Business Standard, one of India’s leading business papers asked us what we thought of the Twitter revolution in India. Read on:

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[Transcript of story by Leslie D'Monte]

Banks and corporations see value in 140 characters.

Of what use can 140 characters be to a very large private bank in India? If those characters make a “tweet”, you will be surprised with the results. With the help of Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of search engine marketing firm Pinstorm, and his team, this private bank monitors around 1,600 tweets or conversations a day.

Murthy and his team respond to 200 to 300 tweets daily to either thank the twitter for a complimentary remark concerning the bank or “correct a perception” as Murthy puts it.

“Even simple things like not having enough cash in an ATM get reported in tweets. It is extremely important to react at the earliest to such problems and the tweets give the bank ample opportunity to take quick action, remedy the situation, and preserve their brand image in the bargain,” explains Murthy. The other tweets are ignored but nevertheless stored for future reference by the bank.

The bank is just a case in point. Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained extensive popularity. India, in fact, has an estimated 1.4 million twitters (Facebook would have around 8 million users while Orkut around 16 million users) and is the third-largest “tweeting” country after Germany and the US. It first came into the limelight during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds. Twitter users on the ground helped compile a list of the dead and injured.

But globally too, Twitter is gaining from strength to strength. In just under three years the “tweet”, or humble SMS of the internet as it’s known, has crossed the five-billion mark globally. It’s a free social networking and micro-blogging service that asks a simple question “What are you doing?” The answers (or tweets) are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users (via mobiles too) who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

Over the last three years, tweets have been helping users in unimaginable ways. Twitter was famously used by candidates in the 2008 US presidential campaign. In Britain, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills released a Twitter strategy written for the use of other departments.

This April, public health departments used Twitter to provide updates on H1N1 (swine flu) cases. And in May 2009, astronaut Mike Massimino used Twitter to send updates of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, the first time Twitter was used in space.

Even Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India was covered on sites such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The Americagov Twitter feed ( http://twitter.com/americagov ) was following the secretary every step of the way during her visits to Mumbai and New Delhi.

Tweets have been helping businesses too. IT majors like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Technologies are on twitter. And so are politicians like the Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor who courted controversy over his “cattle class” remarks on Twitter but still has nearly 3,50,000 followers (the highest in India). Movie stars like Priyanka Chopra and authors like Chetan Bhagat are also on twitter.

Twitter does not release the number of active users but it’s estimated that there are over 50 million global twitters currently. In comparison, Facebook has over 300 million users but has been around for over six years.

Twitter’s success, according to Avignyata social media catalyst Moksh Juneja, lies in the fact that “it can be accessed via the internet (GPRS connectivity), on mobiles and through applications (like tweetdeck) on the iPhone and Blackberry”.

And the tweets will only increase in India with India’s largest mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, partnering with Twitter and allowing the 100 million-odd Airtel subscribers to tweet without having to pay for an international SMS. Incoming updates are free. All they have to do is text “START” to 53000. Back in 2008, Twitter was available in India through SMS but the service was discontinued due to high costs.

But it has not been a smooth ride for Twitter. For instance, in October 2008, a draft US Army intelligence report identified Twitter as a “potential terrorist tool”. And now movie studios are beginning to put an anti-Twitter clause in stars’ contracts. Disney reportedly has a clause forbidding confidentiality breaches by way of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook or personal blog.

Critics have also called it “pointless babble” but Murthy counters: “It’s as useful or useless as a conversation can get. In fact, it’s the pulse of the people which you can choose to acknowledge or ignore.”

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by Seema Sindhu

  Social media sites have enjoyed a steep surge in popularity, but fail to attract advertisers at the same pace. Only 13 per cent of the total Internet ad spends have gone into social media initiatives for the year 2008-09, according to a recent study of the top 500 marketers in India (Digital Media Outlook 2009 report by Webchutney).

However, things are looking up for this sector. In FY 2009-10, the report predicts, ad spend on digital media by the top 500 marketers is likely to grow 44 per cent — from the current Rs 278 crore to around Rs 400 crore.

One sector which will contribute most to the rise in ad spends on social media, is the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. FMCG brands are increasingly logging on to online advertising since their target audience uses social media, notes the report. Examples of online advertising in the FMCG sector abound. For instance, Coca-Cola India in August 2009 launched its campaign for Sprite first on the Internet. Pepsi, ITC Group, and Colgate Palmolive are some other FMCG brands that have begun using online advertising in a big way.

The Webchutney report pegs current online spend of the FMCG category at around Rs 16 crore, and adds that the spend is expected to increase to almost Rs 72 crore in 2009-10.

In India, Facebook tops social media spends, followed by Orkut and LinkedIn — but all earn revenue less than Rs 10 crore.

Neville Taraporewalla, head — Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft India, admits: “Search is far ahead of social media. Social media is used differently (Brands go on social media for word-of-mouth factor).” Apart from MSN, Microsoft owns Bing, Widows Live Planet and Facebook. He reasons that not many brands are comfortable with social media because of the user generated content (UGC) element. “Brands fear that they will have to put up with uncontrolled and inappropriate content from consumers,” he adds.

Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of Pinstorm, points out that regular ads designed for display media don’t work well on social media. The ads that work well on social media are those which engage and involve the users — those that have games, forwarding or other social activities built in. There are very few such agencies which create such ads today.

Google is optimistic though. Parminder Singh, business head, Google India, says: “With the growing popularity of social networks, many advertisers are showing great interest in tapping the audience on these platforms. But the context and objectives of the campaigns on social networks is different from campaigns on other media platforms — so it’s not a fair comparison.” Google owns Gmail, Orkut and YouTube.

Social media is more popular with youth brands like apparel, accessories, electronics and automobiles. Regular advertisers like travel and hospitality and banking/financial services companies are not placing too many bets on social media in India yet. It’s just retail and consumer product firms like gaming companies, dating sites which are beginning to advertise on social media.

When Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm was speaking at the OMCAR 2009 event, we noticed the talk was getting quite a few positive reviews in the Twitter and FaceBook back-channel from the audience present there.

The talk was about how Integrated Digital Marketing can help businesses in these tough times. We thought it would be a good idea to embed it here for your benefit:

This is a summary of his talk there (thanks to the OMShare blog for live blogging it):

Mahesh Murthy started by clarifying that he is not politically aligned and suggested an analysis of the BJP and Congress online campaign. This triggered some muffled laughter among the audience.

He said that analysis showed the composition of the BJP in the age groups of above 60 or 18-20. The composition of Congress was mostly the working class population. The focus of the BJP message was always a strong and decisive government. However, most of the working class population do not see the current government as indecisive and weak.

Mahesh says that he has worked with many media in his life. He says that one media does not necessarily kill another and that one should communicate on all the media platforms where consumers are listening. He then spoke of how the pace of change is increasing among those platforms.

He threw light on the importance of integration of the media channels for advertising by showcasing Coke. According to him, the company has a presence in over 20 countries and it uses different media in all these places. Now, if there were specialised advertising agencies for each media and it would be very difficult for Coke to manage them.

He said that every specialist becomes obsolete. Now however scary, this is a true. Also, the TV became obsolete when internet came along and so on and so forth. So it is important not to hold on to just one medium. He rightly pointed out that though the internet is a ‘niche media’ and not a mass media, it has the users with a purchasing power.

Mahesh also said that before devising a digital marketing strategy one has to answer a few basic questions:

Where are my consumers? How many are on the digital medium and how much time do they spend on the digital medium? What is their behaviour?

He says there are 4 stages of marketing, namely:

Creating awareness 
Generating interest 
Generating desire 
Action

Mahesh also mentioned that it is important to understand how the digital medium fits in any advertising campaign. It is important that a mix of media is used. Here are some insights for digital campaigns, according to him:

For awareness – CPI and not CPM, Contextual, Social, SEO, ORM
For generating interest – CPUV not CPC, Contextual, CPUV display, Mobile, ORM.
On increasing Desire – landing pages, micro sites, CPQL, social, review sites and mobile web.
Action – CPLV/CPA, SMS, Call, Chat,Call centre, Analytics

Mahesh went on to share a very interesting example on how they increased the conversion rate for Yatra. If anybody searched for a Nagpur – Mumbai flight and for every travel site the user is taken to the home page where the user again has to enter the details. For Yatra, they created 15,000 landing pages, a separate landing page for Nagpur – Mumbai, a separate for Mumbai – Nagpur and so on. Their conversion rates went up by 70%.

He gives another example of a bus service, Redbus – it increased sales many folds within 2 years ago. How did they do it – they advertised by integrating two medias – website and phone. He made a very important point by saying:

Focus on the audience and the message and not on the media.

He shared anther quick case study on when Pinstorm had to sell a student travel package for Jet Airlines with some benefits such as 10 kg extra luggage. Pinstorm advertised this package on websites for overseas education. Every time anybody asked a related question online, Pinstorm answered it with the relevant contextual information. Goes without saying that the sales picked up. He also spoke about when Pinstorm needed two interns, they tweeted about it and got 11 applications, without spending any money!

Going straight to the news, the Pinstorm team of Reshma Nayak and Mahesh Murthy placed second in the Media Quiz 2009, ‘Media Quotient – what’s your MQ?’ after winning the Bombay round against 45 teams.

The finale of this pan-India quiz event was held in Mumbai on May 22. This first of its kind quizzing initiative from exchange4media, covered all aspects of the Media discipline – people, places, stories of origin, research, the business and its connection with Indian and global media.

While the team can’t stop talking of the midnight oil they burnt in preparation, no one on this side is believing the stories, all thanks to:

You can read more about the win here.

Marketing through the recession:

is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?

A Pinstorm-IAMAI Digital Marketing Roundtable

Pinstorm (and our partner, Lintas Media Group) along with IAMAI hosted their second event in a series of digital marketing roundtables titled – “Marketing through the recession: is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?” on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, in Delhi.

This Digital Marketing Roundtable answered questions relating to the effectiveness of pay-for-performance advertising in these times of a slow-down.

Though Google started the trend of accountable search advertising, can it spread beyond that to all digital advertising, including banners? Should this be the model for TV and print? How do marketers see media spends in this era of unprecedented accountability? – These were some of the questions answered at the event.

This open-format discussion was led by prominent speakers like Hitesh Oberoi, Director & COO, Info Edge, Vineet Taneja, Head Marketing, Nokia India, Santosh Nair, Head, Strategic Marketing, NIIT, Parminder Singh, Business Head, Technology & Media, Google India, and Lynn de Souza, Chairperson and CEO, Lintas Media Group. The discussion will be moderated by Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm.

During the digital marketing roundtable, the speakers talked about the various issues surrounding the advertising industry today, and how ‘pay-for-performance’ has emerged as a model of accountable advertising to give advertisers more bang for their buck in these times of a slow-down. Companies like Naukri have been continually increasing their digital advertising spends year-on-year to the point that their online spends are higher than their offline spending. The mood of the event indicated that digital advertising is going to take up a considerable amount of ad spend this year in India.

Vineet Taneja, Head Marketing, of Nokia India commented, “I think people search online, however, conversion to final purchase is offline. The theme that I am referring to is conversion at every stage of the market process. If we look at the first level of conversion, it is awareness to persuasion. At the second level, people go online, speak to their friends. In our category, people are experts, and word of mouth really counts, and this is the next stage of conversion.”

On the topic of using different advertising mediums, he went on to say that Nokia believed in exploring various mediums and making sure that those mediums deliver those conversions.

According to Santosh Nair, Head, Strategic Marketing, NIIT, any campaign that uses current news events for publicity must use information quickly and turn it around into results. “The shorter the gap between the advertisement, sales process, and turnaround, the better the results will be”, he said.

Lynn de Souza, Chairperson and CEO, Lintas Media Group talked of how the GoaFest of 2009 is concisely titled – ‘Don’t waste a good recession!’ She went on to say that there seems to be a mood versus a reality situation and we need to think about ways to combat – what we believe – is recession rather than sitting back.

She further stressed that the area of performance in online advertising needs to be looked at seriously in these times. “You have to focus on what you are delivering, challenge your current concepts of performance and only then can we debate on improving performance measures,” de Souza pointed out.

Parminder Singh, Business Head, Technology & Media, Google India observed that advertisers have started realising that the Internet is a multi-layered advertising and marketing medium, which one can experiment and mould. Different companies are exploring the medium in different ways – from user experience, to lead generation, and going all the way up to branding. According to him, “This will continue in the future, though there is fear of meltdown because the fact remains that the Internet is used by most consumers to do significant research.”
He further said, “In the last month, we saw 9 million searches just related to mobile phones and 6.5 lakh searches for DVD players in India.”

Hitesh Oberoi, Director & COO, Info Edge pointed out that on one side where television advertising brings visibility and credibility, the online medium is good for lead generation, transaction and inquiry.” He said that in 2005-06, they began spending almost half their marketing budget online. Print and TV had never really helped Info Edge get too many resumes, so they had to get aggressive on resume acquisition.

“We did a Rs. 5 crore annual deal with Rediff, which took a long time to negotiate. With that, our resume database suddenly went through the roof. The conversion rates were around 4%-5% of all traffic. It fundamentally changed the way we looked at advertising. Since then it has been at around 50% for the last three years.”

According to Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm, one of Asia’s largest pay-for-performance digital advertising agencies said, “It seems pretty clear from the panel and the audience that pay-for-performance is here to stay. I am not sure how traditional agencies will take it, but change is upon us you can choose to evolve or be the dinosaur.”

The session was later made more interactive when the floor was later opened to the audience who participated in the roundtable discussion during the Q&A session. Sujata Datta, Senior VP, DLF Pramerica, Alok Bharathwaj, Senior VP, Canon, Mohit Heera, President, NIIT, and Cyril Mani of Sony were amongst the esteemed audience at the venue. The overall sentiment showed that buyers are looking at pay-for-performance seriously. The conference was well attended by CEOs and Marketing Heads with a mix of buyers and sellers.

The first roundtable, held in Mumbai on January 13, 2009 was led by Pradeep Shrivastava, CMO, Idea Cellular; Aekta Shyam, General Manager – Online Marketing and Technology, Taj Group; Rajiv Prabhakar, Vice President- Retail Business, Sharekhan; and Debadutta Upadhyaya, National Sales Head, Yahoo! India.

The press coverage for our earlier roundtable event held in Mumbai can be read on Afaqs!, Exchange4Media, Campaign India, AlooTechie or WatBlog. We have photographs and video too!

You may want to read more about the event on Exchange4Media or MediaNama or possibly view photographs of the event here or here.