Tag Archives: social media marketing

5 Lessons in Social Media Marketing from God

In the age of wii, iphone and social media even Gods can’t afford to stay the same. As people start doing more activities online(the ones they used to do offline) they are spending more and more time online.
Lets imagine Gods themselves felt the need to engage with their audience and started using various social media tools to market themselves. Lets see how it plays and what can we learn from this.

It’s much easier for people to stay in touch with each other online as compared to offline. Not only this, it’s also easier for people to stay close to their favorite Gods online. Plus the internet offers some possibilities that were unthinkable before like say “making friends with God”.

With God himself on your friend list, the possibilities are immense. So don’t be surprised if your Facebook feeds reads :
“Matt Jacob and Simon Taylor are now friends with Jesus Christ” or
“Vivek Sharma and Sai Baba are now friends via the People You May Know tool”

Lesson 1: Fish where the fish are. Social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc in this case are better options to connect with their audience than say LinkedIn or Friendfeed.

In case you think, making friends with God might be a bit too much(or you fear you’ll loose your online privacy) , you can simply become a fan of your favorite God.

Lesson 2 : Give your audience various ways to connect with you, depending on the degree to which they would like to get involved/connected.

With about 9200 fans, fan page of Jesus is brewing with activity. While most people show their gratitude and express their love towards the God, some people actually want to chat with the God himself and guess what ? Jesus does not disappoint his followers.

Lesson 3: Interact with your audience and small is big.

Lesson 4: Regularly update your web properties and add relevant content. This gives a reason for your audience to come back.

Lesson 5: Don’t oversell. The ultimate goal of Social Media usage is not to sell but to establish lasting relationships with your audience.

These are some of the simple lessons in social media marketing that I could think of from the above mentioned cases, if there’s something else that you’d like to suggest, just drop a comment 🙂

PS: This post is just meant to be used to learn some lessons in social media usage in a fun way and should not be taken in any other context

Social Media Marketing Case Study: The President is Coming

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Social media marketing suits the needs for film makers pretty well, especially for low budget films. Social media marketing works for numerous reasons including wide reach(sans borders) and better ROI, owing to lower costs. While Ghajini saw a slew of online marketing activities, bollywood is yet to see an extensive online marketing campaign. Lets see how the guys behind “The President is Coming” have used social media tools for marketing.

Facebook
It was an ad on Facebook that caught my attention. On being clicked the ad leads to the group “The President is Coming- The Movie”

Given the fact that this group is advertised(someone is paying for it) its safe to assume that its an official one. It has about 850 members, one discussion and 45 wall posts. There are a few pictures from the film and some videos(trailers, interviews etc) added by the group owners.

Facebook is slowly picking up as a platform for marketing Indian films but there seems to be a lack of clear strategy(or focus) on how to leverage the platform better. The film’s facebook campaign is top down, like in most cases and has been used just to push content, not to interact or anything else.

The least that could have been done was talking to interested people instead of just broadcasting the content. The content and the information that’s shared could have been a bit more interesting and a fan page would have been nice too.

Website: Apparently there isn’t a website built for the film, or if there is one, its not at all discoverable, which is equivalent to it not being there.

A website though simple, is a must have to share content, build a community and involve/engage the audience.

Blog: No blog either.

MySpace: Myspace has also been used to spread the word. In place of a website, the main placeholder is the films myspace page

Few things worth noticing about the myspace part of the campaign.
1) “Friend us and write a comment about why you should be a part of the film. If we like it, we’ll contact you directly. Good Luck” reads the profile. This means for one that they started this profile a decent while before the film was expected to hit the screens and secondly it shows an attempt to involve audience.
2) Since the profile’s main page still shows November 28th as the release date, its easy to make out that nobody is really looking after the profile.
3) Content wise the profile is decent, it has a few stills, an audio clip and a video trailer of the film.
4) The profile has been befriended by 175 people so far(though there’s nothing more to it) and the public wall has managed some 14 comments. Once again no involvement from any team member or cast.

Just like it was with Facebook, the attempts at Myspace are either half-baked or poorly executed.

The least that could have been done was to keep the profile regularly updated, interact with audience and share some more information about the film. If this page is used as the main web property for the site, it should have links to other web properties like facebook etc

YouTube:
There are around a dozen different videos on YouTube for the film, ranging from “film trailers” to “behind the scenes” to “press launch” to even “post production problems”. Once again some work has been done in creating and uploading these videos but not much thinking seems to have been done to get the most out of it. Chances of you bumping into these videos are as rare as chances of you bumping into their myspace page, which are to be honest, quite bleak.

The least that could have been done was to make a channel,upload all videos from that account and cross link the channels URL to other web properties.

Imdb: Un-official page without much information and the default poster picture.

The least that could have been done was to create an official page,upload the movie poster and fill in more details.

All in all it seems like a volunteer(and informal) effort by the team members involved with the project, especially the more net savvy ones and thus you can find their imprints across various platforms discussed.

Only if there was a sound strategy in place, things could have been better and effective.

Here’s a nice trailer, apparently made by a fan(as claimed)

You can also download the case study here