Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

Indian online penetration & social media usage surging

Thanks to Gill Kelley of CIM for Tweeting about this great article from WARC about the growth of the internet and social media in India. 

I was interested (but not surprised) to see that facebook has overtaken Orkut in India. Google needs Google+ to become a credible facebook competitor...

Highlights of the article pasted below, for the full article click on the link above (on "great article"):

NEW DELHI: The Indian internet population could triple in size during the next three years, according to estimates from Google, the online giant.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Rajan Anandan, Google's Indian country head, predicted the country's web audience would grow from 100m users at present to 300m in 2014.

Moreover, the current internet penetration level is just 8%, suggesting considerable long term room for expansion exists, boosted by rising smartphone uptake and improving infrastructure development.

"Despite a lot of the infrastructure challenges we have as a country, 100m Indians are online, they're spending a huge amount of time online and they're doing a varied set of things online," said Anandan.

Internet advertising expenditure now stands at $200m a year in India, from a global total of $80bn, while local ecommerce sales have reached around $5bn, trailing the $80bn logged in China.

However, Google has found that 65% of web users in India who are looking to buy a car use this channel when researching potential acquisitions. "[This could] have a huge impact on advertising as well as commerce," said Anandan.

Similarly, the company reported 90% of netizens interested in making purchases from the automotive or telecoms segments regularly go online, but brand owners in these industries are lagging behind.

Anandan said: "You should actually have a digital first strategy. That's not to say you shouldn't do significant TV advertising, but for many industries digital today can not only reach the audience that's most valuable to them but also target them in a very interesting way."

Vizisense, the research firm, reported that Google's search engine has 63m users in India a month, alongside 23m users for YouTube, the video platform, and 3m users for Google+, the social network.

Orkut, another social network owned by Google, has 11.1m monthly visitors, now some way adrift of Facebook, on 42.7m.

Greenpeace attack VW using social media

Thanks to my good frind, Louise Vaughan, of the wonderful Acceleris-MC for sending me the link to this excellent example of social media marketing by Greenpeace. If I were VW, I would be much more forthcoming and pro-active about this. "NO comment" is not the wisest response, in these days of social media proliferation.

The full article is copied below, but if you want to follow the link to the actual page, then click on the headline below:

Greenpeace pressures Volkswagen in online campaign

 

Volkswagen continues to be targeted in what Greenpeace is calling its most successful online campaign ever.

An estimated four million people have watched the environmental group’s online film (click here to view) attacking Volkswagen’s record on climate change, while 370,000 people have signed up to join the campaign against the carmaker.

Now Greenpeace is offering a £5,000 budget to whoever produces the best one minute anti-VW advert – with the prize money to be spent on making the campaign’s next movie.

The competition is being run across the UK, Germany, France and Belgium. It will be launched on Saturday, September 17 at the Curzon cinema in Soho with the closing date two weeks later.

A panel of ‘PR experts and film professionals’ will choose the winner and there will also be a public vote to pick an audience favourite.

Greenpeace climate change campaigner Richard George said: “VW markets itself as a green car company. But in reality it lobbies against key climate change laws and only fits the most fuel efficient technology to a small proportion of its vehicles."

The website www.vwdarkside.com outlines Greenpeace’s objections to the carmaker.

Volkswagen said it would not be responding to the accusations.

Author
Jeremy Bennett
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Q&A With Marketer Magazine

Following the seminar I did with Marketer magazine at the start of the summer, I have answered some of the questions that we had no time to do on the day, as have the other 2 guest presenters. Here is a link to the Marketer site with all of the answers and below is a transcript of just my responses....

I recently read a blog on LinkedIn where people were discussing the difficulties of gathering statistics about your audience on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Do you have any tips on capturing this information?

 

There is not a perfect solution. Facebook and Twitter provide limited information, but there are tools available that can help you. In fact, monitoring social media and online PR is challenging, not just Twitter and Facebook. There are many sentiment-tracking tools available that scan the web, including social media, for mentions of your brand or products and produce reports. Most of these are subscription based, such as Radian 6 and Buzz Metrics. They are not perfect, but provide a wider view than just individual social media mentions. If you are in B2B, you may well get more mentions on blogs than in social media, so you should keep your analytics as wide as possible.

 

We have a Facebook page and my boss wants us to keep it very bland, with no mentions of client names – she is worried that our competitors will see them. For example, we have to say “pharma company in Swindon” rather than Pfizer. Doesn't that fly in the face of the open nature of social media?

 

Yes it does, however you also need to be aware of commercial sensitivities. You need to treat social media as you would any PR. So if you need client permission to mention them in PR, then you should also get it for social. I would be driven by client issues rather than competitor issues. I am sure there are many other ways that a competitor can use to find out who your clients are (they only need to ask one of your employees for an interview for example). So if your clients don’t have an issue with it, then I would be as specific as you can be, without giving away any commercially sensitive information. If in doubt, check with your clients first. Social media is all about content; you need to have an opinion, a view of some kind. Bland content will probably defeat the object of doing it. So try to persuade your boss to ask your clients if they have any objections, in fact whether you can help them by talking about them in your PR. Find a story or two which helps your client relationships and the benefits with your client should outweigh any information that a competitor could use. If you are helping your clients, why would they want to switch, even if they are approached by one of your competitors.

 

If you operate in both B2B and B2C markets, can you combine your social media approach or should you have a separate presence for each market?

 

This is a good question. It depends on whether you have different products, brands and distribution networks. My advice would be that if you operate in different markets, whether the markets are B2B and B2C, or UK and abroad, or high-end and low-end, then you should have different tailored communications for each audience. Therefore the logic is that you need different communications channels. In B2B you may focus on blogging and Twitter for example, with a B2B Facebook page just being a hub that drives viewers to the blog and tweets or the consumer Facebook page. Content should be relevant and specific for whichever markets you operate in. Your social media activity should be thought-leading, using whichever expert you have in your organisation who has credibility in that sector. Bear in mind that this person may not be the marcomms person. It could be the technical expert, engineer or sales person, for example.