The OMG news for the week is of course the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft. It shows the increasing need to integrate social data into the business context. Whether it is knowing that a person is still with an organization before you invite them to a meeting or understanding the person’s immediate purchase history before recommending products, minutes can determine whether your message is relevant or inappropriate. In my opinion, there’s a lot that Microsoft can do for LinkedIn, which is still the most reliable corporate directory around. On the flip side the acquisition may not be so good for tools that relied on extracting data from LinkedIn for their primary existence. Read my piece on how this connection can help marketers. (And as an aside, will Twitter remain a standalone?)We’ve hosted a couple of workshops recently onTechnology in Marketing. I think all of us are agreed that the overarching goal of most marketers today is to individualize marketing at scale. We want to move beyond mass personalization to real person-to-person communication. Just like the good old days when the salesperson knew you and proposed stuff that would work for you. Personalized, real-time knowledge is the immediate need for marketers, and technology to achieve this is mostly there. If you know where to find it
Join us for a webinar today at 3pm on “Beyond Likes: Unlocking Social Media Intelligence for Modern Marketer” co-presented with Microsoft. I’ll be co-hosting the session along with Nikhil Tiwari of Frrole.
Next week will see us co-hosting a CMO Roundtable with Netcore on the 23rd of June in Gurugram-Delhi, NCR at Dusit Devarana. The topic for this session is “Massively Scaleable Marketing For One“. Since seats are limited and by-invitation do email us if you are interested. You can see photos from the previous CMO Roundtable with Netcorehere.
In other earth-shaking news, a JEE coaching institute gifted a BMW (red, if you must know) to their student who was in the top 20 ranks of the IIT entrance. The way things are going, it will probably take him a while to afford the car on his salary as an IIT graduate, but it is certainly a great idea from a marketing perspective. It will get the attention of potential students and is probably cheaper than buying ads. Plus it was a used car so I guess there’s some upside there too! The whole coaching camp eco-system has been receiving a lot of coverage recently, and this certainly capitalizes on that. I am not getting into the virtues in enticing a bunch of kids into sacrificing their childhood to get into a college. Much like fairness creams, if there is a perceived upside, and it is legal, you will definitely find a market for it. And Kota is a classic example of ‘clustering’ that Michael Porter talked about. Who would have thunk!
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