social-media

Facebook Finally Acknowledges That It Faces Competition: But Who Has Better Advantage Of Them All?

by Paul Joseph February 3, 2012 Featured

Facebook is ready to make history with the biggest ever IPO in American history. Interestingly, while filing the paperwork with the SEC, Facebook acknowledged some other tech heavyweights as its competitors. And who are these competitors? Google, Microsoft and Twitter . Nothing surprising. Facebook clearly has an advantage over these other companies in terms of social networking. While filing with SEC, Facebook released the following statement: “We face significant competition in almost every aspect of our business, including from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which offer a variety of Internet products, services, content, and online advertising offerings, as well as from mobile companies and smaller Internet companies that offer products and services that may compete with specific Facebook features.” As expected, Facebook singled out Google as it main competitor. “We compete broadly with Google’s social networking offerings, including Google+ , which it has integrated with certain products, including search and Android”. It also said that some its rivals have significantly better resources and dominating positions in certain markets when compared to Facebook. They are obviously talking about Google here. “Certain competitors, including Google, could use strong or dominant positions in one or more markets to gain competitive advantage against us in areas where we operate including: by integrating competing social networking platforms or features into products they control such as search engines, web browsers, or mobile device operating systems; by making acquisitions; or by making access to Facebook more difficult. As a result, our competitors may acquire and engage users at the expense of the growth or engagement of our user base, which may negatively affect our business and financial results.” Facebook is also monitoring start-ups and upcoming social networks that happen to provide the same offerings as Facebook. This includes Social start-ups like Path and Pinterest . Facebook is also looking at local social networks in countries like India, China, Japan and Korea. How Microsoft would be listed as a competitor is still not clear. Facebook faces competition from traditional media and online media businesses in terms of Ad-serving platforms and Ad budgets. Well, that is a lot of competition but then Facebook is that huge a company. We are waiting anxiously for this IPO to unfold. We will keep you updated. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Facebook Earns 23% More On Impressions That Last Year Team Anna Campaign Scores The Top Place On Twitter’s Trendlist Recap 2010 : Social Networking Yahoo Axes About 600 Jobs! Nokia To Follow Suit? Mobile Advertising On A High

Tagged as: advertising, facebook, facebook ipo, international, news, path, pinterest, social-media, web

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Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Goes Social!

by Paul Joseph January 25, 2012 Featured

Social Media especially Twitter is a great tool for politicians to interact with their supporters and gain national outreach quite easily. We have seen the Obama Government make full use of it to reach out to people. Many politicians are now taking up Twitter to cast their thoughts, engage with lay people and speak their mind. We have also seen have Team Anna leveraged Twitter to reach out to supporters. This is a positive trend towards openness and transparency. The Swedish Government lets one of its citizens tweet as @sweden every week. We are not there yet but we are making good strides. It is being reported that Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh’s Office has now registered itself on the popular micro-blogging site. The PMO’s twitter account will have regular updates on the Prime Minister’s programme in real time. Currently, there are only 4 tweets but their following has reached 11,000 people. The tweets are about Bravery Awards function that was held recently. Pankaj Pachauri, the PM’s communication advisor broke the news about the PMO being on  Twitter. The Prime Minister’s office is now on Twitter @ PMOIndia Thank you for your support. — Pankaj Pachauri (@PankajPachauri) January 23, 2012 Dr. Manmohan Singh has faced stiff criticism last year due to the Lokpal issue and rising inflation. Let us hope that he will interact more via this Twitter handle which will grant greater transparency in Government issues and give us an insight into his mind. Interestingly, some people are asking if the PM’s tweets will be ‘ pre-screened ’ by Kapil Sibal. It has to be remembered that Twitter works both ways. Things can easily go bad due to one tweet e.g Barkha Dutt, Shashi Tharoor and finally Chetan Bhagat even though he is not a politician. PM with Bravery Award Winners: twitter.com/PMOIndia/statu… — Dr Manmohan Singh (@PMOIndia) January 23, 2012 What do you think about this development? Do let us know. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Anti-SOPA Fire Spreading;This Time Mozilla Opposes The Censorship Can Your Employer Own Your Twitter Account? Google Lays Bare Government’s Data Removal Pleas Hire Humans To Censor Content Mr. Sibal Tells Internet Giants You Can Now Post 63, 206 Character While Updating Your Facebook Status

Tagged as: congress, kapil sibal, manmohan singh, news, pmo, social-media, twitter, web

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Announcing The Shortlisted Nominees For WAT Awards 2012!

by Paul Joseph January 18, 2012 Featured

The online voting phase for WAT Awards 2012 ended at 10 pm yesterday. What a day it was! We were absolutely overwhelmed by the stellar response that we got. It feels good to know that Digital agencies and brands are finally getting the due credit for their outstanding work. WAT Awards, this year, is the only event in the country which has incorporated an online voting mechanism which helps to balance the process of selecting the winners and keep it free from bias. Online voting has been given 50% weightage and remaining 50% will be adjudged by our distinguished jury. WATBlog is extremely proud of the fact that we have got some of the most accomplished people in the Indian Digital and Advertising Industry to judge our awards viz. Alok Mittal, Sudha Natrajan, Srikant Sastri, V.Ramani, Mahendra Swarup and Madan Sanglikar. So, here are the shortlisted nominations for WAT Award 2012. Things are are shaping up real good for the WAT Awards which will be held on Friday, 20th of January, 2012 at 7.30 p.m . Follow the awards real-time on Twitter at @WATAwards Here’s wishing everyone the very best and see you all on the 20th.   Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts UTV To Help Indian Celebrities Go Digital – Start With John Abraham Facebook Earns 23% More On Impressions That Last Year WATSummit 2012 Begins This Friday. Have You Registered Yet? How India Searched In 2011! Unilever Merges Digital With TV To Reach Out To Masses In Asia

Tagged as: advertising, digital awards, events, Featured, india, social-media, wat awards 2012, watawards, watsummit 2012.

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Facebook Earns 23% More On Impressions That Last Year

by Paul Joseph January 18, 2012 Featured

Facebook is more profitable than ever now. We have written about how it may have even surpassed online retail giant Amazon this year in terms of profit. How did they do it? Facebook is free and it will always be according to the website. The answer is ‘ingenious use of handling advertising on the site’ .  Facebook has almost 900 million people using its service. A Global brand might will feel delirious when it realizes that Facebook has brought their entire TG to them. Facebook has started paying more attention to mobile because it recognizes that more and more people use Facebook on the go. Advertising on the mobile space a literally an ad buyers delight . They have also started incentivizing advertisers by introducing CPC campaigns which cost some 29% less. Digital agency TBG Digital has compiled a study which shows how Facebook has a robust potential for monetization. You can view the report here . The study analyzed over 326 billion ad impressions run by 266 of their clients in some 205 countries . The study shows how the agency used Facebook’s Sponsored Stories to get a 46% higher click through rate (CTR) on their ad campaigns. Facebook thus earns more money while still providing a low cost per click.  Sponsored Stories have now changed to featured stories in your News feed. Q4 in 2011 was a good one for Facebook as CPM rates increased on a average of 8% from the previous quarter in major countries like US, UK, Canada, France and Germany. The Worldwide CTR increased by 7% in Q4 and 18% for the whole of 2011 . Holiday season ads are pretty expensive on the social network and if you do not want to expressly target the holiday audience, the study suggests that you pause your campaigns during that time. This shows that marketers and advertisers are slowing gaming the ad platform given by Facebook. The study also reveals that ads pointing to your site rather are more expensive than those pointing to your Facebook page. The difference is somewhere around 29% and that is a substantial amount. The ads specifically asking you to ‘like’ their page cost even lesser. This incentive by Facebook is provided so that people are not redirected out of the social network due to an ad. this gives one more advantage to Facebook – showing the user more ads thus making ad campaigns cost less and still making them profitable to Facebook. Facebook does not really face any stiff competition yet but Twitter and Google might just get people to advertise with them by being aggressive. The increase in monetization is also favorable to the company since it needs to justify its $100 billion IPO . Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Social Media Advertising Revenue To Reach $8.3 Bn In 2015: BIA/Kelsey Social Networks Adversely Impacting Online Ad Prices : ComScore Study New Developments at Facebook – A Change in the Social Media Marketing Scenario Facebook Ad’s Are No Longer ‘Sponsored’, Now ‘Featured’ Stories In Your News Feed Business Espionage Gets Easier With Facebook, Twitter: Can It Be Curbed Though?

Tagged as: advertising, facebook, facebook ads, Featured, financial results, mobile, news, social-media, technology, web

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Chrome Defeats Firefox In The War Of Browsers

by Paul Joseph January 3, 2012 Featured

Despite the reports that Google would have to pay Firefox one billion dollar so that it remains the default search engine, is now on a sway. Yes, grapevine has it that Google’s very own product Chrome has skyrocketed to a 27 percent market share whereas Firefox is on a decline. So no matter how much money Google has to pay Firefox , Google still consumes most of the market share. But amidst this war, we have almost forgotten Safari it seems. The most viable answer to this is Safari is baked into OS X with Mac. The other reason why Chrome rules is that it seemingly fast in terms of rendering as well as high end JavaScript actions. Features such as Chrome Extensions, more tabs options, URL/Search Omnibox and many more has made it outstanding. NetMarketShare statistics also reports that Chrome winded up 2011 with 19 percent share and this graph is ever increasing. While Firefox was standing at 22 percent market share but that is going down. Google however is having quite a tough time with its Android browser when it comes to iOS devices. Google Android seems to be bogged down by Safari but on the other hand Safari fails on the desktop. Google Chrome in this scene has to go a long way. Though its market share is on a high, yet there are some players such as IE who have a static 39 to 52 percent share as visible from Statcounter and NetMarketShare. But these numbers will vanish into thin air if Chrome still continues with its work and moves faster in this marathon. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Most Commented Posts Paypal India Block Leaves IT Guys High & Dry – Need For An Indian Paypal? Wish Us Happy Birthday And WIN Free Customized TShirts from Myntra.com – Domain & Hosting from LimeDomains Be a BIG part of the next BIG thing! Join WAT! Now Women Meow On FM Radio! WATBlog Wins The Best Indian Blog Award 2009! Thanks To Our Readers, Bloggers & Staff!

Tagged as: block-leaves, chrome, desktop, firefox, google android, happy-birthday, hosting, leading-social, paypal-india, social-media

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Can Your Employer Own Your Twitter Account?

by Paul Joseph December 27, 2011 Featured

Twitter has been a runaway hit  as a micro-blogging service. It sports the who’s who of the world as its customer base apart from regular people. Companies use it to further their reach to potential clients and consumers. Employees of a company may use their twitter accounts to engage with their followers and address any queries that they have. This is fairly normal and productive. But what happens after an employee quits? Is that Twitter account owned by the employee or the company? The answer to this dilemma may be pretty straightforward to many but what if the employer thinks otherwise? In a case which might set a precedent as to how all these questions may be redressed, Noah Kravitz is disputing his previous company’s claim that his Twitter account and tweets are property of the company. Noah Kravitz was a writer working for popular phone site called Phonedog.com, which he quit after a period of 4 years. While working at the company, Noah used to tweet using the Twitter handle ‘Phonedog_Noah’ and had 17000 people following him. Needless to say, he was pretty popular. He quit the company and they reached a consensus where Noah could keep his twitter account and in return he would have to post occasional tweets promoting Phonedog.com. Not a bad deal, right? But things went south, when he changed his handle from ‘Phonedog_Noah’ to ‘NoahKravitz’. PhoneDog sued him within 8 months of him leaving the company. The lawsuit seeks damages of $2.50 a follower for eight months amounting to $340,000. This is where the madness begins. Here’s PhoneDog’s rationale which says, “ The costs and resources invested by PhoneDog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of PhoneDog Media LLC. We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands .” The intention of the lawsuit may not be to take advantage of Noah’s Twitter account but to get back at Noah for asking 15% of the gross advertising revenue from the site as he was a vested partner. Whatever the intention may be, this lawsuit and its ruling may be very important for the future. Here’s what I think about it. First of all, Twitter owns your tweets and your accounts since it reserves the right keep or remove your account. There is no legal provision whereby, a third party (your company) could ever profess to own your account and your tweets. It is up to a company to figure out how they are going to handle their social reach. A tedious but viable solution would be to make 2 separate accounts, your work account and your personal account just like the way you manage your email. This is not a perfect solution as some people already have a massive follower count accumulated over the years and asking them to start over again officially doesn’t make sense. Another way is to keep one Company twitter account which tweets about its products and services. Have your employees handle it and mention them in your bio. Frankly, there is no other way to do this. About the lawsuit mentioned above, I think it is nonsense and will not even be given much attention to. What are your views on this topic? Tell us. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts You Can Now Post 63, 206 Character While Updating Your Facebook Status Business Espionage Gets Easier With Facebook, Twitter: Can It Be Curbed Though? Twitter Introduces Photo – Sharing Via Text Messages, Not Yet Available In India Team Anna Campaign Scores The Top Place On Twitter’s Trendlist Vodafone Anger The Masses: Social Media Backfiring On Them?

Tagged as: international, news, social-media, twitter, web

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How India Searched In 2011!

by Paul Joseph December 21, 2011 Featured

The year is drawing to an end. It sure has been an eventful one with all the revolutions, the natural calamities, political situations, the advancement of technology , deaths of many prominent people and many other things. Google has recently compiled all the data and presented it in a clean manner at Google Zeitgeist. This site is made in HTML5 and shows us the potential of this HTML standard. Oh yeah, and they have made a pretty nice video about the year 2011. Focusing specially on India, we find that the top 10 trending searches were: Facebook Youtube Gmail Yahoomail Google Yahoo Irctc Rediffmail Indian Railways Way2sms As you can see that the top ten searches this year in India were for other social websites like Facebook, Youtube etc. People use Google to search for Google. Quite a recursion! The top 6 searches were for other websites. The fastest rising people on the web were Anna Hazare, Steve Jobs and others. In News, IPL topped other topics like World Cup 2011, Diwali and Lokpal. Airtel has also released its year end review titled ‘ Mobitude 2011 ’ which shows how almost 170 million subscribers did with their mobile Internet. The results are tabulated below. 150 Million music tracks downloaded. 19 Million movie wallpapers downloaded. Google, Gmail and Facebook were the most visited mobile websites Popular social networks in order of use were Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. So, Twitter lags behind Orkut! Facebook maintained the lead for the most visited Social Network. This shows the paradigm shift that is happening in terms of accessing social networks. People are increasingly using their phones to access these sites and hence Facebook and other services are focusing more on mobile apps. Head on over to Google Zeitgeist and you can scrutinize all this in detail. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Yahoo! India’s Year In Review – Search Trends For 2010 Bing to replace Google on the iPhone? Facebook Overtakes Orkut in India! Google Caffeine – Google Search Improved How Google Always Gets it Right

Tagged as: events, india, internet, search, social-media, technology, videos, web, zeitgeist

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Using Social Media For Market Research: Can They Merge?

by Paul Joseph December 12, 2011 Featured

The adoption of social media is growing, and with each passing day more and more brands are jumping into the vast sea. But one thing which seems to be still missing is Market Research using social media. It’s a simple concept; your customers are talking about you – so why don’t you mine that data to analyse what it actually means? Be it product reviews or customer support issues or simply ideas for new features, diving in and listening to users can be a very rewarding exercise. Let’s quickly look into some practices that you can adopt and some tools that can be very useful for market research. Some of the most famous tools present out there are Alterian SM2, Klout, Amplicate, Social Mention and Radian 360. If you have the budget for it, Radian 360 is a very exhaustive option; and if not most of these other tools give you enough information even for free. By simply inserting your keyword phrase into the tool, you can get answers to simple questions like how many people are talking about you, what they think about your services and their perception about your brand vis-à-vis competition. Some of the guidelines you should follow apart from using these tools are: Do not trust the tools completely:  You must be careful while using these tools, since sentiment analysis still has a long way to go when it comes to analyzing content and putting them in the right categories. For example, take these sample tweets – “I loved Rockstar the movie! It was so sick” or “Kapil Sibal is as intelligent as a star fish”. Yes, you can see where I am going with this. Most tools would place the first tweet in the category of a “positive mention” and the second tweet in the category of a “negative mention” because of the words sick and intelligent. Natural Language Processing can only do so much, after all. Excel sheets are your best friend! : A better and safe way to do this is to comb through your search results manually and assign them categories accordingly. This might not be scalable but we have seen this approach working for a variety of clients from different industries. You can use the Charts tool inside excel to generate nice infographics and patterns which can be helpful to understand your brand. What kind of patterns can you generate? : You should first ask yourself, what you need to know to make your marketing activities work, and then do market research around it instead of trying to answer the entire universe. Here are some examples:  1. How many people are talking about me? 2. How many are talking about competition? 3.Where are they talking about me? 4. What do they think about me? 5. Was there a certain time gap when more conversations happened? Once you have an idea about these, you can then accordingly do customer support, target ads to popular hangouts and seed content similar to what worked last time. Think beyond Facebook and Twitter : You would be surprised to find how many of your potential users hangout at the less “cooler” hangouts apart from Twitter and Facebook. If you are selling tech products, then find your target audience on forums and blogs for techies. If you are selling bikes, find them in biker forums! The internet is a vast place, and you must go to the uncharted waters. Happy researching! Author: Aditya Rao Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Social Media Adds That Spunk Missing in Traditional Market Research Google Lays Bare Government’s Data Removal Pleas Find Your Way Indoors Using The New Google Maps 6.0: Path Breaking Or Simply Dangerous? You Can Now Post 63, 206 Character While Updating Your Facebook Status The Art Of Blogging: A Serious Online Marketing Tool?

Tagged as: advertising, customer support issues, events, guidelines, market research, mobile, social-media, technology, web

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Google Lays Bare Government’s Data Removal Pleas

by Paul Joseph December 7, 2011 Featured

In the light of recent events, Google has released their transparency reports which lay bare the number of data removal requests the Indian Government has been sending them this year. The Government has decided that all offending user generated content should be screened by these Internet companies and removed. Since Kapil Sibal’s press conference yesterday the netizens of India registered a strong protest against Sibal on all social media channels. Regarding the Government and Mr. Sibal’s stand, Google’s report shows that between this January and July there were 358 content removal requests and 68 content removal from various Government agencies . Some 51% of these requests were partially or fully complied with by Google. The report says that, “ Google received requests from state and local law-enforcement agencies to remove YouTube videos that displayed protests against social leaders or used offensive language in reference to religious leaders. We declined the majority of these requests, and only locally restricted videos that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech, which could incite enmity between communities ”. Google also received a request from a local enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles from its social network, Orkut along with content on Youtube which was found to be critical of the Government. Besides these requests there were some 1739 user data requests and 2439 user account access requests that were made to Google . Google claims in its report that it has complied with 70% of these requests in accordance with its policies and the laws of the country. Google says the increase in requests from the Government is not surprising because Google’s product list has grown thus attracting more users to the company and its products. We feel that curbing the Internet is a wrong move and it will never work. Pre-screening user generated content on Social Media sites is scarily close to censorship and totalitarianism if you remember the novel 1984 by George Orwell. There will be massive protests and it will not be possible for the Government to deal with it. For those like Sibal who feel that the Internet exposes you to bad thing, let me say this, ‘The Internet does not expose you to anything. You tell the browser where to go. That is the biggest control there is’ . If you perceive something to be in bad taste, close the browser or the app. Mr. Sibal and the Government should try to understand how the Internet works and the endless potential it has for making life better rather than concentrating on trifling aspects like objectionable content.

Tagged as: advertising, censorship, kapil sibal, news, social-media, technology, web

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Find Your Way Indoors Using The New Google Maps 6.0: Path Breaking Or Simply Dangerous?

by Paul Joseph December 1, 2011 Featured

Google has been patiently adding a lot of design uplifts to enhance the user experience of all its products. They have also started adding various features to existing products.  Google Maps for Android got one such upgrade yesterday. Now, you can use Google maps to check out the indoor map of any place. It is a small feature but it has a lot of potential. With this new Google Maps 6.0 , you can check the detailed floor plan of a building that you are visiting so that you can get to the place you want to be without any hassles. Y ou must have noticed the ‘blue dot’ that shows your location normally on Google Maps if you are using Android . This dot now shows your position in the floor plan. You can also check the floor plan of each individual floor by specifying the floor number that comes up at the side. The downer is that this feature is currently available for only some airports and malls in the US and Japan. You can check out the list of participating buildings and organizations here.   You can also share your shop/organization’s floor plan by going here . This feature has only been limited to Android for now. It may come later for iOS and other platforms. There is only one over whelming concern that we have with this new feature. It makes almost anyone know what exactly the floor plan of a particular place is. This information could also be used for nefarious means. Criminals have earlier used  Social Media to break into a person’s house and steal their things. The important question is ‘How can we keep our home/business/shop secure from such problems?’ The flow Information and knowledge cannot be stopped in this technologically advanced world. So it is better to be prepared! What do you think about this feature? Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency

Tagged as: features, google-maps, international, mobile, news, social-media, technology, the new google maps 6.0

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