There are many platforms for doing marketing of business and internet has provided the most convenient way promote your business with minimal resources. Businesses, small or big, are battling hard to occupy top spots on the google search results. Google has now become the resource for any individual, if you want anything you can ‘google it’. Thus if any business is not on google search results or google listings then it is already loosing potential customers to its competitors. Just being on listing is not enough for a business, because out of 100 or more listings the customers will only look at the top listings on first page of the results. Like any competition, it is necessary for any business to dominate the results. There are many ways for doing that:

FIRST STEP: GETTING A WEBSITE

To mark the online presence any business must have a decent website which is candid a user friendly. When a potential customer accesses the website, he/she should be able understand the value proposition of the business / product easily, without any hassle.

SECOND STEP: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

There will be 100s of companies which will be offering the similar services / products in the market, thus it is very important to perform a search engine optimization which enhances the probability of showing the concerned company on the first page of the google search results. Search Engine optimization (SEO) technique is a method to predict the probable search keywords that any customer might use during searching. It is basically done using html coding and linking the metadata of the site / page to the desired keywords. It is recommended to have an organized website.

THIRD STEP: GOOGLE PLACE LISTING

When a customer searches for any product or services, he/she will look for the companies which are located nearby. Google place listing is done by simply filling out a form on google. The company must have valid address to access this facility. In the search results it will take an additional position.

FOURTH STEP: YOUTUBE

It I a fact that visual aids are the best way of communicating a message. YouTube is the best platform to promote the mission, vision, services and products of any company to the customers. When people see the thing they are search they can easily access and decide upon it. This is also way to enhance visibility on search results.

FIFTH STEP: OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Other social media websites like FACEBOOK, TWITTER, LINKEDIN, PINTREST, VIMEO, etc give the forum to communicate with customers. Customers can put up their queries and company can answer or discuss the possibilities. This gives a sense of trust and loyalty to the customer.

Nestle is one the prominent players in Food & Beverages Industry. With major competitors like PepsiCo & CocaCola, Nestle is thinking a step ahead to transform its marketing strategy. Nestle has identified the significance of digital marketing in today’s competitive market. Facebook page posts, Tweets, YouTube videos, subscriptions, shares retweets, etc are the trend on the digital market. They one-way or the other affect the consumer interest. Understanding the criticality of the scenario, the management at Nestle has conceptualized a Digital Acceleration Team.

Experts from different domains have been teamed up with professional digital marketing team to generate huge consumer related data which are posted and different social media platforms. Nestle has wide range of products comprising of candies, bars, ice creams, snacks, beverages, etc which again has diverse range according to the countries. To handle such a varied range of products and diverse consumer base, Nestle has assigned the job to Social Bakers.

Social Bakers is analysing and comparing real time data to enhance the digital presence of Data. Due to this initiative Nestle has not only achieved the top spot in Food and beverages industry but also has achieved the glory of being world’s most active company on social media.

Sarah Sauder, Nestle Digital Acceleration team says “It is the social media digital experience that is driving the people at Nestle to innovate. It is very necessary to process and convert the huge amount data we receive through Social Baker into meaning insights to motive the team.”

This innovative approach of Nestle has earned it reputation in the industry. 1.2 billion Products sold per day- a growing percentage with digital links, 210 Million Facebook fans, and 1500 pieces of content published in social media daily, 20000 plus Nestle employees on internal social media platforms and 42% of traffic come through cell phones. Nestle has triggered the revolution on Social Media Marketing.

Source link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTqPKyJ6YSM

5S, the Japanese words: Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, & Shitsuke is one the vital component of Lean Methodology. The beauty of this concept is that this can be implemented in any business domain. Marketing has been an important area which has a huge responsibility of connecting to customers, propagating the value of the company and the products.

SEIRI: SORT

Organizing the strategy or ideas is the first step of any successful marketing campaign. It is very essential to remove unnecessary items that block manpower and time. For an efficient strategy keep it clean and precise – to the point. Say we are selling a Car, then identify those activities that are relevant from customer point of view and focus on selling those. This way it is easy to focus on the selling propositions which may convert the queries into sales.

SEITON: STRAIGHTEN or SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT

Sticking on to deadlines is very necessary for any business strategy to succeed. For a marketing strategy involving diverse customer base and demographics, it is very essential to have systematic plan for the activities to meet the deadlines. For instance the strategy applied by Toyota across different countries is different. In Asian countries potential customers take longer time for deciding a purchase and still Toyota sells larger number of cars in China & India than in Europe. They succeed for their well-ordered activities to understand the customer’s requirements.

SEISO: SHINE

The marketing team must feel very easy to understand and execute the strategy. If the team is unaware of the USP’s of the product or the company then they can never educate the customers in proper way. Shine or keeping it clean is a strategy for companies to follow. They must not mix and match the ideas and concepts of different projects and avoid creating a mess.

SEIKETSU: STANDARDIZE

Learning for different projects must be recorded and deployed in other horizontal projects to avoid similar problems. There must be a practice by the management to identify the customers interaction records and discussed with the team about the good things and bad things that were happened. How to counter similar customers or how to answer similar queries.

SHITSUKE: SUSTAIN

Sustenance is the key to success. The whole process or system of marketing activities must be sustainable. It is necessary to identify the failure modes and eliminate them by thorough brain storming.

Japanese companies like Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, etc have implemented 5S in every business vertical and their success is evident from the fact that they are growing rapidly day by day. For start ups this methodologies are rather necessary, due to low funds and tight schedules.

Source links: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAB38D39A6609F9AD

Peter Thiel is one of the most successful serial entrepreneurs of our generation and his “Zero to One” is intended to be a guidebook to any entrepreneur. Thiel’s reasoning is practical and based on solid analytics, sometimes contradicting to popular believes. The book starts with one of them. Popular believe is globalization is more important for a better future (in business scenario), i.e. taking an existing technology and scaling up. The writer’s argued that without original innovation or technology, globalization is not sustainable. He referred globalisation as taking from 1 to n (horizontal growth) and technology as taking from 0 to 1 (vertical growth).

“Zero to one” is not only about business strategies but also a reflection of capitalism and 21^st century world economy, sometimes offering hindsight. The author points out 4 lessons learnt for the Dotcom Boom.

1. Make incremental growth:
2. Stay lean and flexible:
3. Improve on the competition
4. Focus on the product, not sales

Thiel argues in favour of creative monopoly as start-up’s ambition rather than having a competitive edge over other. This is in tuned to changing an industry like Apple, Google, Tesla etc or simply put taking things from “Zero to One”. To quote from the book “More than anything else, competition is an ideology- the ideology- that pervades our society and distorts our thinking “. He isn’t a firm believer of luck and in the chapter “you are not a lottery ticket” He breaks down the whole idea of viewing success as a matter of chance into different eras and world economy. The concept is then analysed in different lights like optimistic philosophy, national policy etc. This can be a little more detailed than needed for a regular reader, but to put in a nutshell, Thiel’s book is not just another inspirational bible for dreamers but a bluebook for understanding market dynamics, learning curve of an entrepreneur. Every idea is practical, thought provoking, presented with stunning clarity and backed up with extreme detailing.

There are so many parameters Thiel projected which are important to build a successful company. Being one of the most prominent VC’s himself, the author talks about the power game of venture capitalist funding. The Relationship between the co- founders/early employees, importance of recruiting the right ones and company culture these are the foundation of a good company. Thiel explains why nerds hate marketing and why marketing is as important as building the product. The book is divided to different chapters touching different aspects of start up journey and parameters, be it the psychology of successful start up founder or identifying the need of the hour. Most importantly there is something to learn for everyone who is a part of the business ecosystem. It starts with a fundamental question “what important company is no one building?” and the whole journey is to figure out the essence or the characteristics of building a successful important company.

But being a brisence of “zero to one”. In between the sharp analytics of business data and tactics, Thiel’s passion for shaping the future, predicting possibilities is what inspires the reader to dream more. The author emphasises on the importance of searching for secrets, creating a leap in technology and discovering the unknown possibilities in multiple occasions. The conclusion of the book is actually a question, “singularity or stagnation? “Where Thiel discusses the future of mankind. But it’s the future generation of the entrepreneurs who will have the responsibility to shape it better. This book helps the reader to realise that very deep connection that the product or company he builds, can make a difference to shape the future and change the world. Metaphorically this is passing the button from one generation of dreamers to the next to carry forward the legacy.

Reference Heading                                                                  Personal Heading

Title:  What is your social media strategy?                         Name: Khusubu Agrawalla

Author: H. James Wilson, PJ Guinan, Salvatore Parise,

and Bruce D. Weinberg                                                          Date Submitted:16/11/2015

Source: Harvard Business Review                                        Course: Internet Marketing

Date:    August 2011                                                               Assignment: Article Review

In the recent years the trends in social media marketing has picked up rapidly. Every organisation is fighting hard for the top place on the Google Search page rankings or the number of Facebook page likes or a huge number of followers & retweets on twitter page or number of YouTube views or many other and their counts. Internet and online connectivity has made it very easy for Big Companies to reach their customers. In this race to maximize their reach, companies often forget to plan out their social media strategy. It is very important to have a strategy that is aligned with the organisational strategy. To understand different organisational strategy, the team in the article conducted a survey on more than 1100 businesses across different industries and conducted 70 in person interviews of different executives who are in social media initiative domain for their organisation. The research found four different strategies based on a company’s tolerance for uncertain outcomes and the level of results sought.

Predictive Practitioner: This is a strategy where the organisation knows what outcome parameters they are looking for, which can be measured with established tools. There is less uncertainty about the result. It works well for the organisations with little cross-functional coordination among different projects. Each project has a clear business objective so that the social media campaign of one project has least impact on other projects. For example Clorox used social media to create a virtual R&D center where they asked different questions to the customer regarding their product and incentive them based on the quality of response. This allowed Clorox to get direct consumer insight. One success story of social media use where Clorox posted a question about a specific compound for its salad dressings. Five quality responses came in quickly and the company got the solution in a day. As a reward they brought the responder to the product development process.

Creative Experimenter: The creative experimenter embraces uncertainty. They run a pilot project to test the water and learn from the mistakes. They are not worried much about the results and predefined outcomes. Here the organisations overall objective is to learn from social media projects by listening to the customer and employees from resulting conversations. For example the IT services giant EMC ran a pilot run in an effort to reduce the use of outside contractors by introducing one platform called EMC/ONE that helped employees network and connect on projects. If the project had failed then they would have tried some other approach. But EMC/ONE was a success and it generated more than $40 million in savings.

Social Media Champion: Organisations which follow this strategy launch large initiatives designed for predictable outcomes. In such organisations there is a centralized group dedicated towards coordinating and managing social media projects across all departments and functions. This centralized group develops policies and guidelines for social media champions. They involve different stake holders to promote and participate in social media projects. This group shares the best practices and learning from different projects throughout the organisation. Ford’s 2009 Fiesta Movement Campaign is a successful example of such strategy. Ford lent 100 Fiestas for six months to recipients who would use social media to discuss their experiences. Within six months the contestants had posted more than 60,000 items, which garnered millions of clicks, 4.3 million YouTube Views as a result the company gained 37% prelaunch brand awareness rate. This campaign also generated 50,000 sales leads to new customers. This scale of result is possible in case of traditional campaigning after spending tens of millions dollar.

Social Media Transformer: This approach enables companies to improve the way they do business. They try to incorporate the changing technology in their day to day activities of the business for both internal and external stake holders. They tightly integrate the social media technologies with how they learn and work. For example Cisco launched Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), a social business platform to facilitate internal and external collaboration and decentralize decision making. Cisco also makes excellent use of video by conducting most trainings and meeting by using video technology. All these technological advancements accelerated “time to trust” among Cisco’s stakeholders.  It enabled them of quick knowledge sharing within the organisation across different geographical locations.

I choose to review this article because it raised the fundamental question that every executive should think before deciding his/her organisation’s social media strategy. Every business decision should have some strategy and the author tried to implement this concept in social media field. Social media is not only Facebook, twitter or similar forums. It is also about creating a social connection among the employees. Every organisation has limited resources for each activity, so it is very vital for them to choose the strategy where they want to use their resources rather than spending randomly on different social media. The article also emphasizes on how the company’s strategies should not only adopt today’s social media technologies but also it should guide managers to adapt to future technological platforms. To avoid the ambiguity about the strategy the author suggests a matrix with few question. The executives can answer these questions in the matrix to know more about their strategy. The author did a very good job in keeping his thoughts precise and to the point. In each strategy he stated a strong examples to illustrate his point. Many companies make a good start in adopting the social media but due to lack of strategy they fail to ramp up the efforts in long run. So it is the responsibility of the manager to think about both the long term and the short term effects of any strategy. I will highly recommend to each executive to think about the above strategies before taking any social media decision.

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