Since this is my last post as a “student”, I am going to coin a big sounding term: “Lean Marketing”, inspired from the hot and trending “Lean Startup“.

The stand is: “a social marketing campaign, especially if it involves a new-media tool, should be approached as an iterative experiment and not as a one-shot deal.”

Traditional Marketing Campaign: Television and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine advertisements, billboards, tradeshows, product promotions and price cuts and the like.

- A linear process where the problem and the typical solution are known; it is all about execution.

Lean Marketing: An iterative experiment with new technology platform to engage with customers; in search of an optimal middle ground between business objectives and customer satisfaction.

- An iterative process. Neither the problem nor the solution are clearly articulated, but there is an eventual business objective.

Another way of looking at the difference is that traditional marketing campaigns require up-front capital, time, and other assets creating an indeterminate amount of risk.  In addition, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of any traditional marketing campaign during the planning and investment stages.

With the transition of marketing strategy to one that effectively utilizes social media tools; an organization can successfully mitigate a majority of the risk inherent in traditional marketing practices.  Instead of a substantial up-front investment, social media marketing allows for smaller, incremental investments, which, if applied appropriately, should scale to the size of the participating market.  In addition, these incremental investments should stimulate immediate feedback among the consumer base that will allow for the organization to further optimize its strategy.

This dynamic call and response methodology, when compared to the traditional “static” approach, allows for a dialogue between the organization and the consumer that should further increase customer loyalty.

For an prototype “lean” campaign, here is a case study Umair and I wrote on Intuit’s Love a Local business campaign.
Btw. check out the slide share below, if you ever need to convince you boss about a social marketing campaign:

Brickbats welcome !

If everything goes as planned this is going to be my last semester as an MBA student. My friend Umair Qayyum and I were planning to cap it off with something interesting and representative of our passion for Social Media in Business. (Social Media = SoMe)

The plan is to propose a hypothesis connecting social media with business objectives. This process will involve documenting campaigns/initiatives by a wide variety of businesses.

This is the initial pictorial cause & effect diagram, which will serve as the basis for mapping the case studies:

For example: if a company is passively monitoring social chatter, it is able to react and minimize the negative impact of a conversation that might be harmful to the brand. This would be mapped as follows:

The current plan is to document these case studies in a blog format, keeping true to our SoMe theme. We have started work with an initial set of 5 companies, which range from a local non-profit media provider to a $25B B2B manufacturing conglomerate. You would hearing more about them soon!

If you or your company is open to participate in this project, please feel free to contact me at Gmail: UrbanTurbanGuy or Twitter: UrbanTurbanGuy. The burden-time would not be more than one hour.

- Gagan & Umair

With all the hullabaloo around Social media Marketing and its ROI. A facet of this paradigm shift in communication tools is being ignored. I am talking about microbloging tools for internal knowledge sharing, no not just twitter. In-fact not twitter at all.
The paradigm of communication, where “whats on ur mind” or “what are u working on” or “what do u need help with”, can be made self evident to a whole legion on individuals who are empathetic towards you, is simply amazing. (if your employees are not empathetic to each others needs, then you have a bigger problem at hand.)

Having worked in knowledge based industries like software development and Automotive design, I realize the importance of being able to ask for help passively and receive it at the right time. All those who have gone through the onerous process of post -project harvest meetings, must share my pain? You must have questioned the fact – will anyone ever be able to reach this document that I am creating ?. The motive behind these Knowledge management practices was noble. But was it accomplished ? Were we ever able to leverage the past experience of another employee sitting at another campus ?

This is where tools like Yammer, status.net (open source) , Identi.ca (based on status.net) come in the picture. Here are more if u want to explore. Say for instance, your organization is in a closed microbloging environment like Yammer , i.e. all ur yams (tweets) are only visible to people within your organization. Now you wanted to know if there is there is anyone in the organization who has implemented a open source CRM tool. Will you send out an email to everyone ? Will you rummage through a repository of harvested projects ? I would rather just Yam “hey, working on an open source CRM project. need help!” . And I guess within , even the largest of organizations- your degrees of separation from the right person would not b more than 2. ( yes I know I need to substantiate wild claims. But it seems sensible enough.)

To really substantiate these ideas I would love to talk to an organization that might have implemented internal micro-bloging tools. let me know if you know of one, either in the comments or @gagantweet (twitter).

The web has always been hailed as the great leveler, as it allows equal access to information. But information has greater relevance if available at the right place and the right time. Shortening this gap between information-need and answers is the goal of  search tools, which fall into the following categories:

Search Engines: It all started with Archie Veronica and Jughead in the pre-web days, reaching their present form in Google, Bing and ask. Their basic function being the ability to crawl, index and search the web. In other words a an “algorithm” decides what matches our queries and presents the results.

Decision engine (specialty search or activity based search): Although Bing would want to call itself a decision engine, the real decision engines are, specialty search sites like expedia, priceline or amazon. A user goes to these sites to to make a decision or perform a certain task. The UI is designed for specific interactions, as against a generic interaction paradigm in the case popular search engines.

Knowledge engines: Websites like Wolfram Alpha, can provide complex answers to knowledge based questions , instead of just links  to website.

Social engine / Help engine: Real time help engines like Vaark , malaho and Yahoo anwers take search to the next level. Instead of connecting people to information, they connect people with others who have knowledge about the subject. This is more true about serveries like aardVark which gather information on people’s expertise and learn with time.

This is not to say that the relevance of search engines is less, but now their role has been restricted to stuff that is not real time and information that we expect to be common enough to be documented somewhere. But as social engines learn and build on accumulated interactions, the paradigm for searching information would surely change.  People would have the choice to ask real people or ask a web repository.

Where would Wikipedia fit ? Would it be an answer engine or a social engine ?