There is a very interesting report on Indian youth trends at Ingene.  What stuck me the categorisation of the Indian youth:
1. The Bharatiyas: 67% of the Indian youth who lives in the rural areas with least influence of globalisation, least economically priviledged and high on traditional values and highly Bollywood influenced.
2. The Indians: 31.% of [...]

I couldn’t agree more with what Lakshimipathy Bhat wrote in the Financial Express that the Sunsilk Gang of Girls, often taken as the benchmark on digital campaigns in India owes a part of its success to the massive offline mass media support it got. Often for our clients we most of the time try to [...]

Recently one of our clients mentioned a recommendation by an online marketing agency on how they can hire 4-5 people who will start blogs and comment among one another to strike up a positive conversation in the blogosphere (different than having a ghost writer to write for you).

The idea is tempting and you might just even get sold on it, if you are a newbie on social media marketing. You control the message. The bloggers are yours. Yet to the outside world, the effort is going to be seen as passionate fans of your brands/ organisation writing positive about your brand or organisation.

We have talked about using Twitter to enhance your media relations practice in the past. We talked about how many journalists are using Twitter today and some of us are now directly pitching to them using the 140 characters miracle. Our media friends love it too – it’s fast, crisp, and devoid of any fat adjectives.

What would an effective social media marketing campaign entail? According to me, there are 4 key quadrants that we especially need to take care of.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

I landed in Cannes as a member of a jury eager to lend my experience to selecting the best among the best for the inaugural PR Lions. I returned humbled by the learning from the vast pool of creativity, enriched by the knowledge and thirst for more.

The world has changed – while changing further at an incredible pace. The idea can come from anywhere – advertising, PR, direct, promotions, you name it. And let’s stop cribbing about it not being a PR idea. The Idea wins. I also know that Creativity flows from the young and free. So from hereon you are the King of Rock – not MJ. So let’s see it floowww……Excellence in execution is key to success – using surround sound – digital, traditional media, email, event, grassroots, you name it. Traditional PR is alive but often not relevant, insufficient, does not reach audiences as quickly as digital does. Often digital leads, traditional media follows – almost always.