Human beings are social by nature. They have always lived socially since their existence. Common interests and relationships bind them together. This concept of living together is very much inherent to their nature. And, with the coming of social media sites, this idea has reached an all together new level. Social media has enabled all of us to connect with society, regardless of time and space.

Nowadays almost everyone, from youngsters to oldies, is there either on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumble Upon or Delicious. And, with each passing day this trend is growing further. This very increase in the number of individuals has also triggered businesses to go social.

There’s no denying the fact that most of the social platforms are goldmines stuffed with loads of target audience for various businesses. But, if a business decides to go social, they really need to think about two things.

First, the integration of social media marketing in the overall marketing plan surely requires some effort. Every business that decides to go social will have to be willing to walk that extra mile.

Secondly, where there are your potential and present customers; apart from leads there are also grievances and negative publicity! While you would have new target audience asking about your products and services, you would also have the existing ones registering their grievances pertaining to a bad experience.

Therefore, comes the question – ‘to be or not to be SOCIAL’!

While, the answer to this particular dilemma must be ‘to each its own’, the importance of social media marketing is something that cannot be denied. Its virality, reach and connect has made it an inevitable marketing medium. So, businesses actually need to be more willing to take the extra pain and be realistic in their expectations from this medium. It is no magic wand but surely one of the most effective ways to connect with your target group.

The stage is set and the chance to reap the benefits of social media is all yours…. All you have to do is DECIDE!

‘Professionals create the Content – Amateurs consume it.’
Since the invention of the printing press hundreds of years ago until a decade back, this statement had defined how media functions. Be it books, newspaper, radio, film or television, one and all followed the same mantra. This basically resulted in a kind of monopoly that these media organizations exercised over information and content being circulated around the world. Therefore, the power to get a message out to the world was only restricted to a few. However, with the rapid expansion of internet and the advent of social media this traditional approach to information and content circulation is now rapidly becoming a concept of the past.
There are two paradigm shifts that have taken place in the media culture as a result of Social Media’s rapid expansion:-

1. The first one being that content is now being created not only by the professionals but also by the amateurs. For e.g. YouTube claims that over 48 hours of video content is uploaded on its servers every single minute by its millions of users around the world.
2. Secondly and more importantly, Social media has now empowered the users/listeners/readers, basically the so called amateurs to not only communicate with the media organizations but also with one another. There is no better example for this than Facebook communities.
What the first paradigm shift has done is to take the control over content creation out of the hands of these mammoth media organizations, corporates and governments. Now, most of the content available for viewing on the internet is not created by professionals with vested interests but by amateurs themselves. In this manner the ideas and information are now flowing horizontally instead of vertically. The second paradigm shift has ensured that opinion is no more controlled by the media organizations. The ability to share ideas and discuss issues at a global level has now ensured audience participation like never before. What this has essentially done is to empower and mould the entire concept of freedom of speech and expression as it was ideally intended to be.

This rapidly changing landscape can be seen through various developments that are taking place in the traditional media houses. Book publishers around the world are under threat from free online publishing supported by e-book formats and companies like Amazon and Apple. Similarly, record companies are taking a serious hit because of YouTube and Apple store. However, most impressive has been the ability of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, etc. to circulate news, information, creative content and most of all in shaping popular public opinion and mobilizing the masses without the need of massive financial investments. This aspect of Social Media’s strength came to the focus of the world most in the previous year with movements erupting throughout the world from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to our own Anna Hazare, all aided by the use of Social Media.

Whether you like it or not, Social Media is now here to stay and it will continue to redefine our ages old media practices. So, the only question we now face is “How can we make best use of this media? Even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.”

Planning to buy a new Netbook? Well, you don’t need to when you stand a chance to win one!

Yes! A brand new Netbook could be all yours! All you have to do is participate in the ‘Netbook Mania’ Contest and tell ‘How a Netbook Can Transform One’s Life’ through a story, image, video or presentation. The most creative entry will win a Netbook.

Since their inception in late 2007, Netbooks have gone through a myriad of changes and improvements. From being the little computing machines that lacked certain features, Netbooks have now become the power devices. So, it’s time we take notice of this tiny tech tool that’s making its way in to our lives, with each passing day!

OMLogic, the Online Marketing Experts, are out with ‘Netbook Mania’ Contest on their official Facebook page. Just log on to the page and send in your entries. The contest begins 8th November 2011 and is likely to go on for a few weeks before one emerges as the winner of a brand new Netbook, all for themselves.

So, for all those who love computer in all its forms, it’s time to show the world their love for the latest addition to the ‘wonder machine’ family!

Think, create and share! You never know, your masterpiece might fetch you the ‘tiny tech tool’! And, don’t forget to mention ‘Intel’ in whatever you create because that is the POWER behind Netbook. Just log on to the official page of OMLogic on Facebook and submit your entry for the contest. While you have all the time in the world to create your masterpiece, don’t be too late!

They say, ‘It pays to be creative’. And, here is your chance to get rewarded for your creative self.

So, let the Netbook Mania begin!

Now this is what I call innovation. Facebook has just done something which seems inspired by Google+. It has introduced the concept of Google+ circles in the form of Smart Lists. It has introduced three main improvements, which it is claiming will change the way you interact with your friends.

The three main improvements are as following:

1. Smart lists – Create them yourself and stay up-to-date with the profile info your friends have in common with you.
2. Close Friends and Acquaintances lists – You can see your best friends’ photos and posts at one place, and see less from people you’re not so close to you.
3. Better suggestions – You can add your friends according to your own preference.

Friend Lists are completely optional. If you don’t like lists, you don’t have to use them.

Smarter lists are now available on Facebook

Smart Lists

Initially, Facebook provided the following options to manage the lists:

• Work
• School
• Family
• City

I personally think that this will make things much easier as earlier it was very tough to scroll down the whole friend list to find someone.

Close Friends and Acquaintances Lists:

There are two important lists which have some special properties- one of them is Close Friends list and the other is Acquaintances list. The close friends list will allow you to choose only 5-10 friends that you think are your real close friends and will show/notify you even about their slightest updates. Whereas the Acquaintances List will only show the most important updates of theirs and yes you can add them to yourself.

Better Suggestions

When you add someone as a friend or confirm a friendship request, then you’ll be able to add that friend to any of smart lists- Close Friends, Acquaintances, and your own lists, making them easier to create and update.

Better Suggestions

See and Share

Whenever you feel like sharing something with a narrower set of friends, simply use this tool and pick one of your lists.

See and share on Facebook

According to me, this new sharing option has just made Facebook a lot safer and it will also resolve privacy concern of the users.

To sustain Leadership in the market, companies have to keep on adding something new in their offerings. Same is the case with social networking giant Facebook. To sustain Leadership in the social networking arena & to maintain popularity among its userbase, Facebook is adding something new to its product line every other day. Recently, it made some changes in its chat & notifications settings, which had a mixed response from the users, and now, Facebook has rolled out big time changes its privacy & sharing settings (few changes have been live & few would get live in the coming weeks).

All of these changes could well be categorized into two parts:

1. changes to its sharing functionality, and
2. changes to privacy settings on user profiles.

Let’s see how these changes would affect the user while using Facebook.

Changes to sharing

These changes are done keeping in mind how you can share your content with others or how you want your content to be visible to others. These sharing changes would fall under two sections:

1. Tagging/Un-tagging
2. Status updates

Tagging/ untagging in Facebook posts

Tagging is a very interesting way to share your photos, videos & experiences with your friends. But it becomes too irritating when some-one tags you in something which you don’t want to be a part of. Now, you would have the option to approve or reject before the picture or video actually gets published. So, you can control people tagging you in their content. Also, you can now approve or reject when someone tries to tag your content, even if they aren’t tagging you specifically. The major change in tagging option is of ‘tag anyone in your posts’, no matter you are friends with the person! Isn’t it interesting?

Shared with friends

This feature would make it possible for you to share your experience with a large group of people inspite of the fact that you are not friends with them. And you never know, once you share your experience with them, they can become your friend. So, with the Facebook tagging feature you can expand your social circle!

Shared with Custom

Another change is of ‘un-tagging’. We think that this is the most sought after option by the Facebook fans. Facebook has tried to improve this feature by providing more options like asking the photo uploader to remove the photo from your profile completely and blocking that person on Facebook.

‘Status Update’ has also come-up with few amendments. You can choose to share your update in three ways: share with public (previously everyone), with friends or customize your status update sharing. You can now decide to whom to share ‘What’s on your mind?’ (Never tell your boss what’s on your mind! )

Not only this, you can now add location & people to your Facebook updates. So, you can share your updates telling the world, whom you are with at that moment of writing the post & where! Now, you can add your location from anywhere, regardless of what device you are using.

Also, you can choose to add location to your photos, albums & videos. We must say these changes in sharing settings will make Facebook more user friendly, not sacrificing the privacy and fun to spend time with!

Changes to Privacy Settings

The biggest change to privacy option is the transfer of privacy controls from settings page to user profile page. Now, you can see the edit-settings option on the top-right side of your profile. The users need not jump on to cumbersome privacy settings tab to limit the visibility of photos and other things.

Also, the ‘View profile as’ option has also been shifted to your profile from privacy settings page. You can easily see how your profile appears to public & your friends.

View as Public

All these changes are again an attempt by Facebook to show the world, that when it comes to innovation, the company is always ready to play the game.

But, the game changers (customers/users) are always the king who decides the success & failure of the player!

So, let us know whether these changes in Facebook are what you desired for & whether you liked them or not?

This post was written with inputs provided by Neha Jain.

So finally!!! Much awaited Facebook updates have been rolled out. We are pretty happy to see these in particular. It looks like that Facebook has taken some cue from Google+ & a little bit from Twitter. We are going to talk about all the latest features in ‘Keep It Simple Silly’ way. Users who have already used Google+ will easily reckon these features.

View Profile As

Facebook has provided a special feature to their users where they can actually customize their profile according to the various users. Or more specifically, now they can actually decide that how their profile will look to different people. Click on the ‘Profile’ and then on the very right hand side of your profile you will get to see this option.

View Profile As...

When you click on ‘View As’, you will get to see a screen (Image Below), where you can actually type the name of the person and see that how your profile will look to that particular person.

This is how your profile looks...

Profile Control Options

Earlier when you wanted to edit your privacy controls, you had go to the ‘Privacy Settings’ and control the information from there. Now, every section of your profile has the button right next to it where you can instantly select with whom to share and what.

Inline Profile Settings...

Profile Tag Review

Now you can approve photos, videos or posts where you have been tagged. You can go to the ‘Pending Posts’ and control the tagging option right from there. So, instead of getting a notification every time, now it’s in your hand to approve that tag or not.

Profile Tag Reviews...

You have to turn on this feature (turned off by default). To turn on this feature, follow these steps.

Account -> Privacy Settings -> How Tags Work -> Edit Settings -> Profile Review -> Edit.

After following this procedure you will see this screen. Just TURN ON Profile Review there.

Profile Review...

Sharing Control Options

Now this is the complete rip off of Google+ feature. This option will appear only when you want to share something over Facebook. Now you can tag your friends and even strangers. Also you can add your location and select with whom you want to share it.

Sharing Controls...

So these are the main changes in Facebook privacy settings and sharing settings. We personally feel that by rolling out these features, Facebook has managed to reduce the security concern of users quite a bit.

Did you find these features entirely a ‘Rip-Off’ of Google+ and Twitter?

This article was written with the inputs provided by Jitesh Pandey.

Apple's new product

Steve Jobs released his new product “iResign“… The product caused frenzy in the worldwide market, but caused Apple shares to tumble more than 5% in aftermarkets. The product is an auto upgrade on all current iPhone, iPad, iPod and all Apple Mac computers.

The new product is bound to have significant impact on the future roadmap for all apple products.

iResign currently comes with a patch called iTimCook. Every Apple follower is now looking for the upgrade of this patch with a newly expected iCEO product.

Companies like Samsung are very excited about this new product, since they can quickly develop applications on iResign on the same lines as Galaxy. There were frenzied parties in Google and Microsoft offices, and the local pizza delivery companies were kept on their toes.

This article has been written by iKapil, CEO of OMLogic, one of the top social media agencies in India. Bidding adieu to the greatest leader of the last 50 years.

Just 15 minutes back, we noticed a sudden change in Facebook profiles.

The differences which we noticed are:

1. Images seems larger (As in Google+)
2. And a ticker, which is showing all my friend’s & page’s live feeds in it.

As you have already seen in some of the websites, blogs, and RSS feeds, Ticker is the most acknowledged medium of getting real time information. Instead of showing all the live feeds of your friends in your home feed, Facebook has decided to gather all that in a ticker.

Check out the first look of the ticker right here:

New Ticker @Facebook

Also, we are very happy about the way Facebook has decided to show a larger thumbnail of pics, which we use in Posts. We have already seen that with the rise of Google+ and now Facebook seems to follow the same path. It will also help businesses to grab some ‘Much needed’ attention of users.

Check out some of them:

Larger thumbnails in Facebook like Google+

Also,

Another larger thumbnail

So according to us, with increasing social media war between Google+ and Facebook, both key players are trying to bring something new every day. Both tickers and larger images options have given Facebook an extra edge over Google+ for some time. But users can expect some more exciting things to come from the kitty of these big daddies.

With inputs from Jitesh Kumar Pandey.

Yatra Cricket Manager

Addas for talking cricket now go digital thanks to social media experts like OMLogic.

When cricket comes calling in India, even Bollywood hibernates to non-action for half a quarter. No big ticket releases are expected to come up for the duration of the Cricket World Cup 2011 which is being held in the subcontinent this time.

That Indians are vocally passionate about cricket is a truism and an understatement at the same time. We know that cricket has always been a “social” game. Paanwallahs see their business rise when any match that is to do with the “C” word is on; not to mention especially when the teams of the world descend on the subcontinent! If like everything else, most of our activities are moving digital, then it is a natural progression for even these addas to move online.

As they indeed have! Addas have come online, on Facebook now!

That cricket will need and be a successful conversation builder on Facebook and other social media platforms was something that OMLogic expected early on and thus took the lead in building the communities “Cricket World Cup 2011” and “Commonwealth Games 2010” way back in 2009 on Facebook.

The success of this community (it has close to 1.2 Lac members) can be attributed to not just the early lead but also because of the constant flow of conversation kept on building in it which kept the members hooked coming back for more.

The thumb rule to measure any conversation online, wise guys so say, has been to see when it degenerates into a slurring match between Nazis and Jews internationally and India and Pakistan in the subcontinent no matter what the piece is about. And this community passes that test very easily

And this is a community in true sense. People do not just respond to just what the given status message has to say at that point of time but also build up their own conversation. The members respond not only during nail-biting moments in the match but continue to have conversations all the time about the match. Conversations are no longer just about “Sehwag got out” or “x runs needed from y balls”, but about anything and everything that has to do with cricket. This really drives home the point how the online platform has supplemented addas in the real world.

As an example: India played against England in its second match of the World Cup on Sunday, 27 February 2011. The match started at 2 IST. The “Cricket World Cup 2011” community on Facebook sent out its first update at 2:45 PM saying “Good afternoon guys. India is on flyer. India 20/0 in 3.1 overs.” This received 187 comments and 117 people “liked” it. Nineteen minutes later the community received the update that Sehwag had been dismissed and it communicated it thus: “Sehwag Gone. Oh Dear!” resulting in 146 comments. Updates like these continued for the duration of the match till 11:30 in the evening till which time the community updated 35 times receiving a total of more than 5000 comments and 3500 “likes” on the page status updates at the end of the day.
Interestingly for a community that is seen to be neutral, the highest no. of comments were those that supported Team India. The community received a whole lot of comments when they congratulated Strauss on his century and a strong support when asked for their opinion on how India could regain the plot of the game that it seemed to be losing. (Even more interestingly, many of these conversations turned into Ind-Pak slurring match faster than you could say “Rediff forums”!)

This demonstrates the power and reach of social media, especially as it comes about as an alternative to real-life conversations which people may find dearth of living in cities.

Building up on this assumption and expectation that cricket will be a huge conversation builder on social media during the World Cup, OMLogic along with Yatra.com developed the game Yatra Cricket Manager.

The game is about managing the Team India XI for the duration of the world cup, taking care of their travel, accommodation and other minute needs. A considerable interest for the game has been generated already and it also has its own dedicated social media channels on Facebook and Twitter. What will be interesting to see is how these will fare and how Yatra.com is able to leverage cricket to its advantage.

Twitter Outwitter

Well, it looks like the virtual space for micro blogging is literally getting cluttered, as many new players jump into the fray, for a show of one-upmanship in ‘blogosphere’. Many Twitter clones, wannabes as well as genuine competitors(so they say) like Plurk, Blauk, Qaiku and a lot others have surfaced, reminding Twitter that it may be the leader, but it surely is not the sole player in the game.

For the moment, Twitter is definitely miles ahead in the race. It has no real immediate dangers lurking nearby; it can still nibble on the lucrative micro-blogging pie, without as much looking behind their backs.

However, if it doesn’t improvise and come up with other attractive add-ons and ground-breaking features in the very near future, Twitter can as well forget its honeymoon with micro-blogging.

The faster, the better it will be for Twitter.

Outwitters?

So who are these new gladiators, jumping into the ring, ready to challenge the high and mighty Twitter?

Well, they are quite a handful, counting the has-beens.

There were Jaiku, Pownce and some more… and now there are many more… the prominent ones being Blauk, Plurk and Qaiku.

How are they different from Twitter? What do they have that can wean users away from Twitter?

Blauk, based out of India and the newest kid on the block has a special focus, with a tagline that says, “I saw you there…and I thought…” Simply said, it’s all about other people, strangers to be specific. Sample this, ‘saw yu sipping a coke outside PVR Saket 2day aftn…black jeans, white T…yu r hot’. Launched in January 2010, it has managed to cobble up some 200,000 users.  So, overtaking Twitter might be just a pipe dream for the moment…but one never knows.

Then there’s Plurk, another Twitter clone, where you put “your life, on the line”. Similar to Twitter in its basic functionalities, only it is put on a timeline, making it more conversational. It has colors for moods and the concept of karma, wherein, the more you use Plurk, the more karma, you get. Like pounce, you can embed Flickr images and Youtube videos too. Here, unlike Twitter, the updates are shown horizontally.

All in all, it is more fun and easy on the eyes than Twitter by a long haul. Presently based in Canada, it’s planning to shift their operation to Taiwan as it has lots of users in Asian countries like Hongkong, Singapore and Taiwan.  So far, it has 5 million subscribers since its launch in 2008.

And then, there is Qaiku, a micro-blogging and lifestreaming service. Stated in 2009, it allows you to “Ask, find, share, discuss. Anywhere”. A Jaiku clone, similar in theme and layout, it too has friends (mutual following) and fans (one way following).

Jaiku, started in Finland in 2007, was cleaner and friendlier than Twitter that Google bought it to make its foray into the micro blogging space. However, forget innovative game-changing features (Google is good at it, right?); it never took off, as it failed to garner any substantial users. And with a whimper Jaiku went off the scene.

Amen to that.

Twitter, It Is.

So what is the moral of the story?

Most of the micro blogging/social networks that came to the scene after Twitter were/are better than Twitter in more ways than one. But, none succeeded.

Call it “the first mover’s advantage”, the head-start Twitter had by launching it in 2006, has made it the unchallenged Numero-Uno.

The simple truth is that Twitter is the most popular micro blogging network not because it is better than the others. It’s popular because it’s popular…call it the ‘herd culture or peer pressure’, you tweet because everyone tweets.  And busy as we are… facebooking and twittering away every little time we can spare online, we just don’t have the time to check these new players out.

But, as they say, anything can happen… anything can happen, and well…a few months, or years down the line, a blauck, a plurk or a qaiku could be the Next Big Thing.

Well, till then, a tweet it is.