Social media has proved to be an evangelist, revolutionising marketing, communications, and the outflow of information. Brands and businesses have always had an access to rich promotional channels, but, the true promise of social media lies in the direct connection and communication. The most beneficial by products of social media are:
1. consumer engagement,
2. creating brand value and
3. building customer loyalty (stated in order of priority)

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.

A question asked by hundreds of people in social media is how can they increase the engagement on their pages? The answer to this persistent question is complex but never truly illusive. However, we decided to view the question differently and thereafter, derive an answer to it. The question should really be what makes a particular page so engaging that fans can’t resist interacting with it. The answer really requires cognitive reversal of theories to determine what interaction attributes a successful post that result in a psychologically engaging user experience. Here are a few pointers you must keep in mind each time you wish to start a conversation on a page.
1. Simplicity breeds familiarity
Simple and basic interactive posts do not require too much thinking on part of the user. They are familiar with the language and the message being communicated. And their response to the post is prompt without having to spare a second thought or an extra second.

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.

System Alert: MALWARE ALERT

Warning
Trojan Adware.W32.Exp.Dwnldr spy-ware detected. This Trojan allows Attackers to access your computer
from remote locations, stealing passwords, Internet banking and personal data. This also prompts
advertising pop-ups.

This sort of warning even in your system is good enough to give you a huge scare. Imagine what this would do to you if Google starts showing the warning to the users that this site has malware. Yes, Google does this. And this happens to more sites daily than you can imagine.

This has happened to me in past too when I had a “certain” shared hosting. All the script files in my website were corrupted with a malware. There was a small code at the bottom of the page which was basically a redirection code. As soon as user opened my site, it got redirected to a “certain” website. This was quite scary to me at first, so I contacted my shared hosting provider about this. Not surprisingly, I got a standard reply that website was hacked due to my insecure way using ftp and its not at all their fault. It took me sometime to get my website working again but then the real problem started, so to speak. Google has marked the website as spammy and showed warning to users to enter at their own risk. This was a one time incident for me but this is surely not uncommon. This has happened to a lot of sites. See screen shot:

Google has a malware database which it keeps on updating based on its own crawl of the websites. Pages which are deemed dangerous are identified and blacklisted. In addition to Google, many browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and anti virus too use this database to warn the users to keep away from such websites/pages. This is just not about the traffic for a few days but also affects the standing of your website. The onus is upon the site owner to deal with this and clean the site in order to remove these warnings.

So as a webmaster, what should you do? You need to know how to remove your site from google’s malware database and avoid common mistakes that can leave your website (even after being cleaned) blacklisted for a long time.

First you need to figure out what went wrong. To do this you can use google’s safe browsing diagnostic page  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site={YOURSITE}. Go to the section which says “What is the current listing status for google.com?”. If your site is in google’s blacklist then you would see something like “Your site is currently listed suspicious”.

The second section which you must carefully look upon is “What happened when Google visited this site? “. To interpret this information, you should look at the two dates: “Last time google visited this site on” & “Last time suspicious content was found on this site was on”. If your site is currently blacklisted, these two dates would probably the same.  Look for the sentences like “Malicious software is hosted on x domain(s) including xyz.com, abc.com. x Domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware content”. Scan your website for these domains. After you clean the code, you can request the website for malware review through Google Webmaster tools. In a few hours, google should rescan your site and come back with an approval.

SEO! Yes, thats right!
While working on a potential project for a government body, we had to review the www.nic.in portal and get some information from it about its services. While we were doing that, we came across a page – How to Promote your website?

This page has a list of tips for a webmaster – right from choosing his keywords, writing title and meta tags, advice about image and video alt tags. It even advises users to replace words like “about us” with the name of the organisation to make it more keyword rich.

The Indian government sure is set to go places!

Envigo is offering the following positions in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

1. Junior SEO

2. Applications Developer (PHP)

3. SEM (PPC) analyst

4. Content writer

You can get more details here and can also apply online. Go for it, we are waiting to hear from you.

This business segment is new. Ten years ago,  an online marketing agency was hard to conceive. True, the internet existed, but not many marketing budgets had a line for ‘SEO’ or ‘PPC’. There might have been a line for ‘Website banner advertisement’ but definitely not so in India.

Today, our breed is thriving. Everyone has an online marketing agency or is planning to get one. Companies now have an ‘online marketing manager’ and even are trying out ‘ SEO Manager’ and ‘Affiliate Marketing Manager’.

Ten years from now, there might not be a search engine result page to compete for ranks. The web will be much more semantic – deriving meaning not only from the content of a page, but also by the structure of information arrangement. The web might also be omnipresent, with very blurred and/or thin lines between the desktop, the mobile and home appliances. Marketing to consumers will evolve and so will we.

About 15 years ago, there was a hallowed professional called the stock broker.  Either way the market went, the stock broker was earning his cut. Then came the electronic stock exchanges who charged razor thin margins. The stock broker had to reinvent himself. He is now usually managing portfolios. He has to advise and he has to predict and he has to earn his commission on performance and not on transacting.

This industry will also get paid only on performance and will have to adapt and learn new technologies. We will have to run very hard to keep us from falling behind.  Devices will start talking to other devices and to banks. Privacy laws will become tougher, but there will be much more data to play with. Customers might block away unsolicited ads completely but will also begin to solicit in an informed manner. The website will

The mobile revolution is just a trailer of the entire reinvention movie. It is exciting – much in the same way a roller coaster is.

Every one who wants to make it big developing Iphone apps needs to know how much money the existing 200,000 applications are making. I came across a survey of 96 iphone developers and wanted to summarise the post here:

• Average number of apps sold – 101,024
• Price point – $0.99 (The average is higher at $5.49 because of a $49.99 outlier)
• Average number of updates – 3.89
• Average total development cost – $6,453 (but developers rarely included their own time spent in development, which would increase the costs a few times)

Even with a higher development cost, the app world is highly profitable. No wonder there are over 200,000 applications, but this field is set to grow further.

• The market is top heavy, the top 10% apps would be getting the bulk of the revenue
• Greatest contributor to sales – Being featured by Apple in some way, in place of sending out an app update

We believe that we live in a world which does a lot of things on the internet, and very soon, will be doing most of it, on mobile. Can you imagine the look you will get if you tell a business partner that you do not have email? Just a few years ago, it would not have raised eyebrows.

Customers are getting onto the mobile bus in droves. In the US, data usage of mobile phones has surpassed voice.  In India, mobile operators are busy bidding for the 3G licenses. Apparently, they want to use the 3G bandwidth for 2G phones, because they are starved of spectrum.

In the not too distant future, a customer might expect video reviews of products streaming onto their location-aware mobile as they pass by a store. They would discuss it with their friends and family on their always on, 3G-enabled social network and then order it by dragging the video into their shopping cart. They would then pay for it using their phone provider’s monthly billing cycle.

The applications used in the paragraph above exist and are in use today.

Are you ready?

Large organisations have product roadmaps which look ahead 1-3 years. Smaller organisations have a mix of look-ahead and what-next plans which take them from quarter to quarter or year to year. There are firms who are working on their “20092010 online marketing strategy” because that is what it essentially is – the same story in a new page template.

Envigo is here to help. We have set our house in order and are now able to offer development services on mobiles – Iphones, Android, Samsung and Nokia!

In our line of work, we spend a lot of time with Article websites. An article website is a website which accepts articles. It allows users to publish articles by subject. Once an article is submitted, it is reviewed by the website owners before publishing. A published article can then attract comments, and more importantly, attracts visitors. Visitors come through search engine results, in which the article might start to appear. The article website makes money by selling these visitor driven impressions on ad networks, such as Google ads.

A well designed article site therefore acts as a machine in perpetual motion. Articles are submitted by authors, who want to establish themselves or want to gain links. Every article can have a few links, which are inserted by the article owner. It is quite common for search engine optimisers to submit articles to gain these links.

An article website is a barter marketplace – Authors submit articles to gain recognition and links. Article websites offer both and want the uniquely written article content in return.

This is where our problem begins. Article website accept articles with links. We are happy with the link we get. However, what happens with some of the article websites is this -

1. Article websites remove the links a few months after the article is published
2. Article websites might insert their own links into articles
3. Article websites might remove the entire article after a few months

The marketplace of links-for-content also places a reduced value on the quality of the content. This is often capitalised by the authors, who regularly rehash their articles and lead to content and SERP spam.

What would be interesting would be to have an article website, which accepts only good quality content, and gives out perpetual links in return.

Here’s hoping for that to happen!

Social Media and social media marketing are the order of the day. Are you thinking about it as well? We wanted to put some perspective behind it, by comparing it with all the other main channels of online marketing.

Social media is different – it is new and it is still evolving. While traditional online channels could be compared along the dimensions of risk, targeting and monetising models, social media does not really fit in very well. The differences between an affiliate sending traffic to you compared to you buying traffic from Google on these dimensions are below:

1. Risk – Who bears the risk of conversion – the risk of conversion sits with the affiliate alone as in the latter case, Google gets paid on a click

2. Targeting – How well is a user identified as a potential buyer – Similar in both cases- A user clicks a button for more information and writes out a keyword for more information

3. Commercials – What is the payment for the advertising based upon – Payment is based on competitive bidding, but in both cases, there is an element of earning per click which comes into play by the volume provider.

Social media fails to fit into such a model except as an over-simplification. The reasons for this are the same as the reasons for its popularity. Social media is -

1. Free in form – blogs, tweets, posts, discussions, status messages… (and pokes)

2. Free in channel and media – the web and the phone converge here – text, images, videos, maps and mashups are all equally acceptable

3. Free to edit, create, contribute, destroy – Yes, of course you can. Of all things, even an encyclpaedia is freely editable (but in a social manner)

4. Free of control – In the traditional sense, yes. There is no one owner. There can not be. It won’t be social any more.

5. Very important for a marketer – Free to engage and influence – The customer is present, directly and without any intervening chatter. You can chat him up – one on one – like never before. He can single you out (for good or for bad)

Search engine advertising was the magical new boy in college – strange at first but a well behaved person who lived by the rules, albeit new ones. You had to learn his language and customs and he became your best friend and did magical new things for you. Social media advertising is the brash new rock star – everyone wants to be with her but no one really knows how to tame her.