2 Sides of the Social Media Coin

For everyone who comes online anywhere in the world even for as less as 5 minutes a day would be aware of Social Media Marketing as a phenomenon. The buzz world today is Social Media Marketing. From Big brand like Ebay to aspiring start ups like Adgully all are today trying to engage users through Social platforms primarily Facebook. In fact what started as a complex combination, of optimizing efforts on a number of sites like stumble, Digg, Twitter etc, has become focused on optimizing efforts on one platform named Facebook.

Facebook has become the Web in itself. In fact Facebook is even better and people are trying various means to make the most of it. Working on a Facebook campaign is seemingly simple. You create a Fan page, get people to like the page, integrate the Facebook activity to your website and vise-verse, maybe also create some interesting App and there you go, you are a hit on Facebook. Simple? Not quite!

I have been watching (and writing too) a lot of brands trying to make an impact on Facebook with the Indian audience, and have noticed both sides of Social Media Marketing, the Real and the Fake, being practiced. Let us have a look at two examples:

An E-tailing company selling high end fashion garments and Grohe Shower. Both have websites to sell products. Both are into selling high end lifestyle products. Both have Facebook Fan page too. Both have good number of Fans on Facebook. But for someone who is following both these Fan pages, it is not difficult to spot the difference between the approaches and identify the 'Real' and the 'Fake'.

On one page you see products being shown as posts and people seemingly liking and commenting about goodness of the same, and on the other page you see people being encouraged to become volunteers to experience the product, first hand. On one page you can see post after post having exactly the same number of 'Comments' and 'Likes' and on the other page you can see the variety in consumer expression. On one page there is a well thought out Social Media Campaign and on the other there is complete lack of creativity.

Creating a successful Facebook campaign requires a lot of involvement, patience, and creativity. It requires truthfulness towards the idea of engaging with the consumers. From the moment I landed on the Grohe Facebook fan page to the time I received my gift (Hand-shower), the Grohe campaign has impressed me. The ideation, the communication and moderation on the page, the frequency and language of emails and finally the actual delivery of the promised gift, have all been flawless. Hats off to the team that is managing this campaign.

Since the beginning, for the common man, Internet has made a mark as a Free, Fair and Transparent medium. Even today it works best that way !! 

5 ways to make an impact with Web design

Express while conceptualizing:
Be fully self expressive when you are thinking about the page to be created. How a web page needs to come up, cannot be ever documented. It can only be explained by dramatizing, and acting. Facial expressions combined with hand movements and Voice are the best tools for explaining a wireframe to the designer.

Look for Benchmarks in the physical world:

The primary instinct of a designer is to Google for benchmarks, search for templates or look at award winning websites to benchmarks for the job at hand. My experience says that designers who look at the physical world around them, the workspace, the roads outside, the kids room at home and the clouds in the sky: come up with the best designs, because Nature shows which colours create harmony and which distract!

Do not copy Vectors/clip-arts:

Google image search throws 1,230,000 results for 'vector shopping cart'. You cant create an impact by choosing the best out of these, but the art is in integrating your main design theme with a cart symbol if you are creating a Shopping site. Be original, even if it takes that couple of extra hours at work.

Identify the key elements:

This is the most important aspect in creating an impact with web designs. Websites are made up of key elements: A Shopping website has key elements like the Cart, Categories, Search and Price/Discount depictions. A Education website has  Key elements like the Classes, Subjects covered, Tests and teaching modules. The Design must make it easy for the users to identify the section that they are browsing at any point of time.

Create a package:

When a designer sets out on creating web pages, the thought is usually limited to the pages that are to be made. One must always look at the complete packaging rather than the pages that are to be created. There is much more to a website than the pages that people browse. There are elements like System generated mails, Promotional mailers, Social media pages, Widgets, Banner ads, Partnership icons and more. The designs need to be thought through to take care of the complete package, and not only the pages.

For people looking to read about creating usable interfaces for TV, here is the link to my last years post.

Impact of Social Media on E-commerce search results.

E-commerce is growing in India. Existing sites are getting more traffic. New Websites are acquiring new users. New product categories are getting sold online. Logistics companies are creating separate divisions to cater to E-tail orders. Newer ways of selling online are being experimented with and many new online shopping companies are likely to come up in the next one year.

In spite of a lot of product categories coming in to play, there will still be the top categories like, Electronics, Jewelery, Books and a couple more that each E-tailer would like to have in the portfolio. The fact that there are common vendors and sources for products across sites in India, is also not in for any major change in the near future. Another thing which is not going to change soon is the fact that most people will continue to search for products on Google before entering a shopping site.

For people who are into E-commerce business but think of people engagement features as a waste of time must read the next paragraph.

In a Scenario when most product descriptions look alike, there are chances of your page being left out of the results display by Google. Google has the result indexed in its data, but it uses a duplicate-content filter method so the display of the page will largely depend on the extent of Original/ different content on that page. Hence you loose out if you only have the manufacturer-supplied copy, on the product page.
 
When user reviews augment catalog and product descriptions, it increases the crawl-ability of the product pages and also improves the display placement of the product. It is like outsourcing your copy-writing to the users and getting it done for free.

User Reviews not only serve the purpose of SEO, they also add to other factors like trustworthiness of  website, that contribute to conversions.