extremely cheaper rates making businesses substantially cut down their profits. Furthermore since most of the people who use coupon are really “coupon loyal” and not “brand loyal”, the customers probably won’t come back if they won’t find the same deal again. In other words both the companies do a terrible job when it comes to quality of leads and at the same time turn out to be extremely expensive forms of lead generation.

So after reading this, what do you think? Are livingsocial and groupon good for lead generation? Or the real question is that are they really a lead generation tool? Perhaps they are more of a “low quality traffic generation” systems rather than a lead generation system. What do you think?

Social Media is the most hyped around buzz word of current times. We all know it; We all understand it; And we all are, well at times, upset about it. In this article we will cover some of the nuances that have been introduced by Social Media in our lives and how to make sure that social media doesn’t mess around with your social life.

Problem 1: I spend too much time on Social Media

Ask your friends and family who are using any kind of social media. Ask them how much time do they spend checking their facebook wall or posting some thing on twitter. People are spending way too much time on “social networks” instead of actually “living social”. The reason is the contagious nature of the way any kind of Social Media engulfs the user.

Solution 1.A: Learn about Time Management

One of the best ways to make sure you don’t end up spending too much time on Social Networks is to first see how much spare time you have in a day. What all you want to do. You can come up with a time slot of the day (say during lunch hour) or while on the bus – this is the time you could use to spend on catching up with friends and family via your Social Network. Come up with a time management plan and stick to it.

Solution 1.B: Define your goals properly

Many people go to facebook without any aim. How many times do you go to a mall without any aim? Perhaps once in a while. But not every time! However, if you talk with people, you’ll find most of them don’t have any clue why they actually go on facebook. You don’t need to be on top of all your friends’ activities 24X7! Think of going to facebook just like going to a mall. Define a goal for yourself. Are you there to share something? Are you there to read something specific or read from some specific people in your group? Anything beyond that will be a pass time activity. Not that it’s bad; It’s just that you must know when your goals have been met and either chose to abandon and do something else or keep logged in and pass time (you could probably read a book or watch a movie instead; so you need to find that line where in you say “OK my today’s goals for Social Networking have been met; so let me move on to something else now”).

Solution 1.C: Prioritize your activities

Think from the perspective that what all you used to do when you had time and there was no social network. Come on, it wasn’t way too back in time. You just need to go back a few years back in time and remember what all you used to do. Perhaps call your friends instead of IMing them; watch a movie; read a book; or listen to music? There are lot of important things that your life is filled with but you ignore them in favor of Social Networks. For example, if you were to buy a car, it might make sense to read about the hybrid technology, or a few articles of what are the key differences amongst various models; do some market research, etc. Prioritize your activities and keep Social Networking the bucket of your “last but not the least kind of things”. Keep in mind that all that social media provides you is another way to communicate; nothing more than that; You could do the same with your cell phone, go back in time – with a mail; and go further back in time – actually traveling and meeting people.

Problem 2: If I don’t use it I feel left alone

Many people just go on their preferred social network every day and every hour just because they think that if they won’t do that they will be abandoned by the community as being a non-social person. This fear engulfs them every single minute of the day and they end up messing all other parts of their life just because of this fear.

Solution 2.A: Learn to “not follow” the herd

One of the hardest things to do is “not following” the herd. Try not to be online just because you think all your friends are. You have to really plan out all your activities and keep your focus on all the things you need to do every day. You don’t have to follow your friends and be available just because they are there. And hey, what if they are there because you are! May be they’ll learn from you and start respecting their time too!

Solution 2.B: Keep clear distinction between “real” and “virtual” life

Many people forget that in the end all that any social network does is connect you with your friends. Nothing more. Remember that you don’t have keep your virtual life really glamorous and hyped about over the Social Media; Because if that’s not true in real life, you will very soon be left alone in the Social Media space too. Keep in mind that social media is just another way to communicate with “real” people. So if you will keep good focus on making your “real life” good, your social life will automatically be good.

So here you go. Two simple problems and a few simple solutions to fix them. The sooner you take action, the better it’d be! What do you think?

Internet and anything related to it has had a history of spreading buzz words like wild fire. There have been more words exploited and miss-used while pitching Web based technologies than anywhere else in the History. And the most used one now-a-days is “Social Media”. So is “Social Media” really a “buzz word” or a real thing? To answer this, let’s roll back in time. History has answers to most of the things. As someone rightly said “History never repeats – It rhymes”. Here are some analogies.

Postal Mail to Telephones

Postal Mail goes all the way back to the time of the Pharaohs (2400BC). It was one of the first (if not arguably “the first”) method of communication that truly tried to connect people geographically apart. But what was fundamentally missing from postal mails was the ability for people to talk with each other – two way – in real time. In the modern World, telephones changed the way we communicated before they were invented. With telephones, people could talk with any one in real time. There was no need to sit down and write a letter and post it and then wait for days to get the response back. Telephones truly opened the doors to make people more social and socially aware.

News Articles to Blogs & Forums

The next similar revolution can be seen during the Internet boom. Traditional News Articles, which were more formalized and typically one way in terms of communication became less and less popular. In today’s time Blogs and Forums are more interactive and pretty much rule the information World. And the reason is simple: Blogs allow people to connect and express in a much easier way than news articles do.

Emails to Chat

Now let’s roll up further in time. Emails literally killed the postal mail. But then Technology brought in another way to communicate – The “Chat”. Chat based systems allow people to quickly communicate with each other. It’s easier than calling up someone using a telephone because it allows people to communicate with each other for long durations or chat in parallel with more than one person on totally different topics. Imagine calling 3 friends and talking with them on 3 different topics at the same time. Impossible! Isn’t it. Now imagine chatting with 3 different friends in the same situation. Perfectly doable and many would call “it’s normal”!.

As you can see; Technology has been trying to make human communication possible with as much ease as possible for hundreds of years. The “media” has been moving towards a more “social” approach since the day “media” itself came into the World; and that comes with no surprise because “media” is “people centric”. It is “for the people” and it is “by the people”. And so I believe “Social Media” has already been; just that it sounds much cool now-a-days to talk about it! If you call it a “buzz word” then it won’t end; it will just morph into something else. If you call it the “essence” of the whole human communication, it has been here and will remain here as long as media remains human and people centric.

What do you think?