“ORM isn’t about others, it’s about you. The focus here is never on erasing anything because nothing can ever be takendown from the internet once it’s online.”

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[Translated from German] Quite different in the East of our globe – which was an interesting insight from a conversationwith our Managing Director Nitin Bhatia of Meltwater India.

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Opinions on how to go offline to ensure you maintain a work life balance.
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I returned to Twitter only after I quit my full-time TV journalism job to enjoy my passion to travel, write and read. In the newsroom , Twitter was only about tweeting news and decent, yet related views. Never had time beyond that.

Only when I came out of the much-politically-correct news environment, only then I realised that Twitter is a “MEAN” yet useful world. I learnt a lot from people there….a big world full of trolls, who if you take in the right  spirit, will teach you lessons for life.

But most importantly I learnt the following things from many Twitter experts, which I would like to share with you. Internet is full of such advice, but once it comes from a credible journalist like me, supported by Social Media experts across the globe…then you surely must read carefully and implement for your own good!

What people will teach you is what to do on Twitter or how to get followers. I am here to share the first-hand experience of many who are going to explain WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE DONE ON TWITTER. Yes, it is easier to get followers, to make them read what you text, but very difficult to retain both in tandem with each other.

As Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director, Executive Alerts, Meltwater India, rightly puts it, “Technology today is very advanced and there are many who are keeping an eye on you. Thus, it will be silly for you to be posting too many personal pics on this medium since the followers you have are not your friends. In short, you do not know who follows you for what reason, so it’s advised to take precautions.”

So we advise you: Don’t do the following…and Bingo! You can be a pro…

1. Don’t Overdo

Excessive tweeting and self-promotion are a clear NO-NO. You will get unfollowed or reported for spam. And this comes in three categories:

• Binge posting: Nothing can be more annoying than a full-column of tweets from a person you follow within a span of minutes. Try to imagine what I just wrote.
• Multi-tweet: Remember, Twitter is a microblog. Be brief because that is the game. If you think you need more words to express, blog it up and tweet the link.
• Pointless Direct Messaging (DM): Do not DM unless really necessary. Tweet thanks to new followers, do not DM. A DM to women saying “Hi with flowers is a s BIG NO”! Being the one who gets them in bulk daily, I can vouch for this repulsion. Most people will block you, like I do. Yes, I mean it!

2. Don’t keep changing Profile Photo too often.

Remember Twitter is not Facebook. People are here to read your mind. “The Profile Photo can be changed once in a while; optimised for web use but is not to be changed frequently. Let your image be registered in people’s mind through the micro-blog, your words, not a photo,” asserts Lopa Banerjee Shah who handles the Social Media accounts of one of my friend’s travelogues in Mumbai.

 3. Don’t Abuse the Hashtag

Hash-tagging keywords or topics in your tweets is an effective way to track and participate in events, debates, conversation etc. But make sure the hashtag you pick is powerful and consistent with your message. “But don’t add too many. It must not make your message difficult to read. Avoid using the hashtag merely for #emphasis or #context. It is very dumb,” says Piyush Chawla, Social Media Expert working with a leading media-site in New Delhi.

4. Do not Auto-tweet

In simple words do not copy-paste a message, especially not without courtesy. How will you feel if someone uses a piece of your brain without giving a credit to you?

“It is always better to rework a message of mass importance. Secondly if you are say tweeting some news…rework the message in your own words, make it more powerful, ensure that it doesn’t get lost in the crowd of millions,” suggests Bharti Neil Thomson who works as a Media Advisor in London.

 5.Don’t forget your Grammar

Grammar and spelling mistakes significantly reduce the impact of your content. “Lose if is different from Loose’ and so is ‘You’re from Your’ and “Its from It’s”. Repeated errors will get you ignored or even ridiculed by Twitter’s grammar police.

6. Don’t get into a Heated Debate

Being in media, I deeply get involved in debates on various topics….but more mentally than in text. Read, imbibe, protest, tweet…but be in limits. Remember, on Twitter you won’t have the last word, because there is no last word here. Make your point (concise), agree/disagree within limits of decency and move ahead. Twitter is not a battleground.

7. Don’t be Shy. 

Twitter a mean world full of trolls, but don’t be shy or scared.

“Small fish as well as sharks exist together in the vast sea. So open up your mind, horizons and reach. Don’t get intimidated by a few. The more you Tweet, the more likely is your chance of building your audience on the social network,” explains Gaurav Kumar Vaish, a former TV journalist from India, now settled in Sydney.

I agree, but just keep point 1 in mind–Don’t overdo! And never feed trolls with replies; they survive on it.

8. Don’t beg for Retweets.

Want your message retweeted? Put power of words in it, rather than sending out hidden or open request messages. It is quite repulsive.

9. Don’t Facebook, it is Twitter

Every social network has its own etiquettes and rules. Facebook is a big living room full of people known to you, but Twitter is a big cocktail party going on in a pub with strangers rubbing their shoulders and at times even their filth of mind on you (we call them trolls). Beware!

10. Don’t reveal Personal Details

Daniel Whitman-a 20-yr-old, bright student from the New York University once told me the following never to be revealed on Twitter:

• Financial Status
• Specific Location or travel plans
• Keep religion in the confines of your home, don’t trigger communalism
•  Precise details about your work unless work place wants it
• Mobile number/ home address
• Details of your family

These are just a few ground rules for Twitter that will help you stand out from the crowd. If you have some of your own rules, do tweet to us @Stuffonix and @MahimaSharmaS. Your feedback is primary!  Cheers!

Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director – India at Meltwater in a stats powered session speaks about the significance of data in today’s world and is data the underrated piece of Digital Marketing Puzzle. 

We live in an information society. The new mediums of gathering that information have become much more relevant – Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director – India at Meltwater.

Bhatia shares that since the inception of mankind, 90% of the world’s data has been created since last two years, which kind of gives us an idea that there a lot of data that gets generated on a regular basis on the internet. Over 2 billion people use internet on a day-to-day basis. This is happening majorly because of the huge mobile penetration. Penetration of internet is around 4.02 billion people, social media users around 3.2 billion people, and 5 billion mobile users. Twitter is seeing over 450 thousand mentions regularly.

“What we are doing right now is trying to figure out ways in which we can create maximum amount of information available on the internet and then trying to make sense out of it,” he added. 

Social Media and Big Data

Social media is nothing but any particular website which allows people to talk about or share perception. That according to me is a social media channel. That means from a monitoring standpoint, we are tracking all these popular social media channels and also making commercial efforts in terms of gathering information from those kind of sources which are not that popular for eg, customer complaints- one of the biggest areas we are focusing on, news tools such as iTunes and google play store also allows a lot of information.

Internet and the Data

We are seeing a big paradigm shift in how internet will provide data in future. For instance, there are so many people posting something or the other, if I have to ask the audience in general, if I go through an Instagram or a Twitter account of a person, I would come to know a lot about that person. This expands into an ecosystem where we are talking about billions and billions of data points, then we can easily understand that in future the modern day marketer will rely on more focused data points.

In future we will be looking into how we can materialize or co-relate analysis, for instance, between number if job posts of the company vis-a-vis the expansion plan of the company or it can be the kind of patent hiring that the company would be doing.

GDPR Guidelines and the Misuse of data

Also Read: Branded content is a shortcut. You can take shortcuts but can’t keep doing it.: Sandeep Balan, United Breweries

Brands utilising data provided online 

Traditionally most of the companies have been focusing a lot on internal data and this data is which can be linked with essential information.

At one juncture we are data providers and at the other we are data collectors. There are different kind of guidelines that we have to follow in terms of ensuring what kind of data we are collecting and secondly what kind of data we are circulating. In terms of utility of data on the internet specifically, it’s completely up to you how much do you allow the ecosystem that you are participating in, in terms of gathering your information and delivering the same.

Data Consumption trends 

Majority of the companies in the past have been using internal data which have collected internally by the organisations and this data was in the form of sales and footfall information, supply chain, hiring and firing data, distribution information. But now in the future a lot of reliance will take place on outside as the internet has started knowing more than the company or the person himself and that is actually a very interesting area to explore. Most of the information is also publicly available.

For instance, if Pepsico has any kind of plans to launch operations in Kenya, firstly they would invest their time and energy into finding the right talent in that country. If there are proper mechanism in terms of collective anomalies from the internet they could have an interesting bet – PepsiCo is hiring in Kenya. That information is going to be extremely vital because neither has Kenya mentioned about their brands in the PR or social media, but what they would do is they would hire a senior director or a consultant in that particular country and that information will be available to its competitors way before it is public and that will help take much more steady decisions in the future.

Nitin Bhatia, Managing Director – India at Meltwater was speaking at the live session of India’s first live conference #SMLive 2018. 

A quick recap of the first episode of F&M Show, find out what you missed with this video.

A digitalized world is not a phenomenon for tomorrow, but a reality of today.  A fad for marketers and consumers, social media is the classic conscious parallel universe with its individual rule book. From a business stand-point, social media marketing is nothing but imperative and a slapdash dive into it can lead to waste of time at best or a massive brand disaster at worst. To cut it short- You need a connoisseur direction and the good news? We got one for you!

An audio-visual, colloquial show by Associate Professor Dr. Falguni Vasavada-Oza and Group Manager- Tech Mahindra Malhar Barai titled F&M Show- curates content coated with heaps of knowledge, experience and immense ingenuity.

F&M Show unplugged

Narrowing down a perceptive towards the significance of digital marketing, people in the industry have realized its necessity in their business. We, at Social Samosa with the motive of influencing the influencer empathize with the need of an expert opinion and thus strive to provide some. Through the F&M Show, they are dedicated to design a digital marketing skeleton for our viewers.

Pairing up with Nitin Bhatia, Director at Agency Relationships at Meltwater the F&M Show hosts discussed around the topic ‘Outside Insights’.

To decipher the title Bhatia shared, “We, today do not have control over a lot of online content available which is why there is no particular  way in which we can correlate and bring it all under one platform and give some meaningful insightful. Overall, the topic looks at analyzing content and data beyond the fireball.”

Through this F&M Show, Nitin Bhatia in one of the examples of Outside Insights, talks about how recruiters can inspect the social media lives of potential employees. Nitin also exclaimed on the prospects about getting buckets like advertisement spending, kind of sales and the number of people hired by any particular brand under one roof!

Later, they even posed a question about social listening to him, where he shared how this space is evolving and going beyond just listening of the brand. He even spoke about how these ecosystems are developing and people are getting more conscious and focused about delivering their content.

The most effective leaders have one thing in common, they are excellent decision makers. From day-today decisions to the decisions that affect their entire company, brand, and industry  influence, great leaders make great choices.

Informed decisions – The phrase itself subsidizes risk to a great extent. The more factors you involve in your decision making process, the higher the chances of eliminating ambiguity or uncertainty in the outcome. That is why Big Data became the buzz word in the industry, companies started analyzing data points and information and offering customer, sales trends every where. Unfortunately, just because we have access to a great amount of  information doesn’t mean that we’re always looking at the right information. In fact, a lot of companies focus on data and information that they collect themselves on historical performance – data on internal processes, benchmarks, campaign successes,etc. And that’s the problem. Internal data only offers part of the equation of understanding the company’s position, while leaving out the critical real-time external data such as brand coverage, competitive coverage, brand influencers etc.

“Analyzing internal data and not benchmarking with the outside can be fatal. The modern CEO has to look out at external factors and analyze them to get actionable insights”

Analyzing internal data and not benchmarking with the outside can be fatal. The modern CEO has to look out at external factors and analyze them to get actionable insights. Where and how do we find external data? There are more than 1.13 billion websites in the world and by the time you read this article the number will change substantially. There’s an ocean worth of information publicly available concerning how customers perceive a business, its products or competitors. This is data is in the rawest form available to us. Leveraging this external data for decision-making is what we call ‘Outside Insight.’

The closest anyone can relate to online data is Social Media. In fact, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and WordPress that allowed people to share their views online. These social media platforms are not websites but ecosystems where people aka any company’s consumers today live in. They share what they eat, where they go, what  they do, whom they meet, what they buy and why they buy it. Any CEO and CMO who is “Customer Obsessed” would love to know as much as they can on their consumers.

How can Outside Insight prove valuable to a business? Well, let’s look at an example. Pantone announces colour of the year every year in January. In January 2016 “Rose Quartz” and “Serenity” were the colors of the year. Meltwater monitored more than 60,000 online conversations within 10 days of it launch. People were posting jewelry pictures, hair color, kitchen walls, furniture and dresses in these colors.That was more than enough for the companies to understand and predict that color plays a vital role in buying decisions and we saw launch of many products in these colors. In fact, Koovs.com was smart enough to launch a full range of cosmetic products in these colors. So for my readers, the color of the year2017 is “Greenery”.

As I said earlier digital media is an ocean, these handfuls of social media channels are just a subset. Today we are seeing more ecosystems evolving where people express their opinions. Then there are other websites, which give out more information – Job Postings, Review sites, product listings, ad spends, stock updates, commodity prices and many more. All these sites have so much to offer to businesses. There are more than 280 new contributions, either a pic or a review posted every minute on Tripadvisor, imagine how valuable information that is for Tourism Boards, Hotels, Ticketing Sites etc.

The future lies in listening to all new ecosystems, analyzing them and connecting the dots to get meaningful insights. Companies need to get into correlative analysis.

Needless to say with the advancements and evolution of tech, even information out there in huge volumes can be listened to and analyzed in a systematic way. Too much data means too much clutter; listening tools that do not offer Boolean filtering will never do justice to outside data. Smarter search means accurate data and more reliable insights.

Modern leaders and marketers need access to the most critical information on real time basis. Quicker access to information means more intelligent decisions, stronger positioning and quicker earnings. We are investing in tools that can give predictive actionable insights to a CEO in a jiffy. Artificial Intelligence will do the due diligence, rank the information on importance, relate it with the current scenario, overlay the client’s preference on them and draw a correlative analysis from it. In the end, the modern CEO will have actionable Outside Insight that is freshly filtered and delivered to him in real time.