India has always been a cricket crazy nation and probably will remain so for the next few generations as well. No, I don’t say this because I love cricket or that I am an Indian but because Indians showed their love for cricket to the entire world yesterday. And the best part is that they proved their prowess at a time not when India had won but when they had LOST a closely fought ODI (One Day International) match against world champions Australia.

Chasing a mighty 350 runs target in 50 overs, Sachin Tendulkar, arguably the world’s best ever batsmen and undoubtedly the best currently playing batsmen, played an innings of a life time and scored half of those runs alone (175 runs) but couldn’t take India to victory as the entire team fell 3 runs short of the target! Each and every Indian who saw the match was heartbroken and their broken hearts and tears flooded twitter with their emotional tweets. Eventually Sachin made it to the Twitter-Record-Books, he already has probably already has all batting records against his name. Coincidentally, he also entered the cricket record books yesterday with another world record of being the first ever batsmen in history to score 17,000 ODI runs.

Coming to twitter analysis, Twitter Trends is way of knowing what is currently hot over the web all over the world at any point of time. Although I knew about it from a long time but I realized the power of trends ever since I saw Michael Jackson trending. Yes, it was through trends that I saw that MJ had passed away. MJ’s demise stayed on twitter for almost a month. Making him one of the most trending topics ever (see pic).

For those who are unaware of what a ‘Twitter Trending Topic’ is, as Twitter puts it :

Trending topics on Twitter are keywords that happen to be popping up in a whole bunch of tweets. We measure these topics and adjust them in real-time throughout the day. It’s a great way of finding out what’s happening right now.

As far as the Indian twitter connection is concerned, although “India” trended on twitter on the 14th and 15th of August (reason being India’s independence day on 15th of August) there have only 3 incidents (excluding yesterday’s “Sachin” Trending) when an Indian individual has been a trending topic on twitter. India’s dram queen aka Rakhi Sawant, Late Andhra Pradesh CM Y S Rajasekhar Reddy, and eliminated veteran BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) leader Jaswant Singh, have made it to the trending topics. Unfortunate but a matter of fact is that all of them made it to the trends for the wrong reasons. Rakhi sawant for the disgusting swayamvar show, YSR – when he died of chopper crash and Jaswant Singh – when he was mercilessly thrown out of India’s 2nd biggest political party – BJP.

See Rakhi trending here.

The fourth instance of an Indian making it to the trending topics was Sachin Tendulkar, though made it for the right reasons, his heroic knock, but what was heartbreaking to see was that India had lost the battle. Well, what’s important is not that Sachin was the fourth Indian, but the fact which is overwhelming to know is that he’s the first cricketer who has made it to the list.

We all know that records hardly matter for a man of his stature, but for all of us they really do. Hats off to Sachin for making us proud yet again – on the virtual world this time. Kudos to Sachin, you truly are a Brand. Cheers !

Technorati Tags: cricket, india, india-vs-australia, Inspirations, michael-jackson, rakhi sawant, sachin-tendulkar, social-media, sports, trending-topics, twitter

The Indian Film Industry is finally waking up to the power of social media. Films have started creating websites and doing promotion online, ads were already seen from quite some time and twitter/ facebook/ orkut were also being tried a bit. A few days ago I reviewed Quickgun Murugun’s online marketing campaign, though it was a crap one altogether, recently I noticed that even India’s biggest production house, Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films (YRF) has understood the power of the internet and taken it up to the social media to get some branding and do good promotions for all its films. I decided to do a done a detailed analysis and was impressed to see the results. Let’s see what they’ve done and what are the thoughts behind the campaign.

The Website:
Yes I agree that a flash site looks good but I still do not favour its implementation primarily because of the slow internet speed in India. Quite a few users who see a flash loading page often tend to close the page straightaway, that’s because of no or little patience. We don’t like to wait! Anyways, once its loaded, a decent interface comes up with the latest release in background (Dil Bole Hadippa these days), a nice way to promote the latest. Also the 30% page flash assures that the recent previous or the upcoming films are also noticed. Contests winners about the previous films are also displayed, motivating people to take part in more contests.

YRF Official Website

Next thing I liked about the site was that each film gets a microsite. No need to create new domains, all on sub domain and having enough knowledge and stuff for the fans or the inquisitive lot. Also contests were promoted in good fashion, full marks to the designers for making them strikingly visible.

YRF-dedicated-movie-microsites with Contests-Facebook-Twitter-Youtube

YRF understands that website alone is not enough to promote and hence has a twitter profile, a facebook fan page, and a youtube channel (operating since 2006), the most essential of them all. All their promos are updated there much before they are aired on TV. A very nice move to get free advertising.

Yash Raj Films on Twitter

Not only YRF, each film has got it dedicated twitter profiles or facebook groups and they’ve mentioned that they are official, a good move once again winning the trust of fans, equally important.

Dil Bole Hadippa (DilBoleHadippa) on Twitter

They have also assured that no one has the slightest of doubts about being official, every profile is linked to one another. The website has links to twitter, facebook and youtube channels and vice versa as well.

Dil Bole Hadippa - Official Group (Yash Raj Films) - Facebook

Dil-Bole-Hadippa-Facebook-ads

Though I am not a big supporter of ads, but if you have the money in your pockets, you should do it is my take and that’s what they’ve done. Facebook ads are evident and done enough to gather a lot of support for the fan pages/ groups .

The engagement team has made a point to keep the fans busy and connected by promoting them all over the place. After all brands are made out of fans/ users. Hence by engaging them consistently they are doing a good job that they speak for them.

YRF-dedicated-Facebook-URL

The technical team seems to be doing a good job. Assuring customized URL’s for their pages, the youtube channel apart from the regular stuff, has branded the page very well.

YouTube - yrf's Channel

They’ve also made sure that every film gets its separate playlist so that the user does not miss any promo for a particular film. A good thought indeed.

Dil Bole Hadippa Playlist

Although they have done a very decent job, the absence of a blog is something which I could not understand. An industry like the film industry which relies heavily or rather completely on its viewers/ fans, keeping that informed is a very important aspect. But not having a blog they are missing on a lot of free advertising and PR. If I am not wrong, Aamir Khan’s dog is named Shahrukh is something that every fan of Asmir knows, but where did they come to know of it ? From his blog of course.

Asking what the fans wished to see in future, what are their opinions, what could be rectified or improved in future is an easy way to get public opinions and then deliver to them. This would improve their fan base, credibility and gain a lot of respect among the crowd. This can be seen by the amount of respect Google has in the online world. A major reason for that is that it does what it’s users want, also the reason why Google’s head designer quit, he had to do not what he thought, but what people wanted. But that’s a one off case, and negligible compared to amount of respect and confidence Google gained among its consumers. So listening to people is a must do for YRF.

Barring the blogging part, Yash Raj Films have done a commendable job on the social media as of now and I must say Kudos to their team altogether. I seriously suggest Quickgun Murugun’s online marketing agency to learn a thing or two or rather all what YRF has done as what they did was entirely crap. Cheers YRF !

Although I did a detailed analysis, I may have missed something which you have noticed. Also possible that you disagree with me on certain points. Do drop in the comments section and let’s have a discussion over it.

Article cross-posted on Zapylacz blog.

Technorati Tags: aditya-chopra, bollywood, Branding, brands, dil-bole-hadippa, facebook, google, indian-brands, internet-power, PR, rani-mukherji, shahid-kapoor, social-media, twitter, yash-chopra, yash-raj-films, yrf