Our COO Ansoo Gupta was invited by AdAsia 2011 to share her views on the theme “Uncertainty : The New Certainty”. She says one certainty that marketers should work on is to ensure that their product is good and lives up to its claims every time a consumer buys it. Stop misleading your consumer.

Every day, a consumer puts her life, her family’s lives, health, emotions, savings, earnings on the edge and buys into a product. And again and again her trust is shattered. This repeated short-changing has made her unsure and cynical. Her negative word of mouth was always powerful but now her campaign also has reach, frequency and high impact. Sales projections go haywire. Budgets go awry. More uncertainties ensue for the marketer.

Just as we don’t like uncertainty, the consumers don’t either. Given a choice, every consumer would buy bread from the same neighbourhood grocer day after day after day as long as the bread is good, is fairly priced and the shopkeeper is friendly. She will go to another retailer if the bread is not good, in which case, the move is justified anyway.

Certainty is about predictable performance.

It’s about giving the consumer a truly good product, about keeping a promise and making it a habit.

It’s about trust.

 

You can read full article here.

It’s awards season these days, where the last year’s efforts are summed up and judged on a plethora of criteria.

As you’ve seen elsewhere, we’ve won our fair share, at the IDMA and WATawards.

But nothing is as satisfying and rewarding as one of our clients bringing us a nice big Thank You cake, happy with the work we’ve done.

Sure, we didn’t go up on stage to collect it – but then again, pineapple is far more edible than Gold and Silver!

Who are the most influential Indians in social media? Find out now on the Pinstorm India Influencers page.

If you’re a brand, who are the people you should ideally try to get on your side? Or at the very least, try to not get on the bad side of?

It’s not just the marketer in us that wants to know – but the ego-surfing social media person too. We’ve always answered that question internally by going back to two globally well-respected tools: Klout and PeerIndex. Both have slightly different approaches to calculating one’s social influence – you can read about their approaches here and here.

And all we’ve done is to start with an initial list of a few hundred people or brands of Indian origin on Twitter, find their Klout and PeerIndex scores and, with their permission (thank you folks!) publish a simple average of the two here. We’ll be the first to admit, many names may be missing – do send those to us, either by email to info@pinstorm.com or tweet us @pinstorm – and we’ll add them over time. (As of now, we’re somewhat thrilled to see three of our own: @netra, @inkv and @maheshmurthy feature on this list of top influencers – we must be doing something right!)

Your messages of mild criticism and insane delight are also welcome :-) By the way, these scores are polled automatically via APIs once a day, so the ranking will change from day to day – do come back to see it regularly. Also feel free to bookmark the page. You may also notice that you can sort the columns by clicking on the headings.

Hope you find this, if not useful, at least mildly distracting during your workdays!

Pinstorm has won the Indian Social Media Community of the Year award at WATAwards 2011 for its Social Media Management for Cafe Coffee Day in 2010.

Commenting on the win, Ansoo Gupta of Pinstorm said “A successful social community is the one which is abuzz with member’s conversations and activities. We’re really proud of winning an award for what is basically a focused Facebook and Twitter-based community with no bells and whistles other than great content and incredible engagement – in fact the engagement levels were 10 times that of other communities that were 4 times larger in member-count. It’s really bold of a retail and footfall-based brand to almost completely stay away from traditional media and choose to build its brand using only digital and specifically social media. The real plaudits here are to our visionary and bold clients at Cafe Coffee Day. This kind of work re-defines marketing communication itself – and we’re thrilled to be part of this effort.”

Here’s a brief  showcase of the Cafe Coffee Day work on Facebook and Twitter:

Cafe Coffee Day – Social Media Management from Vimeo.