Social Rules of Engagement.

Here I would continue from my last post and would try to answer few of the questions rather concerns which brand owner have before going "Social".

How to handle negative comments from customers on a Social Platform?

We usually forget that Social Media Marketing is all about communication, and its a great communication tool. The whole goal of such a media is effective communication with the perspective customers. Its not just about spreading the news about one's product but to interact with customers. Remembering this, it gives us a great power to effectively interact with our customers and take there valuable feedback and follow-up a complaint.
A negative response cannot effect the future customers as much as the realisation that you did not do anything about the negative feedback.
Social Media is a great tool to make our customers realise that we care for them!

Social Media Marketing is not about social spamming!

After seeing the recent Subway or MacDonalds Social media Marketing Campaigns, I often wondered if the social media marketing is all about Social Spamming. They have tried to take the email newsletter concept of marketing to Social Media which itself is a history.

But if you look at the Pizza Hut Campaign, they have smartly used the Social Media and World Cup frenzy for Marketing. It was one of the first examples of Connecting online world with offline as they gave away free meals via Facebook during the World Cup Games. They were estimated to have spent around Rs Rs 3 crore on this campaign and was quite successful. The restra's Facebook India page has around 978k+ fans and they rank 11th among Indian Facebook Pages in popularity and no. 1 in Restaurant Category.

So, what should we learn from here about the future of Social Media Marketing?
Just doing status updates or spamming walls won't help in getting customers being loyal to your brand and neither it would help in creating a brand value. A better investment would be giving away some rewards to your loyal customers in return of them talking about you on Social Media. Just remember Social is new "Word of Mouth".

Not, every one will be able to give away free meals like Pizza Hut but obviously they would be able to give away some discounts or some points for the customer loyalty on this media.

The whole idea is to interact with the customers in a more fun and rewarding way on such platforms or rather in a more Social Way!

In my next post, I would try to address the concerns which brands have before using this marketing tool, like Social Crib about the Brand!

Eclipse working very slow with Ubuntu.

I had this problem that Eclipse use to run very slow on Ubuntu for some reason, I always wondered that it must be my RAM issue or something.

Blah! My ignorance would have been better if I would have googled it at the first go rather then making my own assumptions.

The problem evidently was with GIJ(GNU interpreter for Java) which ubuntu installs by default.
A workaround to this problem is by choosing SUN's java which can be done by using command:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and selecting the Sun's java which was option 2 in my case. After doing this switch you need to restart eclipse. If things still does not work fine then you might have to edit the jvm config files using :

sudo -b gedit /etc/jvm

and move the line:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

to the top and edit eclipse's java_home file using :

sudo -b gedit /etc/eclipse/java_home

and add:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

to the top of the file. Now restart the eclipse. If the problem prevails, go and buy some more RAM or a better processor ;)

Ububtu 11.04 Unity Launcher stops Auto Hiding after a while.

If after sometime, the Unity Launcher stops auto hiding then don't worry. Its a bug in this version of the launcher which we hope would be solved soon. See the bug here.

One of the easiest workaround which I saw to solve the problem without restarting the PC is if you are using Firefox then detach a tab or open it in a new window and then re-drag it to the original window using the launcher. Once it is done, then the launcher would again start working as before :).

There can be a number workarounds to this, please comment if you come across any other.

Shutter

biplavs' photostream on Flickr.