Corridor Conversations

I have had the privilege to sit in on many agency pitches from Social Media, while some have blown me away with their ideas, but a reasonable number of pitches have left me shocked with their complete lack of understanding of what social media is and what it can do for their clients. I have heard comments from ‘we will make a viral video’ to ‘we will give free burger coupons every week’. My reaction being that you can’t make a viral video but you can hope that your video content goes viral and what do burgers have to do with a tech brand? Anyway if you have been in the social space for long enough you will get my drift and rant on this. I guess since every company on the face of the earth now wants to be on social there is a huge demand for social media agencies, which has given rise to an increasing number of fakes and posers trying to position themselves as social media experts. Here are five easy ways to figure out the winners from the posers. 

Personally I love Infographs and I am always excited to share the best ones with friends and colleagues. Infographics do a great job at illustrating data and concepts in a way that’s attractive and understandable. If you talk to any researcher they will tell you that having the data is just half the battle won, but knowing how to slice it and represent it, is the other important half. So I thought it would be a good idea to curate the 10 most effective Infographics that I was most impacted by in 2011. Hope you enjoy the list as much as I do.

A presentation i am giving early next week on Reputation & Risk Management from a perspective of a Social Media Practitioner.

My presentation focuses on these areas.

If you are a part of the social media fraternity or even a keen observer of social, you would have heard about the big fuss around Klout changing their methodology for scoring online social capital. If the buzz on twitter is to be believed it seems that more people have had their scores downgraded than upgraded as positioned by a blog post from them. But then again it’s always the unhappy people that are the vocal ones in a situation like this rather than the ones who are positively impacted, so it’s hard to refute their claim and possibly wrong as well. Personally I understand the frustration some people may have around their new lowered scores, me being one of the people impacted as well (-ve 10 points). But I believe Klout has done the right thing here and here are my thoughts on this.

I recently had the privilege to speak at “The Futurist CMO Conference” that recently happened at Gurgaon, India. The topic I spoke on was ‘Channels 2.0 – how digital marketing can help OEMs’, well this blog post is to provide general pointers i made on marketing partnerships in that presentation. I am leaving out the digital parts for another time .

I guess we all know the importance of partnerships, especially in the area of marketing. Carlos Slim Helu the Mexican business magnate recently said – “In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself, you have to form alliances.” and he is spot on. We all need alliances and partnerships to achieve our business and marketing goals. The key to is finding the right ones and navigating successfully through it, the latter sometimes being more difficult than the former,  especially when you are dealing with large size organizations that may have different goals and a totally different culture.