We recently attended the Click Asia Summit in Mumbai, a gathering for digital and social media marketers in the region. Here are the mantras and maxims, tidbits and trivia from the event.

Not “Drill, baby drill”? More than 25 years ago, Ted Levitt said – “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” That rings true for even digital marketing or social marketing tools. An enterprise is not looking for social media or other software. Instead, they want to be able to better connect with their target audience and become the brand of choice for them.

Up the engagement quotient: As ad man David Ogilvy said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product”. Enterprises can tap digital / social marketing tools to better entertain and engage their customers and potential buyers. Nike Shout, an application where fan messages posted on Facebook or Twitter were displayed on stadium screens, is an example.

See the video on YouTube or read about it here.

“Develop the art of listening”: Social media tools provide an excellent opportunity to listen to the customer voice and feedback in ways not possible earlier. However, many enterprises still approach the digital medium as a one-way street for sales pitches and lose the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with customers. We should note here that there is increasing interest among enterprises for social media monitoring tools or “listening platforms” that promise to keep tabs on what’s being said about your brand. For example, see our earlier blog post on Jive’s social media monitor

“Analyze this?” Sentiment Analysis tools that scour social media conversations for positive and negative opinions about your brand are in vogue as well. These tools deploy language processing and data mining techniques to determine the prevailing attitudes towards your enterprise/brand. While this may (or may not) work well enough in a single language situation, we're not convinced yet that these can handle multi-lingual scenarios where different customers speak in different tongues. We, in the United States of India, are even known to employ two different languages like English and Hindi in the same sentence, or even write out a local language in the Roman (i.e. English) Alphabet. The tools may not be equal to the task of deciphering us.

“Fraudian Slip”: As they say, “half of ad dollars are wasted, the trouble is knowing which half.” In the age of pay-per-click advertising, we might as well say that a fifth to a quarter of online ad dollars are wasted due to click-fraud (based on estimates by Adometry, which tracks these things). It remains a cat-and-mouse game with the good guys and bad guys trying to outwit each other. Marketers need to stay alert and keep a close eye on their analytics for any suspicious behavior and patterns.

“TV is not the idiot box in India”: In India, where only less than 10% of the population regularly accesses the Internet, TV remains the influential medium and unmatched in its reach.  Flipkart (the “Amazon of India”) says that they were taken much more seriously once they started beaming commercials on TV. The larger message here is that depending on your situation, online may not necessarily be the cheapest or the most efficient channel.  

“Comment is Content”: Particularly for news and other community oriented sites, high-quality user comments are becoming as important as editorial content. We can second that based on our experience with clients who place great emphasis on the functionality like management of user generated content and community moderation in their social technology selection processes.

“Crisis Response Use Case” We’ve heard excellent examples of the general public and NGO volunteers rallying in the aftermath for the disasters in Haiti and Fukushima. They’ve created “people finder” apps and used social media tools to coordinate the relief efforts. There’s a lesson here for enterprises on having a plan for when things go wrong and be not caught flat footed. Have your public relations crisis plan ready before it happens.

“Greedy Brands” Earlier, companies just wanted a consumer to buy their products. But now they want them to not only buy their products, but be an advocate for them and also help with co-creating the products. From a software products perspective this has seen the emergence of co-creation and open innovation software tools. However, it is not yet clear why the consumers should participate and / or what’s in it for them.

“Did you know?” Finally, we promised trivia and tidbits as well. Here they are:

• Organized Crime is shifting from their traditional vices to cybercrimes -- equally lucrative but less physically risky.  
• The largest social media monitoring enterprise in the world? It could well be the Government of China, whose 40,000 officers analyze citizen postings on the Net  
• The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is only two years, according to Ogilvy; digital / social marketing projects need to deliver results fast, then

That last one must make CIOs -- whose average tenure is a bit more than four years -- feel pretty good by comparison...

- Apoorv Durga and Kashyap Kompella