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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.

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by Mayank Tewari

The anonymity of the Internet often lures one into dropping one’s guard, the consequences of which can be sordid. Pictures with a former lover suddenly start sprouting weeks before one’s engagement, and a prospective employer conducts a background check only to come across unsavoury language posted on a blog when one was in college. Recently, the perils were illustrated in the Anoushka Shankar blackmailing episode.

However, help is at hand. One’s online — and offline — past can be cleaned up, but at a price. “It costs between Rs 2.5 lakh and Rs 8 lakh a month to manage the online presence of a celebrity or a corporate honcho,” said Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO, Pinstorm, an online advertising and ’search engine optimisation’ company.

Experts at Murthy’s firm delete unwanted instances of one’s online activities. The method can be considered the reverse of hacking, where a person of ill intent can trail one online and dig out information that can hurt.

Murthy said an increasing number of corporate big shots and other individuals affected by crimes like cyber stalking are relying on the services of consultants like him. “Top business figures, politicians and people in public life use our services to manage their branding online… Recently, a woman belonging to a conservative family approached our firm to delete from the Web pictures of her kissing a female celebrity on the lip.”

Managing one’s online presence is done through ’search engine optimisation’. “It means,” said Arpit Bhargava, a Pune-based cyber image consultant, “doctoring a search engine like Google in such a way that positive results show up in preference to links that may cause embarrassment to the client.”

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by Sharmila Ganesan-Ram

On the first Friday of every month, after the sun sets, newcomers at a Santa Cruz marketing firm start sweating. It’s the witching hour that
colleagues have warned them about when seniors and bosses suddenly start behaving like unpaid judges on a reality show. They make unreasonable demands that the novices have no choice but to fulfil. So, these cornered techies will obediently launch into embarrassing confessions, stammer through an item song or do a pole dance with a co-worker for a jittery pole. Thankfully, this performance is not meant for evaluation.

This good-humoured official ragging session called the All Hands Day is only “an ice-breaker to welcome all the new joinees and to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays and rewards,” says Leena Kapoor, HR head of digital marketing firm Pinstorm. Like All Hands Day, many human resource professionals, perhaps in a bid to be perceived as human, are coming up with wacky ways of injecting cheer into the workplace. So apart from mailing pay-cut letters that say “warm regards” at the end and pasting proverbs in the elevator, they are also encouraging employees to visit the gym, watch movies, swig wine, play CounterStrike, doze off, and wear shorts.

Robert Khongwir, HR head of online gaming portal Zapak, who sometimes moves around the office with a baseball bat (”to ensure discipline”), cites the example of Rainy Day. On this day, everyone is asked to come to work in skirts, slippers and shorts and enjoy karaoke sessions, gaming competitions and shake a cocktail or two. “We recently booked first day-first show tickets to Kaminey for all our employees in the nearby cinema. They could watch and come back to work,” says Khongwir, who is clear that there is a “fine line between chaos and discipline”.

At Trine, a game development studio in Malad, this line is called LAN. After work, exhausted game developers vent their frustration against the seniors by forming teams and playing LAN games like CounterStrike. It’s an informal ritual called the LAN party. “We don’t wear shoes inside the air-conditioned studio, which is perhaps why we are cool-headed,” says Somil Gupta, managing director of the 24-hour studio where practically everyone lives on Red Bull. While the casual culture of advertising firms lends itself more easily to these workaday quirks, IT companies too are experimenting. A leading US-headquartered IT firm penalises its employees for being overly formal. “Every time an employee says `Yes, sir’ or stands up when a senior arrives, he has to put ten rupees in a box,” says Presenjit Kumar of Great Place To Work Institute. Interestingly, the senior has to shell out too “so that they discourage the act”, Kumar smiles.

Teams are now built not just by climbing mountains in the outskirts of the city but by sharing clothes, cooking without fire and eating rasgullas. Kolkata’s software firm Acclaris, has specially appointed `fun rangers’ who organised a rasgulla-eating contest that found mention in The New York Times. American company Gallup, famous for their polls, encourages employees to join a gym by reimbursing 50 per cent of the fee up to Rs 1089. The Bangalore office resembled a school on Children’s Day, with employees showing up in school uniform and participating in fun games like Pandemonium.

When Future Capital Holding decided to hold a Twins Day on which two co-workers had to dress alike, the office saw impersonations of Lola Kutty and Quick Gun Murugun. “Everybody was wondering whether Pantaloons had a mega buy-one-get-one-free sale on,” laughs Ophealia Deroze, head, human capital management. Real-life siblings, too, are sometimes invited to the office (on Family Day). “The venue turns out to be a funfair of sorts, complete with food counters, play sculptures, fortune-tellers and stalls,” says Bhaskar Das, vice-president, human resources, Cognizant, which also holds events like Rags to Riches where staff has to fashion clothes from junk.

Humour is a useful HR weapon, especially to lampoon the boss. Intel, on its internal blogspace called Planet Blue, asks employees to give witty captions to pictures of Intel employees in unlikely locales. Pinstorm plays pranks on its staff by asking them to conceptualise a complete online advertising campaign which requires them to strategise and create ads for products like bananas or sanitary napkins. “We give them a week to create a pitch with all the relevant info and then have a fictitious brainstorming session to which the entire company is invited. The news of the campaign being non-existent is broken to them there,” says Kapoor.

Sometimes, though, these clever HR tricks can lead to embarrassing situations. One leading newspaper organisation in Mumbai offers a `bonding allowance’-a sum of Rs 2,000 per month to two employees who choose to share a flat in the city. To claim the allowance, two female journalists approached a notary outside the Bombay High Court to ask him to draw up papers that said that the two girls were in a flat share at Andheri. The notary, who had never heard of a bonding allowance, coolly asked, “Are you taking advantage of the scrapping of Section 377?”

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by Sruthi Krishnan

“Those in Mumbai, slums @ Geeta Nagar destroyed in rains, help with rice/atta/tea/pulses/clothes.”

Recently a variant of this message kept echoing online in Twitter, the short messaging service. These messages would be tagged with #mumbairains, and anyone who wanted updates on how the city was coping with the annual monsoons — be it traffic jams, college attendance or office woes — could log in. And perhaps, wade through the water to Geeta Nagar with some hot tea.

These messages were not being posted by one person, an organised group, the authorities or an institution; they came from the crowd — spread all over the world, united by a desire to help.

Crowdsourcing involves taking a task and letting others do it, says Gaurav Mishra, founder and CEO, 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics firm.

The crowd voluntarily took on the task of monitoring the rains. Interest was a major driver.

A company may want to know how to put pictures on potato chips. There would be many people in the world who would know how to go about it. The company could ask for contributions from all of them and choose the best one for use, says Mr. Mishra, explaining how crowdsourcing worked.

As these people are amateurs, the company would not need to pay as much, and the person, whose motivation is to make that advertisement rather than commercial ends, is also satisfied. So a person living in Italy could give an idea to a person in India — something made possible by the Internet.

Innocentive ( www.innocentive.com) is a crowdsourcing site based on this idea.

In India, crowdsourcing as businesses is just catching up. Lattice Purple, a Delhi-based firm, has created a platform ‘YouSuggest’ (http://yousuggest.us) for companies to crowdsource ideas from customers. “The best of the ideas could be implemented for the product,” says Arvind Nigam, one of the founders of Lattice Purple. The platform is available for use through a SaaS (software as a service) model.

“This is a democratic platform for ideas,” says Mr. Nigam. If the company does not implement an idea, there could be risk of a backlash. But companies could moderate discussions.

Other tweaks may be needed for crowdsourcing to work in India. Myidea ( www.myidea.co.in), started by a private cellular service provider as a platform to crowdsource ideas on Indian politics, integrated SMS. “We kept in touch with the crowd using email, SMS and Web, because we’re not as “on the net” as people in the U.S. are,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital advertising firm that managed Myidea.

Crowdsourcing could take on other forms. For instance, Amazon Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) calls itself a ‘marketplace for work.’ If you need to translate 10 pages in English into Telugu, you could advertise on this site. This task will be broken down and parcelled out to many people and then aggregated to provide you the translation.

The photo site iStockphoto ( www.istockphoto.com) and the T-shirt site Threadless ( www.threadless.com) are some popular examples of sites using crowdsourcing.

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by Durgesh Gupta

Pinstorm Technologies, set up in 2004 by Passionfund’s Mahesh Murthy who’s currently its chief executive officer, was perhaps the only pure-play search engine marketing firm since inception. The impetus for SEM came around in 2004, with individual investors from eBay, Cisco and Intel backing his venture, but the investors own barely 5 per cent of the company.

What is the inception story of Pinstorm?
I have been in the media business since 1984, but over time I saw advertising break up and got two separate ways into a brokerage business and a consulting business. After 15 years in this business, I realised that because you never got paid for your good work, you could never get rich.

In 2004, I started Pinstorm in a 550 square foot office with one person, and we proudly declared ourselves the first pay-for-performance advertising firm in the world. We did something truly crazy – we didn’t charge a retainer, we didn’t charge for creative, we didn’t charge a media commission – in fact, we paid for media from our own pockets – but we put it all together – and charged the clients on the basis of the results our campaigns delivered.

Our clients were curious at first. When they saw results coming in, our business grew as theirs grew. In fact, once we moved them to this model, they didn’t question us on the creatives or the media plans – but only on the results.

Who are your biggest competitors today?
We have a few types of competition. After we started offering performance advertising, we have helped change the market in India – today over 65 per cent of the digital ad market in India is performance-driven and we are the leading player.

Many independent digital agencies had to change their models to match our offering. So there are a couple of smaller performance ad firms, who copy our every move. We keep a close eye on them.

That apart, we have the digital arms of the big ad agencies. We are not so worried about them, because they don’t have the flexibility, the technology and the approach we have to delivering results to the client – but they are good at client service.

Moving ahead, do you feel that social networks are better for branding?
Social networks are not useful for ROI based advertising and relatively they are better for brand awareness advertising. Unlike search, where people go to a site like Google or Yahoo to click away and go somewhere else, social networks are impressive and users tend not to click on ads here.

So don’t expect a high click-through rate on ads on social networks, which can hence be better used for general demographically or behaviorally targeted brand messaging.

What pros and cons do you see for advertisers on social networks?
Social networks are a double-edged sword for advertisers. On the one hand, they offer large numbers of prime young audiences with high purchasing power, who spend a lot of time online.

While typical viewership of a TV programme might be in the 10-15 minute range, the successful networks are used for 3 to 5 times as much. And the audience is more urban, more influential and more amenable to new brand messaging.

On the other hand, the very popularity of social networks can be the problem – people are going there not to see ads or click on them – or even to get entertained, like they go to a TV channel. They are going there to connect with friends, acquaintances, lovers and the like.

So, they’re not exactly in a mood to welcome brand messaging and you run the risk of somewhat becoming wallpaper on Orkut or Facebook. But then again, most advertising on television has a similar fate.

What kind of brand is benefited the most on social networks?
Social networks will be happy hunting grounds for brands which have a core focus around the urban young between 18 and 35 years, with high disposable incomes, and who are trend-setters by nature.

In addition, there are also vertically specialised social networks like LinkedIn, Xing and such. We use these for B2B advertising, where advertisers like large consultancies, IT/ITES companies, can be run very well.

Do you think the only factor attracting online advertising in this recessionary time is the cost?
Well in these recessionary times, the choice that marketers are making is between brand awareness and response generation advertising. And the former is losing ground to the latter. So the big gainer is actually response – generation advertising online – publishers like Google and others who offer pay-per-click or pay-for-result solutions.

The media losing business across the board is awareness media. I can only imagine that social networks are losing out as much as television channels are. After this down phase is over, I predict a strong growth in online awareness ad options, including social networks.

What are the factors that advertisers should keep in mind while deciding on social networks?
Most importantly, who are you talking to ? Depending on which social networks you choose, you can target by age, sex, location – or even by interest, keyword or forum.

So you have both demographic and behavioural axes to make a media pick on. Use both. After this, realise that people aren’t coming there to click on your ads. Do not harbour hopes of high click through rates.

Further, if you want to engage audiences, you have to try harder than just doing a flat banner ad. Try interactivity, humour, fun – remember you have to make it more compelling content than what your friends are saying to you online.