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Social Media Marketing: Amita Paul, CEO of Objective Marketer

June 7th, 2009 · 9 Comments · Entrepreneurs

A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.comwas one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience.  I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in less than 30 seconds and 30 words: ObjectiveMarketer enables you to define the right message for your buzz channels – yes “objectively” — listen to, analyze and measure what really comes back from what you send out there. If you don’t completely understand what you do, you will go unnoticed or preach in a desert of deaf ears likely to unsubscribe at some point. “If you ask five social media ‘experts,’ you get eight different answers,” Guy Kawasaki told me. “ObjectiveMarketer’s product helps you truly figure out if, and how, your social media marketing is working.” He has close to 130,000 followers. He listens to his followers and in turn wants to talk meaningfully and effectively to them.

The Art of Laconic Marketing: Weigh your Words before and when you say them: Social Media Marketing is not the simple addition of three words Marketing + Media + Social. Marketing and Media Marketing are the art of pushing messages to an audience. It’s a primarily a top-down approach. Social Media Marketing is a more complex game: You start from your message, sure, but real-time interaction does not simply require that you know “about” your “target,” but that you also listen to people (more precisely a collection of individuals) and improve your understanding of them immediately and, eventually, fine-tune the way you address them — and this, in real-time.

And you have 140 characters to do that! You can’t be “conversational” per se. You have to be concise – but not sloganish or buzzwordy, because you will turn off your followers. You have to be laconic like a Spartan, i.e. terse (sometimes witty) and provide an url. Now how can you prepare for message effectiveness and measure the exact impact and performance of your messages in real time, know what works, why, how, and how to optimally schedule your tweets? You need a completely new type of dashboard, an intelligent listening machine that guides your decisions — a control tower of sorts for your campaigns. The core value of ObjectiveMarketer is to provide guidance and analytics for your campaigns.

While Internet marketing focuses on getting visibility in general, effective social marketing focuses on message transportability and repeatability. The purpose is to scale a grassroots marketing approach, i.e. foster the storytellers that will feel like communicating your message to their friends/followers — retweet them — within their various neighborhoods, as well as to understand the actual efficiency of the levers. ObjectiveMarketer provides the statistics, the trends and comparisons across campaigns and channels, i.e. the social insight that enables campaign designers to assess the quality of their messages and the actual impact of their amplifiers. Subtle and thorough measurement is the only way to ensure wide reach.   

More about Amita: Amita is passionate about her product. For a good reason: I believe that there is no similar product today. She launched the private beta and her first users are thrilled. They also like this: she listens to their suggestions and understands what they say right away, because she is both a techie and a sharp marketing brain. As a result, when you suggest a feature, you can see that she is already cogitating on how to best implement it. She is a fast speaker and a fast thinker who grasps that, in marketing, “facts, not speculations and assumptions derived from trends or impressions, are key to success. I love marketing,” she adds. “In my career, I have often felt bad for marketing folks. They never seem to have the right tools to make informed decisions. They have lots of out-and-out marketing applications for brand awareness, promotional offers, and various other programs, but nothing that helps them before something has taken place. In the real-time and personalized engagement economy fostered by social media, they need a platform to pre-empt, strategize and execute — and the ability to gauge results.” 

Amita came to this country at the end of 2005 and worked as a product manager first at StrongMail Systems and then at H5 (http://www.h5.com). She loved every minute of it, demonstrated how skilled and efficient she was — eager as she was to show the high quality of her training in India. She got her Masters in Computer Sciences from the Engineering College in Raipur, which enabled her to work as an analyst at Computer Science Corporation and Seacom Solutions – and then, she went for her MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur (http://xlri.com). The more she learned at school or in companies, the more she wanted to become an entrepreneur. She is definitely jumping in with the right product at the right time. She works around the clock with her team here and in India. So, I couldn’t help asking if it was hard for her to juggle work and family, knowing that she has a six-month old daughter, Eisha: “Not in the least,” she responded with her bright trustworthy smile. “My baby is a breath of fresh air and my husband is very supportive.” Amita’s husband, Shekhar Yadav, who recently graduated with joint MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, works as Director Technology at StrongMail Systems.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

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9 responses so far ↓

  • 1 NEENZ // Jun 7, 2009 at 12:29 pm

    In the brief time that I’ve been working on a campaign using Objective Marketer, Amita has made herself very available to questions and tutorials. Above all else, Amita is a very nice person. Objective Marketer will be the tool of choice for social media marketers.

  • 2 kenekaplan // Jun 7, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    Marylene. What a wonderful write up that peaked my interest enough to arrange a meeting with Amita this week. I’m looking forward to meeting her. Thank you for the introduction. You make so many wonderful connections!

  • 3 Social Media Marketing: Amita Paul, CEO of Objective Marketer « Unemployment Killer’s Daily Blog // Jun 8, 2009 at 5:28 am

    […] See the original post here:  Social Media Marketing: Amita Paul, CEO of Objective Marketer […]

  • 4 Tim McQuillen // Jun 8, 2009 at 7:02 am

    I think Amita has created an excellent framework to capture real time value and ROI in the fuzzy world of social media. I am very proud of her achievements to date and look forward to seeing what the future holds. Great work!

  • 5 Cory Rosenfield // Jun 8, 2009 at 8:33 am

    The article sums it up perfectly. The product and the CEO! As someone who manages social media campaigns for a number of clients, Objective Marketer is a dream tool. It allows me to analyze, identify and target my audience effectively with so much more being added every day! With Amita’s creative, resourceful and caring approach, OM is a sure bet to help so many more in the future as it does for my clients and brands.

  • 6 Krittika Saha // Jun 14, 2009 at 2:39 am

    It is about 6 months that I am into facebook, linkedin, the whole web 2.0 etc.. you get a feeling of being in Jurassic park all these days. And with the exciting things you get to see in web2.0, and you a wonder how soon you could get back to being a dino.

    Objective marketer seems to be just the right marketing TOOL, right timing and right place (social media, web2.0, mash ups etc..). These are the tools that you need to ensure that you are ahead of the curve, makes the difference of being a mature marketer and a cave man.

    Amita is a close friend for over 25 years and in all this time, I have seen her take on the role of a student, wife, mother, working professional with Great Spirit and has balanced all demands of life so well. For years she has been obsessed with marketing, this blended with her hands on software programming, gives her unique foresight and ability to build a marketing tool like Objective marketing. She has always worked very hard toward her passion and success followed.

  • 7 Prasant Rout // Jul 10, 2009 at 10:37 pm

    Hi Amita,
    Hearitest congratulations for making a niche in the creative field of IT enabled objective marketing. We Xlers are product of your strong conviction and creativity. My prayer to All Mighty for grand success of your endeavours. Love and blessing to your angelic baby.

    Brief about me. I did by B.E from REC in 1991 and exec-pgp from xlri in 2004. I have registered for a PhD program in e-business with IIT KGP in 2005 but could not do much work. Working with IOCL and posted at Paradip now as Senior Manager(HR&IS).

    Wish you great success

    Prasant

  • 8 Reflecting on a poll: A hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page in an interview. What should she do? // Aug 30, 2009 at 7:12 pm

    […] Note: To create the poll, I used ObjectiveMarketer (http://www.objectivemarketer.com). The platform enables you to create as well as analyze the exact impact of your tweets (It’s not enough to “listen to” people. You must also learn how to talk to them and understand what gets to their minds or their hearts). These tweets can also be polls!  I wrote a post earlier about the founder, Amita Paul: http://delbourg-delphis.com/2009/06/social-media-marketing-amita-paul-ceo-of-objective-marketer. […]

  • 9 Matthew Krawse // Sep 14, 2009 at 12:31 pm

    Objective Marketer is an excellent twitter application. I’ve tried several others (which will remain nameless) but OM is clearly ahead of the pack.

    Amita has done a great job delivering a quality and versatile product. I would recommend Objective Marketer to any and everyone looking to jump into the world of online marketing.

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