Prashant Suryakumar, Social Media Engagement Manager at Mu Sigma, says that a structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign.
InRev is very focused on establishing Social Media as a separate business function, Bhupendra Khanal, CEO of InRev and Maker of Simplify360, said to midVentures. Unlike other tools, we have brought 3 aspects of social media (Monitoring, Marketing Campaign, and Engagement) into one place, so it makes life easy for marketers. Companies that have a team for social media initiatives, and who are trying to form a community around the product or service can get the most benefit. They do all of this through a variety of ways, but the engagement dashboard makes it extremely simple to follow.
Bhupendra Khanal, whom you may remember as the man who traveled all the way from India to make midVenturesLAUNCH, launched the social media analytical tool last year, and he is now based in Seattle.
Although Hootsuite offers a free alternative, Khanal believes that companies should be open to pay for such services. The value addition that Social Media Marketing and Branding brings is huge. He believes that spending around 50% of a company's digital marketing budget should be spent on social media initiatives simply because competitors, clients and customers are generally using at least one of the many social media tools out there.
Right now, the most basic Simplify360 package costs $49/month, which includes a fairly comprehensive package such as 2 searches, 25 url trackings, 5 feeds, 10 social networking sites and 5,000-10,000 emails, as well as a few other additions.
Currently, there is not a retroactive analysis, which can be frustrating if your company has already been handling social media for some time, and wants to compare the growth and change from the past to the present. That being said, Khanal assures that there is a way to handle this, and that Simplify360 will work to integrate with APIs. As we grow, we will work with the social networks to bring it in. This is for status updates of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We do bring old content in videos, news and blog sections now, Khanal assures.
Social media's impact is still not fully known. But when you read figures in VentureBeat that say Internet shoe retailer Zappos grossed over $1 billion in 2009, thanks largely to their ability to integrate Twitter into their customer service processes, one can start to see the importance. Companies will continue to see large revenue hikes due to social media.
Simplify360 tries to stand out from competition by working closely with their clients - a human approach. We have seen that our competitors are doing one of 3 things. Type A are very focused on Brand Monitoring and are going deeper into it. Type B is integrating Social Media Functions to CRM/ERP applications. And Type C is the professional client applications for Social Networks, Khanal elaborates. We work with our partners and clients very closely, and try to overcome the business hurdles they face. This helps us to win hearts, which we believe is the key to success. Many features and UI changes have come this way.
In a day and age where massive companies are overtaking the smaller ones, it's nice to have the personal touch. Also, InRev has an Industry Research Team who continuously monitors the Social Media space and tries to predict the market changes early. We then take these findings to our clients and have discussions. This helps both of us, Khanal says.
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