Beating Viral Blues

Viral marketing is most often than not, your best bet if you seek to promote your business online. It involves techniques that help spread your message/campaign through a ‘viral process’ and reach an online audience within a short span of time.

Digital marketers are often plagued with the thought of finding a solution to creating a successful Viral Campaign. Unfortunately going viral does not follow a standard protocol and leaves many online marketers to figure out the dynamics of going viral by themselves.

However these few pointers will come in handy while formulating a viral campaign.

- Generate content that is original and share worthy. Nobody wants to engage in the exchange of boring, ineffective and substandard content. Make your content thought provoking, humorous, and most importantly original. Mash your content with grays and colour i.e. include fun and humor but make sure to not let the serious appeal of your business/brand slide.

- Include activities such as giveaways, contests and perhaps a video or interactive page as part of your campaign as they are viral-friendly and using them as tools can most certainly initiate viral success.

- Form a viral gateway to your content. Allow users the option to email, share, link, and engage with your content. The more shareable your content, the more chances of it evolving into a successful viral campaign.

- Test your campaign in as many ways possible by asking colleagues and friends to try out different aspects of the campaign and note their feedback. For example: The efficiency of a social networking campaign can be tested by tracking responses generated by the most favorable and preferred activities via a social forum. A crucial point to remember is to understand if your campaign has a viral scope and that not everything can be made viral.

- Target the right audience with your campaign. Audiences that spend a considerable amount of time online are the ones you are looking for. Focus on structuring your campaign based on the likes and interests of these niche communities that will help spread your campaign amongst social circles.

- Push your campaign and urge everyone you know to get involved in sharing it. Make time to approach friends, colleagues, bloggers etc to help spread word. If you want people to see your campaign then you have to play your part to ensure it reaches its full potential.

Success of a viral campaign first features in the initial momentum it manages to build. If done the right way, viral campaigns can prove to be an effective online marketing medium whose success depends on how you plot your social graph in tandem with your business message and goals.

Bru-ing an Engaging Social Experience

Known is the fact that Facebook applications are a great way to generate brand awareness. So when a leading consumer brand decides to tie up with a Bollywood film that ably matched its brand values, we chanced upon the idea of roping in social media to create an engaging platform that brought the brand and film still closer to its target audience.

Bru, India’s largest coffee brand associated themselves with the movie ‘Aisha’ citing similarities in the film’s ideology of ‘togetherness’, ‘friendship’ and ‘shared moments’. Not only were these ideologies in sync with Bru’s brand values but also formed the basis for conceptualizing a socially engaging experience with the brand’s target audience: The youth.

The film revolves around a young 20’s something girl named Aisha, known for always playing cupid to her friends. Keeping this in mind we developed a Facebook application that allowed users to play cupid and set up any two friends from their friend list. Once the two friends are selected, the user is then given an option to choose an ‘interaction’ from amongst:

·         Start with a cuppa Bru and see where it goes

·         Think they will Bru something new?

·         Will they Bru instant chemistry?

·         Something is definitely Bru-ing.

·         There is definitely Bru-mance in the air

Now with their friends selected and interaction chosen, users could notify the selected two about the set-up by publishing the notification directly on their respective walls. The ‘cupid struck’ friends could then choose to accept the set-up which would give the ‘cupid’ user points to win autographed merchandise of the film ‘Aisha’

The app was a viral success thanks to its element of simplicity and the functionality of tagging any two friends, who may or may not even have known each other. Having the app added to the existing official Aisha Facebook page also helped leverage the already existing fan base. The app was installed by over 1100 users, generating more than hundred ‘likes’.  After the Bru Play Cupid application going live, the number of comments, likes and feedback on posts made on the official movie fan page was higher than any other previous wall posts.

The ability to set up friends coupled with the incentive of winning exciting prizes, had the app create a buzz not only for the film but also the brand ‘Bru’ which came in direct contact with users at every step while playing the application.

The Bru Play Cupid application is just one of many successful Facebook applications that meets the purpose of creating a positive online brand engagement/experience between users aka the target audience and a brand.

Try the Bru Play cupid Application now!!

5 Common Myths on Usability

We recently stumbled upon this article by Tom Stewart, which tackled some of the most common misconceptions surrounding usability. Keeping in mind that usability is still an underrated function in the digital space; the following myths have been addressed by him to better understand the basic concept of usability.

Usability is about making things easy

 

No it’s not! Although some usability professionals also get this wrong. Usability, as defined by international consensus on best practice (ISO 9241-11), is about making products effective, efficient and satisfying for their users.

Rocket ship controls should be usable but no-one expects flying a rocket to be easy. Confusing usability with ease of use marginalizes it and makes it merely a desirable quality. Products which don’t work because they are unusable are a useless failure, not just a bit difficult to use.

Usability is only about testing products with users before releasing them to the market

 

Yes, user testing is an important part of usability, but usability methods can and should be used as part of a human centered design approach; to derive user requirements, to drive initial concept design and to guide the entire development process, as well as test the product before it hits the market.

Usability is about asking users what they want

 

Again, consulting users can be part of the human centered design process but that is not the same as just asking them what they think. Of course, users are the best source of information about what will work for them but you do not get at that by just asking them. People are notorious for saying one thing and doing another.

Getting input from users is very important but it needs to be systematic and structured. Following a disciplined and systematic method is not the same as asking a few friends if they like your product.

Usability slows down development

 

No. Applying human centered design methods may mean that initial ideas are subject to real world scrutiny early and that may indeed slow down the initial process - with good reason. If the initial design was wrong, discovering this before too much work has been done will save time and money later.

Concepts can often be altered by making a few tweaks to a sketch whereas once code has been developed or tooling committed, changes become very expensive and time consuming. All our experience is that overall development is speeded up as blind alleys are avoided.

Usability stifles creativity

 

No! Usability methods can work hand in hand with creativity. Of course you are unlikely to get an innovative solution from a focus group or user testing, why would you expect to? But creative solutions need to be tested to check that they are as clever as their originators believe. 

Creative people need to know what problem needs to be solved which usability methods can help refine and define.

Reshmy Kurian, Head of UX Labs at Indigo Consulting says, “UX Labs has now been around for more than 2 years and over the past year we have spoken to a lot of different people about what we do, why we believe in what we do and what value it brings. Most people we talk to have heard about usability and agree that it sounds like a useful activity by and large (albeit time consuming and expensive of course). However, we often come across strong ideas (on what usability is and what it delivers) that are very far from the truth. By now we are not surprised but I have to confess it still makes us want to pull our hair out on a bad day. Marketing teams often confuse the techniques we follow with market research techniques which are more about what people feel than what they do. Others fear that making sites usable will most likely mean making them boring and ugly. Many use ‘Usability’ as a noun, synonymous with Usability Testing. For example, “When you do a usability for us, can you find out who our users are?”

Reshmy further adds, “Tom Stewart’s hilariously accurate article (it looks like some things don’t change irrespective of where in the world you are) is a reminder that an important part of our job continues to be evangelizing the spirit of what we do, educating others on the processes we follow and empowering colleagues and clients to get the best out of the services that we have to offer.”

Feed a Plant via Facebook

Ever heard of real plants being fed and tended to entirely by fans on their very own Facebook page through wall posts, comments etc?  Now you have!

Meet Eater is a project initiated by Bashkim Isai based on his desire to re establish a connection between human beings and plants.



Meet Eater follows a system that registers physical contact with social media interaction. The garden is located at The Edge in the State Library of Queensland and like any other plant requires basic water and nutrients to nurture and grow. However these elements are provided to the plant subject to people turning into fans of the page and communicating with the plant via wall posts.

The fan page has garnered over 6500 fans in just 87 days and has wall posts piling up with messages from  plant lovers doing their own bit to ensure plants are not devoid of love and attention.

This is just another innovative concept that sees the use of social media benefiting an eco friendly cause. This unique idea is sure to stir up a considerable amount of interest and as mentioned on its Facebook page could draw more attention as desired leading to the over loved plant requesting for some quiet time via its Facebook page.

What better way to spread an eco friendly message via the world’s third largest country right….What do you guys think about this social media experiment? How far are we on the path to help spread green awareness using social media? 

{Image source: http://www.facebook.com/meeteater?v=photos#!/photo.php?pid=383781&id=125299544153561&ref=fbx_album}