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