eThos from Hemant Soreng

The subject did catch your attention, didn’t it. Well, not exactly how it sounds, but two members of this year’s losing team Oxford in the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, lost the race and have won $ 65 million.
As I surfed TV channels in my hotel room in Istanbul on 3rd April 2010, I happened to watch this amazing boat race and heard an even more amazing story.

As the story goes, when studying at Harvard in 2004, Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, Olympian rowers and member of Oxford’s rowing team, along with their partner Divya Narendra (incidentally, is also a rower) sued Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, just six days after the site was launched. The three Harvard seniors,  accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. And it seems just before this year’s boat race the trio had made a cool $ 65 million through an out of court settlement.

Reminds me of the nursery rhyme with my own (corny) twist :

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently to the Bank,
Merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

So do we know all about Social Media Marketing? Many corporates seem to think so. Dell found it the hard way after “Dell Hell”. Now Nestle is the new kid on the block to do so.
SMM strategy seems to be setting up channels in the Social media space,”engaging” with the customers and building a community. Easier said than done. It has to be done right, which is again relative and need to be find out, learn and change. It is iterative. There is nothing right and wrong. It will always be learn, learn and learn and implement.

Here is how screwed up on their Facebook page

http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=6786&tag=nl.rSINGLE

Who would’ve thought that the web will change so much in so little time?
Who would’ve thought that it will become so participative?
Who would’ve though that the big content houses will be given a run for their money by the insignificant net user like you and me?

Its time to stand up and recognize the silent revolution of UGC or User Generated Content.
More and more people are reading blogs and reviews by people while making their purchase decisions(esp. in the PC industry its so rampant). Ads are being just reduced for just building awareness, the rest of the brand metrics in the purchase cycle – Consideration, Preference and Purchase is heavily influenced by UGC in the online world.

Today entire businesses – platforms like social networking, blogging and even portals incl. ecommerce are heavily dependent or entirely based on UGC.

Here is one good article from emarketer on this silent revolution.
Can User-Generated Content Change Your World?

200 million plus mobile phone users in India and still rising. One instrument you take with you all the time. This is future. No, this is the present.
SMS is big, mobile social media is the next big thing if the trends are to be looked at in the US.

Reliance has already launched mobile blogging in India. It will not be far when social media networks start ruling the “mobile” roost? Marketers should be proactive and read the signs.

Read the eMarketer article

A good read which I picked up from ClickZ

At their core, all social networks are about one thing: friends. Without them there would be no impetus to join, and no sustainable interest in remaining a member. Depending on the network, users add friends selectively or collect them like hockey cards. Either way, they’re vital to every single consumer who ever logged in to an online community.

It was with this in mind that Canadian telecommunications company Telus launched what I consider to be one of the best sponsored applications on Facebook I’ve seen.

Last year, the company introduced a new cell phone plan called My Faves, which allows customers to pick five friends — regardless of their own carrier — with whom they can receive unlimited talk and text services. With a target market of high school and university students, and an objective to raise awareness of the new service, social networks were the ideal venue through which to inform and educate consumers about the plan. Click here to read the rest
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629098