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The world is one big round place, and the problem is, we’ve not been able to enjoy this while watching movies on television. We’ve been looking at a cropped view of it for way too long.

But thanks to new technology advancements in cameras and online algorithms, we can now enjoy this 360 degree world on our smartphones. We can see in front, back, to the left and right, above and below, in full spherical.

VR in Social Media Industry

“Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” That’s what Mark Zuckerberg wrote after Facebook acquired Oculus, the virtual reality company, for $2 billion in 2014.

Facebook has already begun incorporating Oculus technology into its 360 Video. It allow users to experience scenes from different angles (looking right, left, up, down, etc.), on both web and mobile devices, creating a more a new real time experience.

Right now, there’s 360 Video available from The Disney Channel and a really cool clip from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Expect to see more immersive videos in 2017 as publishers and even brands catch up with the technology and begin creating more 360 degree videos.

Oculus VR has already released a new “social” app called Oculus Social Alpha. The virtual movie-watching app allows you to “sit” in a theater and watch a video in real-time with other users. It is entirely changing the meaning of ‘hangout’.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, 360 video and virtual reality (VR) was the big talk of the show, from huge concerns like YouTube and corporate parent Google, to Facebook’s Oculus Rift and camera makers. VR and 360 were there.

If you are a person who wants to see everything, want to hear everything then you are going to love this new face of social media which is painted in the colors of virtual reality and 360 degree videos.

The biggest news is of the $599 Oculus Rift VR headset,  which is on sale now. With the Rift, gamers will get a much wider and expansive view of their worlds than they’ve ever seen before.

Beyond VR for gaming, social media there is a scope of 360 for photography also.

In a speech, YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl talked about how VR was going to dramatically change the mobile viewing experience. He parsed the current situation by stating that we currently watch 1.5 hours a day of digital video, compared to five hours daily for TV. But he sees digital video surpassing TV within four years, with VR being a huge driver for the shift.

YouTube, has already made an early bet on 360-degree video because it is the first type of video that actually gives you a better experience on mobile than you can have on desktop or on your TV. And since it’s an open secret that mobile video is exploding, formats that lend themselves to mobile storytelling will grow along with them. And virtual reality is the exactly that person.

Acceptance By the industry

 The filmmakers are not able to dive into 360 in a big way is the limitations of how 360 video gets made. To get the full view, you usually need to use a bunch of cameras tapped together, and then “stitch” or piece the views together in video editing. That process can take hours, days, even weeks.

Several camera manufacturers looked to solve that issue, with small, consumer-grade cameras that are easier to use and promise to eliminate the stitching issues.

With VR you can teleport people into a new experience and blow their minds. It’s not a question of if, but when it will become adopted by consumers. This is the same type of content that’s made GoPro so successful. If we’re not innovating, we cease to be relevant.

Will 2017 be the year when virtual reality becomes a reality or not, the answer lies in the womb of the future

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Today we are surfing on internet, visiting different websites, posting, liking and commenting on events and images of our friend. While all this we are leaving our digital footprint which is converted into data and stored. This data is very precious for companies to understand and target their customers.

Social Media and BIG DATA?

Today an average user has five social media accounts and spends approximately one hour on social media. Most number of Americans get their news from Facebook only.

Everyday social media websites are abuzz with communication around brand. Facebook witnesses millions of likes, posting and people’s reaction to different news and photos. All this creates data in petabytes (1 petabyte = 1000,000 gigabytes). But unlike other data, social websites creates unstructured and uncharacterized data. If you want to get a glimpse of how confusing it can be, go through a twitter feed of any popular brand, and also to its Facebook page among other social profiles (variety in big data) should you wish to be more confused, and then try to make sense of this all from a marketing point of view

All this stands as a testimony of the fact that social media is a big big contributor to the tremendous amount of data produced i.e. Big Data.

Big Data helps in digital marketing by

1. Telling who your customers are

2. How your customers feel

3. What they want

4. Their source of information about your brand

5. How do they arrive at the buying decision

Chinese Social Credit System – a new dystopia for BIG DATA

In some religions there are two angels, one which keeps an account of your good deeds and the other about your bad ones. But in today’s world it is going to be algorithms. Regardless of what one believe, world where our deeds are recorded is in near future. Chinese government has rolled out a social credit system which is going to be compulsory by 2020.

Chinese government has allowed its internet giants, like Alibaba and Tencent only to run and bring this utopia to the realm of existence. Right now they are making the beta version of this system.

Whenever you post something on RenRen or Weibo (which are equivalent to Facebook and micro blogging site Twitter), you will create a data which is going to affect your score. If you’ll post a photo with a person with bad credit score then that also is going to change to your credit score. For making this large amount of data is going to be needed to process. This is going to be provided by Big Data from social media as more and more people are shifting their lives on it.

Big data is going to be a big business, which means ignoring them is not going to be a healthy decision. It will not be wrong to think that the more you learn about your customers the better you will be able to target them with your social media campaign, and seeing the gigantic size of data produced by various social channels, it becomes imperative that you make use of big data in your social media marketing campaigns. By giving you a far deeper understanding of your customers and their relationship with your brand, big data will help you fine tune your social media messages, and choose the right social media platform to disseminate information.

Today, we know of multi-millionaire bloggers like ScoopWhoop, MouthShut.com, Techcrunch and many more. People loved their content, and these bloggers got really rich and popular.

Blogs came into existence in the 90’s. Back then, blogs were simply used as an online journal for the people to write down their feelings, opinions and personal thoughts.

But now, the importance of blog is much more than just being a hobby. Blogs are efficiently being used by small businessmen, entrepreneurs, various websites as a marketing platform.

Here are few Reasons Why blogs are a Must in Digital Marketing

1. Self-expression

With minimal following, this platform was so easy to use, that it gave a lot of writers an access to build their own audience and gave people a new platform for self-expression to get their word out, which encourages the principles of a Democracy.

2. Business Exposure

The scale of your business doesn’t matter. Blogging and a Digital presence helps you reach your target customers and brings in more customers and hence elevate your sales figures.

3. Community and Network-building

As a businessman, you could build your network. As an artist, you could build your fan-base/audience. You could get direct feedback from your targeted customer. It could help you in fund collection, or help you reach your investor, or could be helpful in raising Public Funds.

Moreover, it becomes a medium of communication with your customers.

As a passionate follower of a particular something/someone, you could meet like-minded people.

4. Branding:

Blogging is an indirect way of branding yourself as artist or a businessman or branding your company or products or services.

5. Google loves content:

Blogging means giving out information, and hence this could increase your website ranking on Google or any other Search Engine. Blogging is one of the finest SEO techniques being used by every big brand and well known websites.

6. Increases Traffic to your website:

It also creates more inbound links pointing to your website, hence making it easier for Google Bots to find your website.

Hence, Blogging is used by all kind of businesses as a marketing platform.

7. Enhances Creativity and Skill:

A blogger is often referred to as an artist. You could start a blog if you think you have good writing skills, but not enough recognition. Or, if you want to improve your writing skills, you could start a blog. Writing about yourself gives you time for self-evaluation and prospection. It is a very useful skill.

8. Spreads knowledge and awareness:

Most importantly, blogging serves the people and help many people to get their opinions out.

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Happy Holidays!!

1.      AMEX

The Open Forum website of AMEX is a collaborative website that encourages content on business knowledge and wisdom through industry experts. The magnitude of information on the website makes it popular on various search engines with the benefit of being free of cost to AMEX. This is because, AMEX invites articles rather than paying marketers.

2.      The Guardian

The Guardian is highly innovative when it comes to publishing. Its website contains interactive features and responsive content. It manages its marketing strategies in such a way that it can take optimum advantage of SEO and reach international audiences.

3.      Red Bull

The company makes full use of YouTube to promote an active and adventurous lifestyle in sync with its own motto. It regularly uploads videos showing stunts and daredevil acts in risky locations.

4.      IKEA

Out of all homeware retailers, IKEA ranks high on online experience. It also performs well on conversion rate. The Facebook marketing strategies of the brand are highly successful as they can grab customer nerves. In 2009, it uploaded showroom pictures on a page and allowed netizens to tag themselves on items. The first tag on a product meant the tagger would get it! This became viral.

5.      Uber

The customer friendly app is an advertising technique in its own way so much so that the firm does not have to spend huge amounts on marketing. The feature of referral codes in exchange of free rides generates word-of-mouth marketing for the company which spreads like wildfire.

More than 80% of purchases are made through referrals.

6.      PlayStation

Sony’s PlayStation YouTube channel is a favourite among gamers. It involves consistency through a fixed logo at the bottom of every video so that the brand image is reinforced every time a video is watched.

7.      JetBlue

The company does not use its handles for promotional activity rather it uses them for better customer service. Its responses include @ replies which is unusual in business marketing and provides customers with a great sense of satisfaction and delight. JetBlue knows best that promotional material is boring and what users want is good service.

8.      The Shelter Pet Project

It is a pet adoption firm that brings millions of homeless animals to safe hands. They raised awareness about the plight of animals by building a memorable campaign with the help of FB’s Creative Shop.

9.      Airbnb

The company has revolutionised travel and booking. Its digital marketing strategies include how to videos, user generated pictures and videos through various social media websites and popular city guides. Its Instagram campaign makes it a travel forum through attention grabbing images of locations mixed with humour.

10.  Taco Bell

It is a winner in mobile campaign. Its new app resulted in 3,00,000 downloads on the first day of the launch. Apart from that Taco Bell dominates social media too.

11.  Ola

The taxi aggregator targeted raising awareness through its #ChaloNiklo ad campaign using Facebook during the initial days. It tied up with Myntra to launch the lookgood campaign offering free makeover to Ola users. Ola Share and Ola Café are other marketing strategies. It recently advertised through TVF with a video on how to teach your dad to book a cab and is a major funding source for the company.

Digital marketing exists in an environment which is ever changing and very dynamic. Hence, it becomes unquestioningly important to account for and thereby address the factors affecting it.

Factors affecting digital marketing can be listed as follows:

• Target Market: The first and foremost thing in my viewpoint is deciding the target market for digital marketing. You cannot randomly serve your advertisements and online content to the millions of internet users available online because that would only lead to more costs for a firm. Also, the content must be aligned to the suitability and interests of your target market.

• Channels: Based on the channel decision, a business will be able to target its potential customers. The online marketing domain covers a wide spectrum of platforms, and many more are emerging with time. A business needs to do conduct a cost –benefit analysis and rank the various mediums on the basis of their cost effectiveness.

• Technology: One of the most important factors affecting digital marketing is technology which needs to be reviewed and updated on a continuous basis. Your in-house internet marketing team must have the technological knowhow. Beyond technical difficulties, companies often have to invest in equipment and services to implement their digital marketing campaigns. For example, a company that wants to do video marketing needs a digital camera, lights and audio recording equipment and the expertise to use it, or must pay a studio to handle the video editing and recording.

• Big Data: Big Data lets you answer the what, how, when and why of digital marketing. Big Data will continue to be an all-powerful and overarching topic among business planners and marketing strategists. As businesses realize that customer behavior and usage data is pivotal for leveraging their overall performance and profit, more businesses will adopt Big Data policies and data acquisition and integration technologies.

• Content: Your digital marketing efforts must include language and images that reflect your target market and resonate with them. Studies have shown that effective content marketing contributes in a great deal to the improvement of consumer conversion and retention.

• Social Media: Social media presence of a business matters a lot. Businesses these days maintain active and healthy social media accounts of their businesses as well ask their employees to do so to engage their customers. Many companies launch online campaigns through social media platforms to attract new customers and retain the existing ones.

• Talent: Everything will out of place if the talent and skills of your digital marketing team are not up to the mark. The human element of digital marketing is actually its backbone. The knowledge and experience you and your team have in digital marketing influences whether or not you incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy. Having a talented workforce is an asset!

• Budget: Digital marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing, but it is definitely not free. Hence, there arises a need to prepare a well-defined budget for digital marketing. A marketer must decide and appropriate mix of organic as well as paid promotions. If budgeting is an issue; as it might be for smaller firms, it is advisable for them to outsource their digital marketing to a business who specializes in this.

When all the aforementioned factors are well accounted for and strategies are designed in congruence with them, digital marketing leads a business on the road to success.