It took me too long to realize

And understand, that software coding  and hardware design was the closest be being an artiste in the realm of technology. 

Its pure art. Period.

It’s the true form of creation that can create technological change.

And though I got a good enough opportunity to walk that line early in my career I chose not to, because of some silly preconceived notions.

The stupid naivety of youth.

When

A social media campaign adds thousands of new followers, millions of impressions and fans overnight, apart from mutual congratulations from other social media junkies, glitzy presentations which go to great pains to define something as engagement, and award submission frenzy , what insight does it really tell you ( the brand) ?

  • You have many “engaged” fans?
  • Those “engaged” fans automatically mean that they have bought from you, or will buy from you?
  • Those “engaged” fans are creating more brand equity/value?
  • Those “engaged” fans are sharing your content and getting net new “engaged”fans who can potentially tomorrow become net new buyers?
  • That now you can map your “engaged” fans by name, map it back to your CRM/ Sales DB and find out who bought from you ?
  • That you can target your “engaged” fans  who haven’t yet bought from you, personally on their social network/ email/ doorstep/ with new offerings and they will buy?
  • That you have conclusive evidence based on fans “engagement” metrics which can help you create a new sales/ channel/ distribution/strategy ? 

It does tell you ( the brand) that a bunch of people liked your social media campaign without telling you that they liked it because it was you ( the brand) who was driving it- but that they are happy that you came up with that idea. 

It does tell you that because of all those tweets and retweets, the traditional media wrote about  it ( because you fed a PR story) which was again shared and tweeted and posted and created a lot of awareness and consideration for the brand image.

It does tell you it’s a good way to get some good PR with relatively less effort.

It does tell you that you have a lot of metrics to show but you don’t REALLY know what it ACTUALLY means.

Not Yet.

The shift is coming

” From Social to Digital Engagement - The Shift is Coming”.

Quite an interesting post with pictures, and images and concepts like Influence loops

But it raised in my mind some questions?: 

  • So till now Social Engagement was different from Digital Engagement?
  • Customer’s didn’t take a journey before?
  • Social media was not one part of overall digital media ?
  • A search query did not engage people before this ?
  • Engagement was proprietary to only one channel before this?
  • We did not already know that social media and its engagement was just one part of the overall digital adventure?
  • Did I just like, share, tweet, post, to show engagement  or could i be engaged as well as buy without doing any of that?

Wasn’t social engagement always just one part of overall digital engagement which was just one part of overall marketing engagement?

The Expertise Issue

When experts start spending time, pontificating on their own knowledge to prove their level of expertise, then there is no solution.

There is debate.

There are useless discussions on holistic queries which have no bearing to the problem in hand.

There is a game of self satisfaction and a pregnant punctuation of an unsaid dialogue from old hindi films -

Do you know who I am ?

Nope.

I don’t.

Don’t care.

Don’t want to. 

No one knows me as well and am very happy being there.

Can we now solve the problem?

Or can i go home ?

Cos am tired of useless debating, of trying to revolutionize my thinking, of wasting time on stuff that you or me cannot solve right now.

The thing about email

Is that it still works. That is why every other day you will get a mail in your inbox from all the social networks that you are part of , reminding you of the picture your friend has shared, the new cat video which is making the rounds, the invite you have ignored for so long, the tweet’s that you may just be interested in and so on.

And all this just to remind you to log in.

One. More. Time.

The thing about email is that you access it based on your need. Not your wish.

Need has always been a better driver of intent than wish.

Just because you are giving it for free

Does not mean it is not helping you to earn. Often what you freely give away, sets a domino effect which creates a trigger at a completely different point, from where the payment comes.

Ask Justin Timberlake. He understands this better than most marketers and sales folks.

For his comeback album the 20/20 experience, Justin aired select album songs for free- everywhere. The radio, the Super Bowl, through tweets, on iTunes Preview and a host of other channels.

And in each touch point he made it personal.

The result - 968,000 copies sold in the first week of which 47% were strictly via digital channels of distribution.

<Tangent>

If you are really good, give it away for free. 

The cheque will come in the mail.

About us

We are a small team of dedicated and passionate professionals with the simple objective to keep you happy constantly with the work we do. We aim to do this through, synchronizing social strategy integrated with semantic search coupled with platform agnostic multichannel technologies which are deep synced into the mobile web with the best of breed analytic APIs baked right into our blah blah blah blah blah...  constant hard work and an honest effort into everything we attempt to do.

Pitch This. 

You will have a more attentive listener.

And maybe a buyer.