Shrinidhi Hande, who heads Business Blogging’s delivery and strategy, has been selected as an official blogger for Tata Nano. He is one of the 3 bloggers selected from all over India for this assignment, code named Nano Superdrive.

Shrinidhi is currently on a 26 day road trip, driving all around South India in Tata Nanos. his team started from Ahmedabad and currently in Kochi after covering Surat, Mumbai, Pune, Goa and Mangalore. The mission would prove the durability and ruggedness of Tata Nano as it covers dozens of cities and thousands of kms.

From TataNanoSuperdrive

Shrinidhi specializes in live blogging and has covered several events and conferences. He is publishing his daily updates and photos at the blog http://superdrive-greenroute.blogspot.com/. He is also updating his personal blog on the journey.

From TataNanoSuperdrive

Nano brigade will be visiting Chennai on 17th. Do catch up. We at Business Blogging with Shrinidhi and team all the best and a safe journey.

Ever listened to Podcasts? Creating a Podcast is not really that complicated a thing as some make it out to be. You too can become a Podcaster! And to help you with that is precisely why we at BusinessBlogging, have come out with a workshop on the subject.

The one-day workshop will involve the participants in hands-on exercises, while also providing them reasons, as to why Podcasts can be employed in their routines to benefit them on a professional, as well as personal level. Modeled on the unconference format, the interactive session will take participants through a brief history of the art of Podcasting, and the various tools available for one to create a Podcast. A detailed course outline can be found here.

The workshop is scheduled for July 4, and the participation fee for the event is Rs. 2990. However, there are exciting discounts for early birds. Click HERE for details. Venue details can be found here.

This workshop has a limited capacity of 30 participants. So get yourselves registered at once, and set your sights on becoming a Podcaster!

Wiki defines Micro blogging as form of blogging. Which differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, or an image or embedded video. Some popular Micro blogs include Twitter, Emotionr, IRateMyDay, Frazr, Moodmill, Hictu, MySay, Jaiku, Tumblr.

When Twitter was launched first, it had been criticized by many bloggers as a useless startup, but Twitter was revolutionary, after launch of Twitter many similar services got launched. In India, even though many twitter like services started, a few of them are successful and others failed, still many new services are launching one after one.

Micro blogging is slowly moving into the mainstream. In the United States, for example, Presidential candidate Barack Obama microblogged from the campaign trail using Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging services. Traditional media organizations, including The New York Times and the BBC, have begun to send headlines and links in microblog posts. Other potential applications of microblogging include traffic and sports updates and emergency broadcast systems.

Nearly 66 per cent of internet users globally visit social networks and blogs. The time spent on social networking sites is growing at over three times the rate of overall internet growth. Social media primarily constitutes social networking and book marking platforms, blogging platforms, content applications, social gaming and social connectivity. Indian companies currently using social media include Infosys, TCS, Frito-Lay, Dell, Naukri and HLL.

The main advantages of social media are high brand awareness (through internet advertising, regular updates about the product/event), and company-consumer interaction (by taking live feedback on products for development). Low cost high returns medium –Using social media is more cost effective than any of the traditional marketing methods. Moreover, the benefits in store far exceed the cost involved in setting up and executing a social media campaign.

EXAMPLES:

Café Coffee Day has two pages that show up on Facebook search and the one with smaller number of fans seems to be the official page. They have around 48000 fans but seem to be making no concerted effort to make social media marketing work for them. The wall has no posts and counter-intuitively there are some posts under boxes tab.

The company, who seems to be trying, though not too hard, is Kingfisher. Kingfisher has a great brand presence that would translate really well in social media marketing.  They post frequently and have events that they update. They just have 3000 fans but have the potential to be a leader of Facebook Marketing in India.

Social media monitoring is the broad term for the services and tools you will use to pay attention. It incorporates monitoring, measuring and analyzing Internet-based social media, usually combining automated systems and human insight to turn raw data into useful information.

People are talking about you, your company, your products, and your people. With modern, digital communications tools, they’re publishing their thoughts to a worldwide audience. They write on blogs and in online communities, and they share pictures and videos on popular sites, such as MySpace and YouTube. Paying attention to these online conversations is a new imperative for anyone who cares about their company’s reputation.

Depending on your needs and exposure, you may be able to do your own social media analysis. You’ll use publicly-available search services, such as Google and Technorati, and free or low-cost software, such as RSS readers, to collect and sort data. You might also try the free versions of commercial social media analysis tools that some vendors offer.

Social media analysis services from commercial vendors offer two major advantages over free services: their tools are more advanced and better adapted to large-scale needs, and most offer a layer of human analysis that makes the information more useful.