Zapylacz – Blog

Archive for the ‘branding’ Category

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With twitter officially declaring on their blog that restaurants are the most benefitted business from their service, Indian restaurants have woken up as well. And what better place would be than the IT capital of India itself to start making use of this service. Ever since Times of India reported that Food and Restaurants are the two words that are most searched in Bangalore, restaurants and food chains have understood that even they can’t stay away from the internet for too long. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of restaurants turning up towards the net and running campaigns, increasing their social presence through blogs, twitters and the facebooks.

Also recently a restaurant in the Indiranagar also got into the newspapers for the wrong reasons. Desperate to get the crowd back, the also turned up to the social media instead of the regular media. The restaurant called the “The Beach”, launched a “Support The Beach” campaign and offered youngsters free and discounted drinks if they tweeted the link to their incident which had their side of the story and explaining what was wrong in the newspaper reports. I don’t know how successful the campaign was but it definitely grabbed eyeballs of the netsavvy youth in the city. Getting your crowd back is a tough ask especially if newspapers tarnish your image, they definitely acted smartly and found the best way to pull the crowd back which was essentially the youth on any given day.

A few shots of The Beach campaign. Entire campaign can be seen here. No, not much use visiting that link as the discount period is over.

Support the beach campaign

The Beach, Bangalore

Support the beach campaign

Well I’ll leave you with some of the ones I found, the rest of the job you have to do and I’ll add to my list here.

• Punjabi Parantha
• Kyra
• Mast Kalandar
• The Beach
• South Indies
• Potluck Restaurant

South Indies on Twitter

I expect more from you people. Let us know @zapylacz or in the comments below.

The Indian Film Industry is finally waking up to the power of social media. Films have started creating websites and doing promotion online, ads were already seen from quite some time and twitter/ facebook/ orkut were also being tried a bit. Recently I noticed that even the biggest production house, Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films (YRF) has understood the power of the internet and taken it up to the social media to get some branding and do good promotions for all its films. I decided to do a done a detailed analysis and was impressed to see the results. Let’s see what they’ve done and what are the thoughts behind the campaign.

The Website:
Yes I agree that a flash site looks good but I still do not favour its implementation primarily because of the slow internet speed in India. Quite a few users who see a flash loading page often tend to close the page straightaway, that’s because of no or little patience. We don’t like to wait! Anyways, once its loaded, a decent interface comes up with the latest release in background (Dil Bole Hadippa these days), a nice way to promote the latest. Also the 30% page flash assures that the recent previous or the upcoming films are also noticed. Contests winners about the previous films are also displayed, motivating people to take part in more contests.

YRF Official Website

Next thing I liked about the site was that each film gets a microsite. No need to create new domains, all on sub domain and having enough knowledge and stuff for the fans or the inquisitive lot. Also contests were promoted in good fashion, full marks to the designers for making them strikingly visible.

YRF-dedicated-movie-microsites with Contests-Facebook-Twitter-Youtube

YRF understands that website alone is not enough to promote and hence has a twitter profile, a facebook fan page, and a youtube channel (operating since 2006), the most essential of them all. All their promos are updated there much before they are aired on TV. A very nice move to get free advertising.

Yash Raj Films on Twitter

Not only YRF, each film has got it dedicated twitter profiles or facebook groups and they’ve mentioned that they are official, a good move once again winning the trust of fans, equally important.

Dil Bole Hadippa (DilBoleHadippa) on Twitter

They have also assured that no one has the slightest of doubts about being official, every profile is linked to one another. The website has links to twitter, facebook and youtube channels and vice versa as well.

Dil Bole Hadippa - Official Group (Yash Raj Films) - Facebook

Dil-Bole-Hadippa-Facebook-ads

Though I am not a big supporter of ads, but if you have the money in your pockets, you should do it is my take and that’s what they’ve done. Facebook ads are evident and done enough to gather a lot of support for the fan pages/ groups .

The engagement team has made a point to keep the fans busy and connected by promoting them all over the place. After all brands are made out of fans/ users. Hence by engaging them consistently they are doing a good job that they speak for them.

YRF-dedicated-Facebook-URL

The technical team seems to be doing a good job. Assuring customized URL’s for their pages, the youtube channel apart from the regular stuff, has branded the page very well.

YouTube - yrf's Channel

They’ve also made sure that every film gets its separate playlist so that the user does not miss any promo for a particular film. A good thought indeed.

Dil Bole Hadippa Playlist

Although they have done a very decent job, the absence of a blog is something which I could not understand. An industry like the film industry which relies heavily or rather completely on its viewers/ fans, keeping that informed is a very important aspect. But not having a blog they are missing on a lot of free advertising and PR. If I am not wrong, Aamir Khan’s dog is named Shahrukh is something that every fan of Asmir knows, but where did they come to know of it ? From his blog of course.

Asking what the fans wished to see in future, what are their opinions, what could be rectified or improved in future is an easy way to get public opinions and then deliver to them. This would improve their fan base, credibility and gain a lot of respect among the crowd. This can be seen by the amount of respect Google has in the online world. A major reason for that is that it does what it’s users want, also the reason why Google’s head designer quit, he had to do not what he thought, but what people wanted. But that’s a one off case, and negligible compared to amount of respect and confidence Google gained among its consumers. So listening to people is a must do for YRF.

Barring the blogging part, Yash Raj Films have done a commendable job on the social media as of now and I must say Kudos to their team altogether. I seriously suggest Quickgun Murugun’s online marketing agency to learn a thing or two or rather all what YRF has done as what they did was entirely crap. Cheers YRF !

Although I did a detailed analysis, I may have missed something which you have noticed. Also possible that you disagree with me on certain points. Do drop in the comments section and let’s have a discussion over it.

Article cross-posted on www.abhinavsahai.com

Our next case in study is the Domino’s Youtube scandal. 4 months ago, 2 youtube employees posted a video that showed them spoiling the food they were preparing to be sent. The video showed one of the employees putting cheese in his nose and then using in the food as well as sneezing and spitting in the pizza’s. The video spread like wildfire and reached half a million views in its first three days itself. When the authorities came to to know they asked youtube to remove the video but I guess nothing can be removed from the Social Media permanently and it kept surfacing at quite a few places. The companies’ brand image took a HIT and a great great PR loss is what it ended in what the employees termed just as a ‘PRANK’. Though the employees have been suspended but both the company officials as well as outlet owners were seen shedding their faults, blaming each others.

All this resulted in heavy losses to the company. Unconfirmed reports said that the losses were up to a staggering $50 million as the company, which operates in 60 countries, bookings took a beating. Criminal cases had been filed against the employees and the President of the Domino’s himself used youtube to apologize for the incident.
Here’s the apology

But does that nullify the complete effect ? The answer is NOT COMPLETELY. While the original video took 3 days to reach half a million and was much over a million views before it was taken off Youtube the apology has under a million views, that too in 4 months duration. You can imagine the damage that it had done.
Things to be learnt : you need to keep a strong eye on this new age media as news here spreads Virally. It takes years to built trust and seconds to break that.

Article cross-posted on www.abhinavsahai.com

Ever since our launch or even before that, we having been facing a lot of questions over why should we use Social Media? Some say we are too small a firm to invest there while some say we are already established so we don’t need to be there.
To answer all those companies / people, we have decided to put you across some profiles whom you know or maybe you’ve just heard or maybe not even heard but are worthy knowing and are using the social media in some form or the other.

Companies

The search engine giants : Twitter GoogleAtWork Google AdSense

The software giants : Facebook  presence

The notebook manufacturer biggies : Twitter,  Dell on Facebook

The Mobile Giants : Facebook presence Official Zoozoo fan club

Twitter Youtube

Facebook Careers Twitter

Politicians

Website , Twitter, Facebook (All those were not just publicity stunts, they are updated even today)

The Indian MP who’s being on Twiiter has created a lot of debate. Website Twitter

Celebrities

Ashton Kutcher

Gul Panag

News Channels

Most popular News Channel  Twitter

India’s Premier News Chanel : Twitter

And the list goes on…..

Are you there ? No, I am not but want to be !

Still not inspired ? Visit our labs section to find out more reasons.

Barely 9 days into the launch, Zapylacz got its feather in the cap. Yup, we say it a feather in the cap because we got listed in the Social Media Companies in India and that too on none other than Gaurav Mishra’s blog as well as on the 20:20 Social Media analytics blog.

Gaurav Mishra, better known as “gauravonomics” in the dotcom world, is the co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In his previous avatars, he has done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. His post on his blog Six Types of Social Media Agencies in India, lists Zapylacz among five other companies. While the others have been there for some time especially Rajesh Lalwani’s Blogworks, a couple were in a similar niche stage as Zapylacz.

Well that mention has pumped in further zeal in our work as we continue to vie for more clients and extend its reach. Zapylacz extends its thanks to GauravMishra for talking about us. Cheers !

How many times have we wondered that this is not what I want to to do in life but still staying in that job or on that profile ? Then the very next second the next question arises ? Why am i doing it if I don’t want to do ? Why don’t I quit ? And it doesn’t take long to get the answer as well. I am doing it for money! What do I do if I quit this ? Where will I earn my living from ? And then when we don’t find an answer to that we forget all our questions and then continue doing what we currently hate to do.

The problem is not with us, it’s natural to think of such things and to care about our living before thinking of anything else. So in that case how do we bail ourselves out ? How do we move out from our present condition ? Well the answer to that question is called iReboot.

iReboot, a unique and only one of its kind firm in India, let’s you experience your dream job or in simpler words find what you want to do in life and that too without even taking the risk of moving out from your present job.  Yes that’s why iReboot is unique. You might find many career counsellors who will try to help you figure out what you want to do and then leave you with 10 options to try which you will never try because you don’t know where to go and more importantly won’t want to lose your current source of income.

Mukta at iReboot allows you to try a few options for a couple of days along with a mentor, who will guide you in the job you are trying, and then decide for yourself whether you want to take make a career out of that job.  And best thing is that you don’t need to quit your job before you try the dream job opportunity. Isn’t it great ?

Rajiv went onto become a chef at a restaurant in Indiranagar, Bangalore and along with his mentor Manjit, cooked dinner for the guests that night.

Rajiv trying out his dream job with mentor Manjit

When we are dissatisfied with our jobs we tend to think of hundreds of fields which we can excel in but have never had the option to try it out, but I guess not you cannot complain as iReboot has come to your rescue.

Well as of now iReboot operates in Bangalore and Mysore but it is growing at a fast pace. Having featured in Livemint and Hindu already, Mukta plans to spread iReboot’s wings to the all the metros nationwide.