Some of the websites designed by the team in 2011 were www.clubitc.in, microsite for ITC Grand Chola hotel, (first seven star hotel in India by ITC Hotels), microsite for Condenast Traveller and for the Glamour websites (both of these are leading brands in the UK in their respective fields), Maxbupa & many more. We got great feedback for some of this work.

We also designed our first mobile apps and mobile websites – m.itchotels.in, m.welcombreak.com, site for ITC Grand Chola,  Maxbupa mobile apps for Android market

Another area where we started off afresh was in the design of Facebook applications. Now, by the end of the year, we have a good portfolio of work as well as loads of experience designing facebook applications.

Training and development was an important factor contributing to our ability to plunge into new areas. HTML 5, Jquery and CSS3 were the topics we spent our time on. This helps us in designing the layouts on latest & internationally accepted trends.

One of the challenges we faced in 2011 was hiring – rapid growth led to a need for increasing the size of the team.

In 2012, I am quite confident that we will be in a good position to leverage our new competencies. We will continue to work closely with the development team at Envigo to deliver compelling concepts across multiple platforms – web, social and mobile.

Unlike the other teams at Envigo which are very process oriented, we are engagement oriented

Please don’t for a moment think we do not have processes. We have processes but they are slightly different!
If I was to look at the SEO and social media team processes, then, this is how they would compare.

Anything for getting those coveted likes, comments and impressions!!

But here lies a catch. This is not what the client gets to see! We remember to wipe our shoes on our trousers before meeting a client.We are evolving and we try to learn from everyone around us

With a lot of support, encouragement and some push and pull these are the social media campaigns that we ran in 2011:

1. Scientist Bhaskar – Foodles instant noodles by Horlicks
   • http://www.facebook.com/ScientistBhaskar
   • https://twitter.com/#!/scientisbhaskar
   • http://www.youtube.com/user/BhaskarKiKahani
2. Ranbaxy Revital
   1. http://www.facebook.com/MyRevital
   2. www.twitter.com/my_revital
3. Fortune Hotels
   1. http://www.facebook.com/FortuneHotels
   2. http://www.youtube.com/user/FortuneHotelsIndia
   3. www.twitter.com/Fortune_Hotels
4. The Frunos – Eno by GSK
   • http://www.facebook.com/Frunos
   • www.twitter.com/fruno_babli
   • www.twitter.com/fruno_sunny
   •  www.twitter.com/fruno_chintu
   •  www.twitter.com/fruno_JC
   • www.twitter.com/fruno_Guru
   • http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFrunos
5. Max Bupa http://www.facebook.com/MaxBupaHealthInsurance
6. Lifelong Learning – http://www.facebook.com/LFAIndia
7. Stratedge – GSK –Ch Buzz – http://www.facebook.com/GSKCHBuzz
8. The Wine Society of India – http://www.facebook.com/thewinesocietyofindia

It was a mixed bag of brands and we were able to deliver satisfactory campaigns across industry verticals.

In my next blog post I will map the qualities of the social media team which translate into successful social media campaigns. So stay tuned!

In 2011, Envigo’s web development team were contacted to provide the following kinds of applications:

• Web development – 2011 was a big year for Ecommerce websites in India.  Businesses finally believe that online ordering has come of age and did not need to be limited only to online travel. Envigo worked on one of India’s most exclusive loyalty programs (Read this blog on Club ITC) and also on an food ordering and home delivery website for a start-up. The requirements for website development almost always included social and search engine friendly modules.
• Facebook applications to generate engagement – Envigo worked on developing games, quizzes, polls, contests, profile pic editors for various fan pages. There were some projects which were for enabling lead capture and tactical promotions. Applications were used to maintain a high level of engagement on the Facebook pages and give fans novel ways of engaging with the Pages, its community and with their friends. We also noted that Facebook is gradually launching platform features which used to be apps earlier. (A lot of the work which we had done for Diditz is now part of Timeline and Facebook photos. We are in no way claiming that Facebook’s product roadmap is being influenced by Envigo, however it is nice to see some of our thinking being validated)
• Mobile applications to drive customer utility – Envigo worked on a few mobile apps which were light on branding specific benefits, but focused more on customer utility. Max Bupa’s HealthFirst application was one of the apps we were involved in. By limiting the apps only for customer utility more than direct sales or lead capture led to an increase in downloads in the initial few weeks and also in the number of times an app was used.

Location and identity should be the two important themes for apps in 2012. Using apps which deliver personalised information depending upon your location will be interesting. It will not only be pull information, which is similar to ‘Google search on mobile’ today, in which a user shares his location and gets algorithmically filetered information directly on the mobile phone. By sharing location with marketeers in a strictly policed (read anti-spam) environment, a customer will be able to enjoy highly relevant information exactly when she needs it.

Think about the possibility when you enter a mall and your phone lights up to tell you that the shoes you have been planning to buy are on the first floor at 30% off!

That’s what we are working on now – watch this space!

Here are some screen shots from one of the most exclusive loyalty programs in the country.

The website has a .NET powered front-end.

There are two type of Adwords Certification.

-          An Individual Adwords certification.

-          A company Adwords Certification.

Google Adwords Certification Exam Format.

-          Passing Score 85 %.

-          No of Questions 113.

-          No Negative Marking.

-          Exam Completion time 2 hours and once you start the exam you will not be able to pause the exam

and come back later.

-          You can retake the exam once per 7 days, for a $ 50 fee each time.

-          Providing the tester with a review button, which you can click to skip a question and come back to

it at the end of the exam (time permitting).

Here are some tips to pass the Exam.

-          Get familiar with the all the topic covered inAdwordsLearningCenter.

-          Understand in depth the difference in content and search targeting.

-          Understand where to find the information and reports within the different tabs.

-          Have a solid grasp on the latest Adwords Editor.

-          Read the Adwords Editorial guidelines.

-          There is little check box at the top right of the exam page which allow you to mark a question for

later review.  Make sure to check it, otherwise you will never make it back the beginning questions

before times runs out.

-          Focus more on small detail of Google Adwords rather than broad scale ideas.

Focus on My Client center uses and benefits.

Strategies

New linking strategies have been introduced in company which can provide number of quality back links for website. We focused on quality rather than quantity for effective results. The Panda went by without any big bites from our ranks. Page quality has been a centerpiece of our SEO efforts, which helped this a lot this year with Panda.

Content

Due to a rapid scaling up of work, we faced a significant challenge in content. In the past few months, we have made a lot of inroads into creating a team which is able to deliver high quality, uniquely written content for our clients.. We moved away from keywords and embraced themes in our content generation strategy. We have operationalised this strategy by working with content roadmaps for each client.

Tools

A lot of time and effort went into the requirements writing and scoping for LinkedList – our new link building and SEO analysis tool being developed in-house.

We are now in process of creating sustaining web assets – which will act as genuine platforms for content exchange by certain niche communities. By sticking to a few niches, we will be able to gain authority faster. This will help us in related SEO projects.

Training & Hiring 

Hiring was major challenge for us this year. We hire carefully and are willing to evaluate anyone who has put the effort in meeting us. Investments in training bore results. Our philosophy is to groom talent for the future. This means investing time and effort on junior team members, so that they can grow to take on more and more responsibility. No one really trained us on training. This year, I think we are satisfied with the process and results from our training program. The entire SEO knowledge pool has been divided into grades and mapped to job levels. The team here contributed a lot in designing and improving the training program.

Plans for 2012

Our aim is to continue to deliver consistent and reliable results to our clients. We will need to continue to test and innovate various SEO strategies, implement better processes and tools and put it all together to achieve our goals. The highlights for next year are going to be:

-          Launch and rollout of LinkedList

-          Managing a large and growing team

-          Finding talent

-          Improving content quality

-          Launching new services as part of SEO

The dictionary defines engagement as, ‘to attract or hold attention of, engross’. Consumer engagement on the social platform therefore, refers to anything that glues a customer to the brand or business on the social media channel. It could be an update on twitter/tumblr, a page on Facebook, a profile on LinkedIn, an account on Orkut or an upload on you tube. The brand needs to be everywhere and anywhere the consumer is and mere presence is not enough. Of utmost priority is to keep the customer engaged to all the events and updates. The simplest way is to communicate all that takes place within the brand premises so as to build curiosity in order to gain affinity; else the brand needs to get curious about all that lies within the range of interest of the consumer and build affinity. The main idea is to have the consumer coming back to the page or continue searching for the brand.

This however, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Consumer engagement is not tangible, it’s hard to measure or track. The brand/business needs energising and motivating content to remove any kind of viewer fatigue. It is important to establish a personal connect making way for a 2 way process of communication, initiated by the brand. To maintain engagement on the page, it is highly recommended to follow up on each post. A simple thank you note for any feedback/suggestion may not do wonders but not acknowledging consumer action can sure do blunders.

In social media, just like in the real world, presence is felt between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest. Engagement helps weave the graph of social significance and success. All brands and businesses are out there, swimming in the ocean of social media, so engagement is the ingredient that serves as a mast, for the brands, against which they can pull their sails and voyage unhindered.

2. Add details where needed
If the posts are brutally simple and familiar all that it can breed is boredom. Therefore, now a need arises to add necessary details to the content. Once the fan’s mental model of how the page interacts is well formed and fully embedded (known technically as schema formation) to elude boredom and using familiarity add details to the page keeping in mind the profile of the targeted audience and user base. The posts should slowly move on to being user centric addressing their needs, solving their queries and forming a bond.

3. Cleverly Manage response time
The quicker and prompt the reaction time, the better will be the engagement. The aim really is to marry the user needs and the brand page resulting in many loyal customers. Time management can be leveraged to add to the quality and depth of engagement on any page.

4. Measure the engagement and proceed
The engagement on the page can be measured by the likes and comments and interaction per post. But the success really depends on when you can track profile of the most loyal amongst them and interact with them directly, in turn increasing their affinity to the page.