Sparkah , a San Diego based Business Consultancy firm has come up with the “Global Top 100 Social Media Agencies and Consultants 2012-13″ list. I am pleasantly surprised to be a part of this list,especially with names like Chris Borgan, Mari Smith, Jeremiah Owyang and also be the only India based Social Media Strategist on it.

You should glance through the list too and follow some other interesting social media strategists and thought leaders.

Her blog post says -

Given my corporate leanings, and the interest in women and leadership, I decided to start there.  So I sent out a tweet:

“Searching for the Sheryl Sandbergs of Asia. Give me a name and reason”

The search lasted many weeks, tweeted and retweeted, reached Japan, China, India and US. Many liked my question, encouraged my efforts but no one knew of such a list.

In Asia my network is largely in India so that is where I got most responses from. The majority of the names were journalists and actors. Social media folks followed close. However, this list was not diverse enough and I searched some more.

By now I had moved past my interest in women leaders just from corporate India. Now it became about highlighting all women who represented a niche. Not about Klout scores, not about followers, not about time spent on twitter. So it became:

“Searching for the #top25 Indian women to follow on twitter.  Leaders of their niche, not just celebs and media folks”

I searched so long that the question may have faded from the memory of many who supported and encouraged this search. I raided twitter follower lists of famous people, tried popular twitter tools and tried to include as many unique niches as I could.

Today I send this list out and dedicate it to all women thought leaders from Asia, not just from media and film, not just the corporate world but all the ones that are making a difference in their own way.

It feels nice to be a on the list with the likes of Kiren Bedi, Gul Panag, Shabana Azmi and Sania Mirza. You should look up the list. I found some really interesting women that I would now like to know more about.

Why twitter for local businesses:

Huge user base: Twitter in India has over 16 million twitter users and that number is growing daily. My personal experience on twitter leads me to believe that a vast majority of the twitter users are urban middle class and have high disposable incomes. They are the audience that the brand should primarily reach out to, as most twitter users are influencers in their circles. I reached this conclusion by assuming that as early adopters [through joining twitter] they are more open to trying and exploring new things and would pass their opinions and experiences [both positive or negative] on to their offline circle.

Location based search: Twitter is the only social network that allows location based search, something that other networks and traditional media largely miss out on. By searching for relevant keywords or bio’s in the “local area” or “target area” the brand can optimize their conversion rates.

A simple e.g. would be: A car service station in Mumbai can search for “car service” near “Mumbai” and interact with users only from Mumbai. Some spillover is bound to happen but the hit and miss ratio is not that bad.

Read full article on SocialSamosa.com

He responded, “Haan Haan madam, Facebook wale main bahut colour hain.”.

The same evening I took a shared taxi back to Churchgate Station. A middle class family with a kid was sharing the taxi with me. The wife was suggesting to her husband,

” Agar aaj ke koi pics ache hain toh woh Facebook par daal denge.”

The next day on my way back from a meeting, I overheard a conversation of two college students in the First Class ladies compartment. One of them was having a problem with her album privacy settings, while the other was suggesting her to go to Facebook Privacy settings on the top right of the page and change it from there. Alternatively she said,

” If you have a Facebook addict or Techno Freak in your class ask him to change it for you.”

I never imagined something like a Facebook would penetrate people’s lives this deeply.

Have you come across any such event? Do share

If you have a business , it is crucial to listen to what people are talking about you. It is also a way to reach out to your relevant audience and start a conversation with them and maybe convert them into a customer.

Here is one of the free monitoring tools, Google Alerts, among others, that you can use for tracking your brand mentions on the internet.

How to use it:

Visit- www.google.com/alerts

Fill in the keywords you wish to track. Please add the keyword in quotes, else for the keyword Hotel Sea Princess, Google will send you alerts for Hotel, Sea and Princess ending up spamming you.

Once you create an alert you will start receiving mails.

Depending on the content of the mail you can take action, ignore, raise a flag or plain simple just be aware of what the internet is talking about your brand.

Note: Google alerts is not 100 % accurate but does a fairly good job and almost all online marketers use it.

Starting off with a Welcome tab & Deals tab for your Facebook page.

Founded by Rohan Dighe, Dealtadka.com offers you a dashboard to create deals for your Facebook connections. It also creates a decent looking welcome tab. It is a very easy process and they also offer help to set it up. You can create multiple deals for a very minimal fee.

Live deal:

Dashboard: [Where you can create a deal yourself]

Welcome Tab:

It is suitable for local businesses selling products or services and for businesses where footfalls is of prime importance.

It is extremely affordable, the monthly retainer cost to keep one deal running, as I know it, is really marginal.

If you like the idea and want to try it out, reach out to me in the comments section or write to me here. I will connect you to Rohan.

Disclaimer: I am in no way attached to Dealtadka. This is just a knowledge sharing blog post.

I see Reliance Mobile attempting to do the same. They have this fancy customer care tab on their Facebook page and also believe in being transparent about which customer care executive is handling the query. Pretty much like dell does. In past Dell representatives have reached out to me through messages on my Fb profile.

I recently bought a Reliance tab and it’s been 5 days and they haven’t started my calling and 3G connection. I have posted a query on twitter and their fancy Fb tab. Let’s see how much of this is being put practice.

PS- They could have done with better designing.

Personally I love twitter. Facebook is cluttered and brand pages kill it for me. Google +…well I haven’t logged in for ages now.