Social Media Marketing

Before the advent of media and advertisements, people were buying products and services through word of mouth of their friends and family. It is human nature to be curious about other people’s experience and reviews about product or service. For example, people would ask their friends and family about a doctor before seeing him/her for treatment. Then came an era when people started learning about more options through televised and printed advertisements. They were still asking their friends and families for their experience but the amount of information they would receive was very little because they knew limited number of people and not all of them had experience with every product and service.

Same way, companies were getting limited amount of information about their customers likes, dislikes, needs and wants. Companies would get very limited amount of information through surveys and many times the information they would receive was biased because of the bias in survey design or the population sample. Most of the times the information was not real time and it would take months or years before companies would identify a pattern and make adjustment in their products or services.

With the advent of Internet and social media, people are learning not only about their friends’ and families’ experience but also about the experience of community, region and people around the world. Consumers trust other consumers’ experiences and reviews more than a speech from sales person or model in advertisement. Social media has given consumers freedom and platform to put their thoughts and experiences in front of the world. It also works in favor of companies because comments put by customers does marketing for their products.  Sometimes user reviews and comments also work as survey and hence learning for companies. According to one statistic, the number of users on facebook is third largest after the population of India and China. No advertisement platform can reach such a huge consumer base through traditional way of marketing

Social media has not only become a great platform for marketing commercial products but also for talent marketing. More and more companies and recruiters are searching talents and posting jobs on websites like Linkedin. 97% of all HR and recruiters use Linkedin in their recruiting efforts. 77% of all job openings are posted on Linkedin. Social media is changing the method of applying for a job by making companies visit applicant profile rather than applicants posting their resume to company website.

Source: http://socialmediatoday.com/leaderswest/1440796/infographic-77-all-jobs-are-posted-linkedin

Source: http://socialmediatoday.com/leaderswest/1440796/infographic-77-all-jobs-are-posted-linkedin

Social media like blogging and twitter has changed the field of journalism. Blogs and tweets have provided platform for young and less experienced journalists to post their articles and throughts. Overall, social media has created advantage for both consumers and marketers by introducing freedom and transparency to the process.

Sources:

/http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/08/marketing-is-dead

http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/infographic-linkedin-user-statistics-network-profiles-groups-applications/

Paid vs. Organic Search

Paid search has been very popular among many businesses as an inexpensive and effective way to market their products. For a long time companies have been using television, magazines and newspapers to market their products. The biggest issue with those mediums of marketing was that companies were paying to advertise their products to those whom they were not targeting. The other issue was that the companies were not getting valuable data such as who is watching/reading their advertisements, user reviews etc. In engineering terms, there was no feedback cycle for companies through conventional ways of marketing. Paid search has opened doors for small businesses and made it possible for them to reach consumers beyond their local reach. Based on information provided on wordstream blog, businesses make an average of $2 for every $1 they spend on AdWord. Please click this link to see some stats and success stories.

Now the biggest question is whether organic search is better or paid search?

Organic search is free. In organic search, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing direct your search to the website links for free based on the match between keywords and the content in the website. It is also called search engine optimization (SEO). In SEO, marketers have to put more effort in designing their websites content in such a way that it appears in result for relevant searches. So even though one is not paying directly to Google, he/she is spending more time and money on optimizing website. Getting listed among the top organic search results draws lots of traffic as many people consider it more credible compared to paid advertisement. The downside is that it takes longer to get to the relevant content and if the search engine algorithm gets upgraded then the ranking could drop and all the time and money spent behind website design goes to waste.

Paid search requires companies to set keywords, which when used in the search directs users to the advertising link. Advertisers only pay when users click on the link and visit the content. Paid search is very useful when marketers are trying to target specific audience, geography, season etc. Organic search is not effective to narrow the audience. Contextual search option is available in paid search. In general paid search provides better control over organic search.

In the end, whether to use organic or paid search depends on need.  It makes more sense for the companies with specific target market to use paid search. 

Sources:

http://www.brand5.com/organic-vs-paid-search

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233159#

Search Engine War

With Microsoft expanding into the search engine business, the competition has become interesting and fierce in search engine market. For years, Google had not much competition in the search engine business but now it has a reason to worry for a long term future. Even though Google is still dominating the market, Bing has grown faster in a short time. It will still take Bing years to catch up with Google but considering some of the missteps taken by Google in recent past, people have become more alert. Click this link to read more about some of the missteps taken by Google. In this situation it is nice to have couple of alternate choices like Yahoo and Bing. Both competitors are continuously making their search engines better to compete with Google. Below are some of the comparisons.

Bing uses virtual robots called spiders to map a website. Once a website is submitted to bing, the spider automatically collects all the information about that website such as content, tags, links to other pages etc and maps it. Spider can read both static and dynamic content, flash files and video content of the website. It constantly looks for updates on your website and captures them. Bing has added some features such as news, maps, images, videos etc to compete with Google.

Yahoo uses its own web-crawler technology. Yahoo also uses a selection based search in which users can use their mouse to search and the results are displayed in a moving frame. Yahoo charges certain amount to the commercial websites and non commercial websites are listed for free. Besides search, Yahoo provides range of services same as Google.

Google uses combination of technologies such as crawler, query processor and indexer. Google uses a patented algorithm called pagerank that helps rank pages to match the search string. Besides search, Google also provides features such as weather, stock quotes, maps, news, calculator, images, videos, shopping, apps, books, email, blogs etc. Google’s adword service is very popular among businesses to market their products.

Greetings

Greetings Everyone

This is my first blog ever. I had never blogged before so I am very excited to start sharing my thoughts and receive any feedback (either positive or criticism) from you.

Just to introduce myself. My name is Vandan Sheth and I am a Chemical Engineer by education. I was born and raised in India and came to USA in 2005 when I was 22 years old to pursue my masters in ChemE. It's been wonderful 9 years. I have made many good friends ( from all nationalities), met my soul mate and learned a lot about the local culture. The land of opportunity has been a great teacher and a place that I can call my home now.

One thing that I have experienced so far is that internet has made the world small. Computer and Internet are the innovations that have traveled across the borders faster than any other innovations.I remember the days when we had to go to places called "Cyber Cafes" to access internet and pay by hours. That was in year 1997 in India and then by year 2000, many of us in India had personal computers with dial-up internet connections so we did not have to go to Cyber Cafes anymore!! But again, the high speed internet was still not affordable to have at home. When I came to USA, my parents would call me once a week over Skype from a Cyber Cafe because a dial-up internet at home was not fast enough for video chatting! But within a year or two, we had high speed internet connection at home as it became more affordable! Another example is that in year 2005, me and my friends had just started hearing about Facebook and I opened my account first time just out of curiosity and within a year most of us were on Facebook 24/7! Same thing with online shopping. I remember how skeptical I was when I heard about buying a laptop from Ebay or Amazon! The concept of buying a laptop from someone I have never seen sounded too risky. When I ordered my first laptop from Dell website, I was so worried and constantly checking my mails to make sure that no one else receives it and now I feel more comfortable shopping online than driving to a store because I get better price and user reviews.

Anyway, I have written enough in my first blog! Hopefully you will find it interesting. I am really looking forward to reading your blogs and learn about your ideas and thoughts.