bhavishya_KANJHAN

This entry was first posted on the Socialize Blog

It was about this time last year I was struggling to find a topic for my dissertation, a topic that would be academically acceptable and still not make me want to drill a hole in my brain.  Being the Social Media junkie I had become – talking about it, on it – meant I had to incorporate some element of it in my dissertation. Little did I know that my topic of measurement and monitoring of Social Media would get approved.

I decided to come home to Dubai to get involved with the Social Media scene here for two reasons; to witness the evolution of Social Media in the Middle East, and for my mom’s home-made food. More so for the latter.

In the few months I spent researching and covering the local Social Media market, I found there were more Social Media “Experts” than there were genuine enthusiasts. These “gurus” – who claimed perfect knowledge of what is still an imperfect and developing discipline – came across as nothing more than shady snake-oil salesmen. But things are not as dark and gloomy as I may have painted them so far. I did come across marketers with a strong foothold in and a flair for, Social Media – the likes of Abha Malpani, Reuven Proenca, Mita Srinivasan, Akanksha Goel, Baher Al Hakim and Sanjive Khosla.

Coming back to Akanksha Goel – from the very first tweets I saw of hers, I realised we were on the same page when it came to Social Media. She shared the same passion (more like borderline obsession) that I had, and expressed it in ways similar to I did.  This is why it didn’t come as a shock when she came up with the concept of “Socialize”, a social media training house – a name and a project I had secretly considered myself but not given much thought to it. She happened to mention about Socialize on Facebook (where else would the Social Media geek do it) and I didn’t take too long to send her an email about it. On meeting her I realised that the idea behind Socialize was not to do with what most Social Media “experts” were offering – running your Social Media campaign for the business without their involvement – but to sit down with companies, understand their USP and personal challenges and help them enter the Social Media space.  Not a lot of time passed before we were colleagues and were working on helping businesses do exactly that.

Here at Socialize, we really believe in the power of engagive marketing. We believe its time businesses started talking with consumers rather than speaking to them. While most experts will restrict Social Media to Facebook and Twitter with some video production for YouTube thrown in, we believe Social Media is tool-agnostic. It’s not just about having the technical expertise to use the various tools, it’s about understanding the reasoning behind it. Akanksha and I both believe that social is a layer which each company’s marketing plan must possess and that is the attitude we want to help companies adopt. At Socialize, we are trying to change mind-sets of and help them commit to the though process of Social Media marketing.

The obsession to know, in quantified detail, the return achieved on the investment made (both in terms of time and money) in marketing efforts is not new. Especially with regards to a brand, any initiative or project is generally met with the same question ‘What is the ROI?’ . The real question we should, and Raj Anand of Kwiqq did ask is if trackable marketing is the be-all and end-all for brands?

The problem of the lack of directly quantifiable results exists from the days of traditional marketing. The effectiveness of TV & Radio campaigns, Billboards, or Pamphlet distribution could not be definitively determined because a variety of external factors came into play which could enhance or negate those efforts. However when online marketing was first introduced, a conscious effort was made know how effective the campaign was. Analytic tools provided detailed numbers and information on users and potential customers. Location, time spent on site, pages viewed, time spent on each page; all that information was now available in the hands of the online marketer. The most important thing however was that despite the open nature of the Internet, marketers still retained control of the image of their brand, for the most part.

The arrival and adoption of Social media changed that though. Numbers on engagement and conversations were not available; atleast not in terms of how they affected the brand. Most importantly the managers had started to lose control over their brand image as the consumers of the brand were becoming co-creators of it as were the former controllers (managers). The way Seth Godin sees it, marketing is both an art and a science and the marketer has to choose what hat to wear; that of the scientist or that of the artist.

Working on the new marketing initiatives requires an increasing use of the Artist hat. The results of its employment, once again, aren’t necessarily quantifiable, but they’re still in line with the original aims of the brand; to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. The second aim is especially catered to as individual two way communication initiated by the brand (or its representative) with the consumer facing a problem (with the product/service) will bring the consumer from the negative point to a point further down the positive line than if a customer were to have not had a problem to begin with. And it is this function, of adding value, to the brand (and its perception of it) that serves to be the unquantifiable, yet still essential benefit of Social Media.