To the moon Page 20

  We co-founded King of Clubs with the intention of creating a brand for the aspirational Indian male and, for me the association with MissMalini was perfect because there aren’t many people in the country who understand the millennial mind like she does, or have the kind of reach and influence she does. I strongly believe that she has only just scratched the surface, the best is yet to come!

  I believe that ‘MissMalini’ represents every voice that has emerged from a generation that spans decades of pent up desire – to live a life less ordinary. In fact, to live one that’s extraordinary. Living the dream, doing the things you love. If that sounds like, you then you’re part of the MissMalini crew too.

  Y is for YouTube

  YouTube has become such a normal part of our lives now that it doesn’t even occur to us that it didn’t exist before 2005. Three former PayPal employees got together and started it and just a year later sold it to Google for US$1.65 billion.

  You won’t believe this but according to Wikipedia the actual inspiration for the creation of YouTube came from Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl incident. Remember when her breast was ‘accidentally’ exposed during her performance? One of the founders, Jawed Karim, says he couldn’t easily find that clip online so he thought why not create a video-sharing site. How insane is that?

  And clearly the founders haven’t lost their sense of humour because every April Fool’s day they play a YouTube prank. I’m guessing you’ve been the victim of ‘rickrolling’ for sure, when in 2008 all the videos on the YouTube home page took you to the Rick Astley music video ‘Never Gonna Give You Up!’ Just a reminder to always keep having fun, no matter what you do!

  Obviously having good video ‘game’ is the way of the future but how do you stand out of the clutter with 100 videos going up every minute? You must have a combination of personality, X-Factor and geek blood. Case in point YouTube creators like iiSuperwomanii, PewDiePie, Jenna Marbles, Smosh – the list is very long!

  I remember the first YouTuber I ever started following was iJustine. I thought it was so cool that she lived her life online. A one-person reality like I’d never seen before. And then it struck me. YouTube was the voice of the world. Suddenly you didn’t need to have tons of money or connections or even blind luck to get a shot at stardom. All you needed was a free YouTube account and a video camera. Talk about changing the world. India’s the world’s largest democracy but I’m guessing YouTube is biggest democracy on the internet.

  Now excuse me while I go check out that cat video from 1894!

  Z is for Zzzzzzs

  I kid you not. Get enough sleep! The first thing that goes out the window when you’re building a business is sleep. Much like when you have a baby. Thus, follow the rules of parenthood. Sleep when it sleeps. For me that has been the hardest part. Tearing myself away from social media at four in the morning and almost as often from Candy Crush. (Am I the only one still playing that damn game by the way? Because nobody is sending me any lives anymore!)

  Sleep is such an import part of our overall composition and ability to function at full capacity that as I am writing this at midnight, I almost what to put myself to sleep right now, Cinderella style!

  The importance of sleep only hit my radar recently when one of my boss lady idols, Arianna Huffington, wrote a book about it and started flooding her own social media with what she called the ‘sleep revolution’ to tackle the sleep ‘crisis’. To be honest, initially I thought, what’s the big deal, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. (I heard that line first from Bon Jovi actually – ‘Gonna live while I’m live, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’) And now I’ve started to think, it should have been I should sleep before I’m dead or at least dead tired.

  But anyway, back to the sleep revolution. I was looking for an excerpt to share here from her book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, and came across a disturbing story of a Goldman Sachs analyst who hadn’t slept for two days, working non-stop, jumped to his death from a high-rise building, presumably from work stress and anxiety. And then guess what happened? Her very next paragraph is this:

  ‘Death from overwork has its own word in Japanese (karoshi), in Chinese (guolaosi), and in Korean (gwarosa). No such word exists in English, but the casualties are all around us. And though this is an extreme example of the consequences of not getting enough sleep, sleep deprivation has become an epidemic.’

  Um. Goose bumps much? How did she just talk about the exact same thing I started my book with? I swear to you I had no idea this was in the book. I’ll be honest, I haven’t read hers yet because I don’t get time to read. It sounds so vapid I know but I’m awake scrolling through Instagram or trying to ideate and post engaging content. But I’m ordering this book right now and I’m going to read it every night before I sleep till it’s done. Because this is a sign.

  I don’t know if you believe in ‘signs’ but I do. Many people, including my husband have understandable scoffed at the idea, but I believe that the universe leaves you little nuggets on your path to your purpose just to reassure you that you are on the right track. Kind of like the bread crumbs in Hansel and Gretel, and I’ve narrowed them down to the ‘glitch in the Matrix kind’, ‘déjà vu’ or uncanny coincidences. Like this one.

  Okay, let’s be brutal and say, Malini – or MissMalini – what does this mean. She quoted the same concept, it’s appropriate to her subject and you happened to start your book (laden with positivity) with the same exact thought. Do you see where I’m going with this? For me this 100 per cent counts as a sign. That I was meant to be writing and I’m going to get somewhere because I’m on the right path. I’m on the yellow brick road to my extraordinary life. I’m off the see the Wizard, the wonder wizard of Oz!

  In my defence how is this any different from the concept of religion or the New York Times bestseller The Secret, that both expound the exact same thought. Belief in something that is larger than me, which can’t be scientifically proven but gives me immense hope and guidance. You feel free to believe in Paulo Coelho. I’ll believe in my signs.

  PS. For some reason the number ‘189’ features so often in my life that I have begun to take that as a sign too. I Googled and found quite a hokey explanation about an angel trying to contact me, which I won’t get into here because I stand a very good chance of being committed. But you see my point. I hope. If not, you’ll enjoy this quote:

  ‘All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people!’ – My Man Godfrey

  Blog #31: The Rules of Engagement

  Anti-Social media. Let’s be honest, that’s what your parents think of social media, right? That it’s making you so antisocial? ‘Chaubis ghante phone pe pata nai kya karte rehte hain.’

  *Translation: Spending 24 hours on their phones doing God knows what!

  Don’t worry. My mom says this till date and she definitely knows what I do for a living by now…I think. Also, my mom spends about 75 per cent of her waking hours on Facebook commenting on and sharing my photos (thanks for upping my engagement levels mom!), so she’s pretty aunty-social herself, get it?

  Anyway, let’s get to it! We have an analytics ninja in the office who spends a large part of her time reading and learning about all the new developments across social media platforms and even the tools to gauge them by. She often shares them on an office Slack group called ‘good reads’, so who better than Roshni Ramchandani (head of digital marketing) to give you the 411 on how to get ‘engaged’ on social media. Thank you Roshni for all the incredible insights you have provided for this blog and dayum, you’re good!

  The key players in your engagement agenda are obviously your subscribers/followers/fans. (For the sake of simplicity we are going to refer to all of these as subscribers in the rest of the blog). These are the people who decide your day-to-day fate. Keeping them interested and happy should be your number one agenda. I mean there’s no point churning out content that nobody’s watching.

  So your first que
stion is ‘How do I get subscribers?’ and the second ‘What do I do to keep them coming back for more?’

  1. FIND YOUR TRIBE

  First identify your Target Audience. Who are they, what gender, which age group, what economic demographic? That is what we call your ‘TG’ (Target Group). At MissMalini, we have established our TG as 18-35, female skewed, well-educated, working and probably no kids yet. This does not mean that we shut out everyone who doesn’t fit that profile, but it allows us to focus our content filters and measure how well we’re doing in that subscriber pool.

  2. ESTABLISH A CLEAR BRAND VOICE AND MESSAGE

  It’s important that you know who you are going to be on social media and how that will resonate with your audience. This is where creativity meets analytics. If you don’t have a solid idea of ‘who’ your content is meant for along with ‘what’ it’s meant to do for them and ‘why’ you do what you do, no analytics tool or no amount of data mining will help you get valuable and engaged subscribers.

  3. IDENTIFY YOUR METRICS

  This means you need to decide what you will deem your measure of success at different stages of your social media life cycle, basis what you are trying to achieve. Is it purely number of subscribers? Is it how many views, likes and shares you get on your content? Is it your revenue? Ideally it should be a healthy mix of all. Once you have your goals and success metrics defined, the next step becomes extremely crucial to help you keep track of your growth and achieve what you’ve set out to do.

  4. DATA MINING

  There is a natural tendency amongst most people to assume they know their audience inside out and to make sweeping statements about ‘what works’. In my experience that is a dangerous path to follow because you’re going based on nothing but your opinion and absolutely no data to support it. The good news, however, is that we live in an age where everything is absolutely measurable when it comes to online operations. So, identify the best tools for your business and mine the data you have collected extensively. Roshni has identified a few tools we have found extremely useful at MissMalini Entertainment. And since sharing is caring, here you go:

  Native Platform Analytics Tools

  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest have their own inbuilt analytics tools that gather data from your page with every passing second. I recommend this is where you start. These platforms also have learning centres to help you understand the data that is being captured from your subscribers and how you can convert it into actionable strategies for growth. All of this is made available to content creators free of charge.

  Snapchat Analytics Tools

  Snapchat has been a bit behind their peers in developing an analytics tool because the company maintains that they are a camera company and not a social media platform. Regardless, many social media creators and brands present on Snapchat have voiced concerns about the lack of analytics and some service providers have attempted to build third-party analytics tools to help them out. Snaplytics is one such tool which we’ve tested and adopted. Out of all the ones we evaluated, Snaplytics has the simplest and smartest interface and a great customer support team. If you are serious about your Snapchat game, these are guys you should pay to help you up it and stay on top.

  Third-Party Analytics Tools

  There are many other advanced analytics tools out there that can help you make more informed decisions. I think these are worth investing in only if you are a big company with defined marketing goals. We at MM were friends with a cool startup called PropheSee, which had built a semi-customized tool for all our social media data crunching needs. Unfortunately, they shut down in 2016. We miss them a lot. (I think Roshni cried.) Before we decided to work with them and after they shut down as well, we’ve evaluated a bunch of other tools – Unmteric, SocialBakers, Sprout Social, SalesForce, Union Metric and SimplyMeasured. All of them have a variety of advanced analytics solutions that they bring on-board and great customer support teams.

  These tools are so far evolved now that you can use them to not only understand your audience content consumption patterns to see what works, but even identify the exact time and place where people are dropping off, thereby flagging the weak links in your content.

  5. KNOW YOUR PLAYGROUND

  Today’s social media platforms have been around long enough now to have established some clear patterns of success. As I always say, you need to go to where the party is and you must go dressed the part. Now you also have to make sure you’re having the right conversations when you get there, and you’re speaking their language.

  Each major social media platform has its own society in a sense. People interact and consume content very differently on Twitter (which is a conversation) than they do on Instagram (which is much more visual in nature) or stories that offer a fleeting, fly-on-the-wall perspective in a raw home-video style. Granted, almost all platforms have now adopted the ‘like’ or ‘heart’ button to establish the popularity of a piece of content, but you’re still going to need to customize your content to fit a very specific mold.

  Obviously, this means using the correct image dimensions, adding appropriate filters, using hashtags, tagging pages (using the handshake function for brands), etc. But an even more crucial part of this is understanding the deeper intricacies of each platform’s subculture.

  As a social media consumer, ask yourself as many questions as possible: How do I use this platform? What do I look for? What do I like to post? How do I navigate it? What tends to catch my eye? What do I find annoying? Who do I follow and why? Then if possible repeat the process of questioning with your TG, I promise you an eye-opening survey!

  The landscape of content creation and innovation in engagement models is every expanding so I can’t promise you a fool-proof plan. A lot of it depends on your personality and purpose. But here are a few things to keep in mind and I hope they’re useful:

  Do you have a compelling call to action? For YouTubers it’s all about getting people to ‘Like, Subscribe & Comment’ and many of them have come up with hilarious and creative ways to get that message across. This is the most efficient way for them to get engagement on the videos they’ve created and to invite new users to start following them to get notified when they put up videos.

  Do you have a response ethic/plan? YouTubers and Snapchatters know that a very important job as a creator is to reply to the comments and messages you receive from your followers. When you are managing this on your own it helps to have an hour or two set aside daily for this.

  Do you nudge your audience to share your content with their friends? Referral marketing is an age-old tactic that is always beneficial. Don’t shy away from asking your fans to tag their friends and family in comments on Facebook if they think their friends will enjoy watching the video or learn something from it. This is not possible on YouTube because not everybody has an account or checks their tags on it.

  Do you have a compelling profile design? Instagram is all about the how visually compelling your content is. Take it in writing that all serious Instagrammers spend a massive amount of time picking which photo out of the 300 ones they took will make it to their profile. They all spend a lot of time deciding what are their go-to filters and how these will make their feed appear overall, which makes the chances of getting a follow back on Instagram a lot higher.

  Similarly, on other social media platforms, getting people to engage with your content is key, ask a fun question and encourage your followers to leave a comment or tag their friends. Start a conversation but don’t leave without actually having it.

  6. SOCIAL MEDIA VERIFICATION

  What is it about that little blue tick that makes you feel so legit? I am not embarrassed to admit that till this day, seeing a little white and blue check mark by my name still makes me feel a little sense of elation. But how did it all begin? Well, Twitter introduced the idea of verified accounts in 2009 after they were almost sued by someone for having been impersonated on the social network (apparen
tly, Kanye called out an impersonator too, without the lawsuit though). What Twitter did is find a way to demarcate the accounts of celebrities, politicians (and other people most likely to be impersonated) with a seal of legitimacy. Now here’s the crucial part, Twitter didn’t stop at verifying just people. The official explanation is:

  Verification is currently used to establish authenticity of identities on Twitter. The verified badge helps users discover high-quality sources of information and trust that a legitimate source is authoring the account’s Tweets. – support.twitter.com

  Like the Huffington Post says, ‘The definition opens up the possibility of a wider number of accounts getting verified. Again, it establishes identity. You don’t even have to be a human being.’1

  And that’s my favourite part. Twitter paved the way for a whole new world of communication where brands could interact with people, like people. No better avenue exists today than social media to bring your brand to life. Ergo, if only @Pinocchio had been a verified account on Twitter, nobody would have doubted that he was a real little boy.

  I also remember early on when I was setting up my Facebook account, they launched those vanity URLs so you could get your actual name in the slug. Unfortunately, https://www.facebook.com/missmalini was taken so I had to settle for https://www.facebook.com/missmaliniblog/. But I never gave up hope, of one day securing the URL with my name on it. The girl who has it is my namesake – Malini Stephen, and lives in New South Whales, Australia. My dearest friend Shawn Fernandes now lives in Oz too and was in fact one of the first few people who sat around my living room when we first made our plans of ‘MissMalini’ world domination a decade ago. Shawn offered to go find this girl and ask her if she’d part with the URL for the greater good of all MissMalini aficionados in the world. I don’t remember where we got with that exactly, but I thought it was SO funny that this was the plan we hatched. I can’t remember if I ever DM’d her to ask her for it, but the many hours we spent fantasizing about various scenarios in which Shawn meets (the other) Malini and they fall in love over a Facebook URL, was epically more entertaining!