It has become imperative for any youngster to have an account on any of the social networking site and most importantly on Facebook and Twitter.

The more the friends you have, the more you are connected to a vast number of friends chances are you are already crowned queen/ king of the social networks.

There is a joke doing the round, a Girls posts on her FaceBook wall, “ohh! hurt my ankle!!”, and there are 834 comments on 560 likes, and comments ranging from enquiry to all range of medicinal advice. And a Guy posts that his leg got broke, he receives 2 likes and 3 comments all asking for if they can borrow the bike till he gets healed.

Social Influence, is very well defined at Wikipedia, as which happens when an individual’s thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. But still is it a persuasive effect we have on one another or our Emotional Need to be in touch with other and create a socially defined open or closed circle for us to reach out to other. The Anna Hazarre case made a case for where Social Influence is responsible for change in Attitude.

Recently, Klout, the infamous Social Influence watch dog ooops ranking service, ranked the social influence of over 100 million people, and there CEO rightly said, “One hundred million people with Klout Scores means that there are 100 million voices effectively leveraging the social Web to share their opinions, hopes and dreams and shaping the decisions of the billions of people now listening to them”.

Of course! It doesn’t guarantee Klout’s as a legitimate yardstick of social media influence although Yes, it can be a great method of finding like-minded, thoughtful people with a certain interest or expertise. but do open gates or atleast Business Intelligence (BI) fraternity need to measure anything and everything.

As Klout, the system that rates how influential people are on social media is set up in an old Carrot and Stick thory of Motivation, herein the carrot, which is the reward, is the influence you have, and that is backwards. But Influence is not a reward or an end result. It is a byproduct of actually being good or bad.

Can this Social Influence be deployed by a Firm for Marketing purpose?

Late C K Prahalad in his book, ‘The New Age of Innovation (Next Practices)’, give a principle for Social Influence for a firm which rightly can be said as guiding parameter for New Marketing Dimensions, which is: N=1, R=G formula. C K Prahalad formulates serving one customer at a time as N=1. In order to service this one customer like this, a whole lot of reliably working partnerships are to be forged.

It invariably will have to scale globally, formulated as R=G (Resource = Global).

The key characteristic of a The Firm serving N=1 with R=G are:

• Node within a global web.
• Personalized Experiences
• Co-creation
• Celebration of Individual
• Thematic experience.
• Delivery Network.

For example, YouTube had this democratization (N=1 + Affordable = Democratization, unlike any paid online video channel like OnStar) play out in physical space more intensely and much faster than anticipated.

Time will soon be there when these “Influence-rs” of market will advocate Market Buying and Purchase Behavior of Consumer. No Wonder, Google who never was known to provide a way for marketers to distinguish between the performance of their paid efforts such as Product Listing Ads, and organic search ads recently came out with Metrics for Shopping.

Google now seems to be more interested in trying to understand the product data in the context of how people search.

So now for Ecommerce Players and Retailers, it is imperative to ensure their feeds or Product Search Queries are optimized for search queries, similar to Web site pages for search engine optimization. Otherwise, consumers will take no time in passing to a result where  the product photos and descriptions are tuned to the people way of searching. Marketers must do a better job of normalizing their feeds to align with the way people search.

So again the Social Influence blends contextual and behavioral targeting for Social Media Marketing.

- Akshat

Yatra.com Online Advt – Travel from Delhi to Lucknow only for Rs. 1981

Yatra.com Behavioral Advertisement

Yes this is what I happen to see when I was browsing a site and the page was having a Google Adsense display of Yatra.com. Why I’m raising this? Well actually only a 4 days back I had booked a ticket from Lucknow to Delhi and I suppose this is why I am receiving this – the return fare ticket display advertisement and that too using Google Adesense.

Welcome to the World of Behavioral Advertising.

I find the whole situation interesting even amusing considering that how much information the websites in actual collect.

In order to provide a more relevant online experience, Behavioral Advertising has not made only a big entry but if stats could be collected, I believe some of the ads a user sees online are customized based on previous online activity to the liking of users, and why not it is after all giving you a customized and targeted as per online purchase history or users’ footprints solution.

Information about past online site visits are now being used to predict the interests of people using any internet connected device and not only computer and present advertisement related to those interests/ past online activities.

So, what exactly is behavioral advertising? It is a process where a company can monitor and selectively target an individual by much more than demographic and contextual interests. An example of this type of targeting includes political interests, health ailments, social network identifiers, browsing history, content preferences and more.[1]

PrivacyGourmet, a website targeted towards safety of users has but cautioned users on it.

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So to be secure and to be on safe side and not to leave so many of the footprints, it is advised to play with the Privacy Settings of your browser. Also most social networking sites offer privacy settings that give users the power to control their feeds and online activities. The ability to determine who can access their profile as well as various components thereof such as basic information, personal information, videos and photo albums could not only be controlled but also directed to the rightful users whom you really want to share your updates.

It is very clear that Online based Ecommerce sites are using this information which is available through cookies or your online footprints to serve ads which are not only contextual to the content on the page, but also to your other browsing activities.

That’s all NOT good.

So if you are really concerned I would advise to vsit the NAI website to find out who has been tracking you and to also opt out of behavioral advertising if it bothers you.

Have you watched movie,  Minority Report which takes place in the future. The main character is bombarded by advertisements in the physical world which are keyed to his past shopping history or known personal preferences.

So it is evident that behavioral targeting is on work in the online world.

So be ready when next time you see on Facebook, hey Dude, you ready for a hot night? call me on XXXXX, and we’ll pick you in your Red Shirt you bought on FashionandYou.com… and afterwards on we’ll grab a pizza at Dominos but don’t forget to get your discount coupon on SnapDeal.com