Iffort's Blog | Social Media & Web Marketing Company

Last Saturday, about ‘25′ folks gathered for a meet which was an Open discussion and a Planning forum for ‘Noida’s First Ever Social Media Chat’. The Open Social Media Meetup was organized on 14th August at Barista, Shopprix Mall Noida. The attendees were working in a different field of career and very interested in Social Media. There were scholars from MDI Gurgaon, Facebook app developers, community managers, affiliate marketers, bloggers, SEO executives, a freelance movie director and many young entrepreneurs.

Some of the Attendees:

Ananda Pillai – PhD. Social Media Research Student, MDI Gurgaon
Deepak Pandit – Entrep. and Research Student, MDI Gurgaon
Kinshuk Sunil – Community Manager, Gurgaon
Swagat Sen – Documentary Film Maker
Aditya Kumar – SEO/Web Marketing Professional
Sunil Singh – Community Manager
Asif Ahmed – Blogger/Affiliate Marketer
Siddharth Goyal – CEO, www.kitnebaje.com
WebKul Team
Bhaskar Reddy
Mita Majumdar
Sunny Jindal – Director & Co-Founder itemperance
Daksh – Director & Co-Founder iffort

The meetup started with each member giving a brief introduction about their field of work and sharing why he or she was interested by social media. Each one of them defined Social Media in their own way with some saying that social media is an inflow and outflow of data while another saying that social media is non-definable.

Attendees at Social Media Chat Noida

Since this was a first of its kind meetup in NOIDA, so the primary agenda was to discuss what can be achieved from these meetups and to chalk out a schedule or a plan for similar meetups in the future.

Various issues were also discussed, such as analytics in social media, the growing relevance of social media as well as the pros and cons of social media. One very interesting issue that was discussed was that of people tweeting while they are in a meeting. Some people supported the act as they thought that realtime tweeting increased the audience of a meeting, while some others thought that realtime tweeting distracted the tweeter and this made him just physically present over there while mentally somewhere else!

Participants at Social Media Chat Noida

There was so much discussion going on that we lost track of time and had to be reminded by Barista that it was time to wrap it up. Most probably the future meetups will be held at Iffort Consulting’s office in Sectoe-65 NOIDA.

We have also created a fan page on Facebook for these meetups so that everyone can interact under one roof, brainstorm and connect with each other. If you are in/around Noida and hungry about ‘Social Media’ you can join the conversation on Social Media Chat Noida Fan Page by clicking here.

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Aug 12

Facebook and India

Our team recently made a visual presentation which talks about ‘Facebook’ and its penetration in India. We have tried to cover some interesting insights via the presentation.

We hope you would like it If you have any questions about the presentation or running a business and wanting to explore the potential of ‘Facebook’ feel free to get in touch with us. We would be glad to help.

Facebook and India

View more presentations from Iffort.

Technology Partners: itemperance consulting

Image Credits:Eric Parker

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Aug 5

TEDx Delhi: My Experience

Talks happen. Often with a few set goals AND it may or may not make difference. But who cares. And that’s where ted enters. TED is a confluence-of IDEAS. Ideas which has already changed. But herein lies it’s ingenuinity. To have people who have and who will upturn the world with ideas that will resonate beyond the realm of the individual mind.

My curiosity as a result was strong enough to brave the rain and once-a- Sunday laziness.

The Gala Inauguration: TEDx Delhi Facebook Page

16 speakers.

9:30-6:30 p.m.

Talks by people who have gone beyond the ideas and implemented them as well. Encouraging? Yes.

But the question was what are we-the audience are to do beyond the listening and preaching or……….?

It’s about meeting those who have and who want to make a change. Change here would mean something that goes outside the boundary of the material or common notion. Change with a mission. That mission could be anything but positive enough to cause the ripple in our herd like tendencies.

So when Shabnam Virmani spoke I had tears swelling in my eyes. Not an idea but a message-KABIR. The austere saint who she had awoken. Not a surprise then that the whole audience rose to give her a heartfelt gratitude.

When the humble Chewang Norphel spoke, one might have ignored him like any other ordinary mortal, but it was the work that stood across. Or when an octogenarian,V.B.Mishra spoke, we’re exalted at his level of persistence. It makes you believe that dreams can be dreamt.

Rabbi Shergill Credits: TEDx Delhi Facebook Page

Leaving one or two guest speakers, the rest were brilliant. Not just some passing ideas but mavericks who DO as well. Their contribution may not always be good enough to show in the nation’s progress card, but are powerful enough to bring smile across faces.

But it was the snack time which was the heart of the event. There was idea banging across tables, networking, sharing and food was probably the last thing in our minds

It was not about meeting a person but sharing the values and goals. So I was happy to meet this guy,among others, Srini. He happens to have been an engineer, who chucked his job abroad to volunteer as a Teach for India scholar. But my guess it’s just the tip of the iceberg. What lies ahead is merging of those brilliant thoughts and submerging, re-merging.

TED reconfirmed a belief of mine-that ideas are worth it and if executed well could have the potential to be life-saving.

It’s been a few days. But I’m yet to gulp it all. Ted is a message. So one lifetime may be too short, but hope is never to be lost. So the IDEAS are to be cajoled not shunned.

TED is not about networking on business deals but on sharing ideas. Ideas that cannot be confined to the materials, political, social etc. walls of the of the society.

So before closing in I’ve one thing to add DON’T BE but ………………BECOME.

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Note from Admin: This post marks the blogging debut of ‘Polo’ who is the latest addition to our growing army. A keen observer, she comes from a fine-arts background and here she talks about her experience at TEDx Delhi. Hope you enjoy it, like we did

Polo: Image Credits @Naina - Studioaside.com

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Aug 3

Contribution at PaulWriter.com

I was given a kind invitation by Padmaja Nagarur from Paul Writer Strategic Services Pvt. Ltd. to contribute to their newly launched B2B portal www.paulwriter.com. The team is headed by Jessie Paul, who was previously the Chief Marketing Officer of Wipro’s IT business. For more information, you can visit their website www.paulwriter.com.

Here is a write-up which was first posted exclusively at www.paulwriter.com. It talks about some of the aspects that your brand can consider before taking the plunge into ‘Facebook’.

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Facebook: ‘4’ tips for your brand to get it right

It was conceptualized as a small time college network where Harvard university students could share pictures and messages with their buddies. Time has passed by and since then, Facebook has grown to half a billion global users and would fall next only to China and India if it were a country. Talk about users or talk about brands – the adoption has been equally phenomenal! If users are creating profiles, sharing pictures and uploading videos, brands are building their Fan pages to attract and engage with their target audience.

Back home here in India, the story isn’t much different. Facebook has surged ahead of Orkut in terms of percentage growth rate and by the time this write-up goes live its strong Indian user-base of 12million+ people would have grown an inch closer to the popular rival Orkut.

With this comes the opportunity; a chance for your company to engage with your prospects, identify and connect with people who would be interested in your product’s next offering.

If you are still evaluating the platform and are trying to estimate the possible returns, here are a few tips which you would want to consider:

It doesn’t work for all – Business & Stakeholder Introspection

Creating a campaign on Facebook & nurturing an online community requires a lot of time and effort. As a conscious business owner, you would certainly want to equate ‘time/effort spent’ to returns. The bottom line is, Facebook isn’t a one size fits all solution. There would be businesses for whom Facebook presence is not at all a necessity.

Whether or not you need to be on Facebook depends on your industry vertical & the type of your product and service offering. A 10-second TV commercial for your moisturiser shampoo brand costs a tonne of rupees and that isn’t even targeted since your product is meant only for girls in the age bracket of 18-24.

Here on Facebook you can define your age group, demographics and then run a targeted campaign resulting in subsequent cost savings when compared to Print/TV advertisement.

On the other hand, if your prospects aren’t thriving on these communities building a dead brand-page isn’t perhaps worth the effort. The reason: Your people are simply not watching you because they aren’t there and even if somebody is he isn’t your target.

Define your expectations

Now that you have realized that your vertical fits into the Facebook schema, the next step is to define your objectives. These objectives are going to be a subset and combination of your top level business goals, expectations from the online medium and from Facebook as a social network.

Make a list of these objectives and prioritize these in the order of importance. Let us say, if you are a beverage company examples of some objectives could be:

Attract my target audience and build a loyal fan base.
Position my beverage as the favourite energy drink of youth
Provide a platform to my customers, where they can learn about our brand’s new offerings.
Create fun contest s and drive end-user participation

Synch your needs with Business functions

The next step is to map your expectations with respective business units. E.g. it could be a need arising from your marketing function or from HR or from operations. At the end of it, you need to understand what all my stakeholders require and which units do these stakeholders represent?

Set your Metrics

Lastly, a thorough set of metrics needs to be defined against which your brand’s performance on Facebook can be evaluated. It is absolutely vital, as these metrics will help in ROI calculation and deciding a future course of action. The success or failure criterion of your activities will depend on these metrics. Some examples of these metrics are:

Level of engagement of your brand and its definition
Relevance of rise/fall in number of page fans in a month’s time
Averages Likes and comments on your Facebook page
Click through rates for your Facebook ads.
Monthly traffic to your website from Facebook

Remember that any activity you need to justify to your cost centre should ideally have metrics in place.

Although it takes less than a minute to build your Facebook presence, these are some of the possible approaches you can take. What is your Facebook plan? Share your tips with us!

This exclusive guest post was written by Daksh Sharma is the Director and Co-founder at Iffort, a people centric digital marketing & a web-strategy consulting firm. For more information you can read his blog http://themarketingblog.wordpress.com and visit his company’s website www.iffort.com.

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Jun 19

Demystifying Facebook Fan Page Insights

From the time Facebook has provided the facility to make a Facebook Page for public figures, organizations, bands and celebrities etc.; social media got a new way to walk competitively. Go to Facebook Pages list (http://www.facebook.com/pages/) and you will see how users are sticking around this social media site.

Facebook Page can be a good promotion tool for your organization and your brand name. Making a Facebook Page can help you to make your brand name more famous and connected to the customers. You can share your product updates, useful information and organizational progress with your customers and can get reviews, comments & suggestions from users. It will help you to develop your business strategies and product map.

Facebook has integrated social media monitoring tool in Facebook Page called ‘Insights’, that helps you to monitor and analyze your Fans, Page Interactions, user behavior and demographics etc. You can use this option via ‘Insights’ box on the left sidebar of your Facebook Page. Facebook has just made some changes in the Insight tool. You can check out the new version at this URL- http://www.facebook.com/insights. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jun 15

6 Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Tools

In this fast moving world where social media traffic is flowing like anything and we are witnessing more and more organizations entering in this playground. Companies are developing their marketing strategies based on the context of social media. Either it could be making a business page on Facebook or posting short messages on twitter, companies are competing to establish an identity for their brand in ‘Social Media’.

To make a strategy better you need to keep an eye on the market to know about the various activities that are happening around. The same goes for Social Media Marketing. You need to monitor your social media activities and analyze the competition behavior.

For brands, it is better to know what people are saying about them, their products and reputation in various blogs, social communities, forums and micro blogging sites like twitter. With that comes the need of social media monitoring and analytics.

How will we do it?

Now that we have established the need of social media monitoring, the next thing is how to use it?

To know what is happening around social media, you need to discover conversations and activities in real time. You have to analyze and measure trends; know the geographical and demographical information of the users and evaluate the positive and negative opinions that are displaying in social sites.

Some really nice tools and services are available to enhance your experience of social media monitoring and analytics. Here are the finest of them-

Tools and Services

Radian6

Radian6 gives a good platform of engaging with your customers. It helps you to listen to your customers, measuring the influence of their talks and monitoring buzz. You can take a test drive here

Tweet Deck

TweetDeck is a powerful tool to synchronize your social accounts to your desktop. It uses Adobe AIR to give you a desktop interface. You don’t need to open your browser again to be in touch with your social media. It supports multiple social accounts including Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare and Google buzz.

Scoutlabs

As they have mentioned on their homepage, they are helping brand teams to tune into social media. You can have a look on their Case Study page (http://www.scoutlabs.com/case-study/) to know about clients like Fortex Group, Disney, Netflix etc.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic, as interesting service as their tagline that says, ‘inhale the web’. Just type any topic and hit enter key, you will find a single page displaying results about what people on various sites like Twitter, Bing, Google, Youtube, Digg, Friendfeed and more, are talking about that specific topic.

Trackur

Track your reputation in social media, gain valuable insights, make your marketing campaigns better and monitor social sentiments; all of these are the services provided by Trackur. You can register for a free account and try its services that are starting just at $18/month for personal use.

Twazzup

See the real time news and updates that are happening on the web for a particular topic. Results are displayed from various sources including live pictures and news blogs. The ‘Insights’ feature of the site displays various metrics like keywords, Hashtags, Top Links, Top Influencers and Sentiment etc. Currently, it is in alpha. You can request for an account.

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May 6

News Coverage on Business India

The latest issue of Business India dated May 16,2010, covered Iffort’s study “Indian Companies on Twitter: A Usage Study”.

The story titled “The Twitter Generation-Life in 140 characters” has been compiled by Parthasarathi Swami and Hiral Sheth.

The news story basically talks about the sudden popularity of Twitter among various sections of the society, like the business organisation,politics,the entertainment industry etc. The story also focuses on figuring out the age-group that is most active on Twitter, and what do they use it for.

We can also see a comparison between Twitter and other social networking sites like Facebook,MySpace,Orkut etc.

Quotes from the new story mentioning Iffort:

If a company is known by the men it keeps on projects such as social media,India Inc is rates very poorely. According to Daksh Sharma,co-founder and delivery head of Iffort Consulting,a start-up in the Web strategy and social media consulting space,very few Indian companies are on Twitter and Facebook.

Iffort Consulting has just completed a study titled Indian Companies on Twitter: A Usage Study. It looked at companies in ninie verticals-information technology (IT)/IT-enabled services, telecom, fast-moving consumer goods, healthcare, internet, finance, logistics, media and automobiles.

Here is the entire News Story on Business India May 16,2010 issue:

Business India May 2010 – Twitter Cover Story

View more documents from Iffort.

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May 1

One-month old at Iffort!!

Hi everyone, i am here again, writing a blog for Iffort after almost a month Yes, I have completed a month at Iffort and it has been a fruitful journey for me.

Working at Iffort is very different than working at any other office,because the environment here is just so youthful and energetic that even if there is a lot of work to do, the people around won’t let you feel the burden. We recently celebrated my “One-month Anniversary at Iffort” in the office, we got a cake and had a small party

Apart from having fun, i got to know about a lot of new things that i did not know earlier. Every new task that is given to me is explained in detail and still if i have a doubt, which i always have i am always free to ask.

So, to put it all together working at Iffort is really working out well for me and as i wanted it to be it is proving to be a great learning experience that i will always remember

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Apr 18

Facebook and India

This is a statistical post, which collates data from various blog-posts, press-releases and news sites. The objective is to analyze the usage trends for one of the biggest sites on the Internet – Facebook and world’s second most populous country – India.

India has always been a vital country for Facebook’s growth plans. 8 million Indians are connecting on Facebook with their friends, family, and other people they know, both within India and around the globe.

Last month Facebook had announced the opening of their India office in Hyderabad. The critical aspect is that when it comes to India, there is a lot being said about the phenomenal growth demonstrated by us as a nation. However, by and large there is dearth of qualitative data which can be used by decision makers in the long run.

Some pointers

YOY Growth – No. of Facebook users in India have grown from 1,561,000 in March 2009 to 7,809,800 in March 2010 marking an astronomical 400% rise.
Monthly Growth – From February 2010 to March 2010, Facebook witnessed an 11.9% growth in India. (Numbers up from 6,342,800 in February 2010 to 7,095,760 in March 2010).
Drop in an Ocean: These numbers at a global level constitute 2% of Facebook’s entire user-base approximately. (India’s 8 million is 2% of Facebook’s global user-base of 400 million).
Facebakers.com: Additionally, a website called Facebakers.com presents the number of users on Facebook in India as 8,702,700. This website claims to be updated daily and that is why the numbers are higher than Nick Burcher’s study. The break-up has been made as follows: Number of male users on Facebook in India: 5,889,740 and Number of female users on Facebook in India: 2,589,600.
Male Domination: As the website puts it 69% males access Facebook in India and 31% females access Facebook. 47% users in the (18-24) age bracket accesss Facebook and 31% users in the (25-34) access Facebook.
Interestingly, according to Facebakers.com Facebook’s overall penetration in India is 0.76 % and the overall online penetration in India is 10.74 %.
Californication: Number of Facebook users in California are 13,531, 540 almost 5 million more than India’s 8,702,700

India Facebook Statistics Age Graph (via Facebakers.com)

What are the reasons that can be attributed towards Facebook’s phenomenal rise and Orkut’s epic fall? For how long do you think will this growth trend continue?

NOTE: This data has been referenced from various websites on the Internet and might not necessarily indicate the actual numbers.

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Apr 12

We’re Hiring

Hi there, to add strength to our current team we are recruiting a skilled designer/graphics professional with around (1-2 years) of experience in the following areas.

Job Description Skill Set:

Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Flash
CorelDraw X4
HTML, CSS, JQuery

The candidate must possess following skills:

Good understanding of Web 2.0
Good understanding of the CSS based web design
Good understanding of Flash Designing
Excellent creative & visualization skills
Good communication skills (writing & speaking)
Able to interact with multiple teams

Benefits include:

Working with a young vibrant team, a typical startup environment
Opportunity to be your own boss
Learn & Practice multi disciplinary skills in the domains of Business, Techonology & Social media
Enjoy office tea, sandwiches and weekend cricket

Please note:

The job profile is based out of Noida. If you are interested, feel free to drop us an email note on jobs@iffort.com with your CV. Remuneration is not a bar for the ideal candidate. Incase you know someone who would be interested for the job, please let us know!

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