If you think we have got a good plan now and it’s time for detailed campaign activity roll out, perhaps we might have jumped the gun.

Most of the time, the first set of ideas go to the trash. When you further discuss it, you might find loopholes. In other times, the idea might just get replaced by another.What it does at best is set the wheels in motion. But just like your first day at the gym; the form is still lacking.  You need to grind a lot more to get it right.

In our particular example, let’s try to think whether organising a photo contest is really a good idea. Somebody might ask, ‘What are we going to get as entries on the microsite as part of the contest?’ A lot of interesting night time shots send in by contest participants. ‘So what?’ None of these were clicked by our camera phone. All of these were shots by possibly competing camera phones or camera brands. So in the microsite we will host, we will be displaying a series of pictures shot by competition products. That will be the joke of the year.

What do we achieve from the contest: We want potential customers and fans to know about the camera features. The contest doesn’t seem to address that. For this, we need people to test the mobile phone for themselves and share their (we are confident most will be positive) experiences.

Alternate idea: Should we not give some units to some customers and let them test it out of themselves? Perhaps let them post their reviews online.

But then these customers have to be chosen transparently. People shouldn’t think we just planted few of our friends to write positive reviews.

Engage which stakeholder – customers, fans or influencers: Should these be well known bloggers who are credible and people know they are not associated with us? But what if they go beyond what we want them to do and critic it in different directions? We can’t control what they write.

So is it to be done with customers or fans, not with bloggers? We also need to have some guidelines to steer what content are being produced.

Can we invite ideas of what people want to shoot if they have to at night time? Are there places that look beautiful at night? Like a lakeside on  a full moon, or a laser display, or a monument.

So what if we invite ideas from participants, select some of those with the best ideas that will bring out the mobile phone camera feature as we want, and give the phone to these select people. They can shoot these pictures and post it online.

Will they be able to do justice to the idea: What if they are not such good photographers after all? We don’t want some average looking photographs coming out as all that can be done with our mobile phone.

We will ask for some sample photography they have done. Also we will get them trained under some photography experts. Since these experts are known faces, we can ask them to speak to the media. It will help in creating buzz.

You seem to get somewhere with this idea until someone points out, ‘It’s too complicated. I can’t share ideas as well as photographs.’ The room goes silent.

Amendment to the idea: We will come out with the list of shoots to be done. It will be a mix of shoots – landscapes, city lights, a pretty model (perhaps a Bollywood star), etc. We will give different shoots for different participants.

Finally, …

‘Hunt for XYZ’s Night Photographers’ – Participants to share one photo sample of their own shots. Amateur photographers can participate. Selected participants to be trained by expert photographers and sent on an assignment to shoot 10 pictures across India, all funded by XYZ. Live telecast on TV channel. Online updates from company social channels as well as these participants. Best photographs to be made into a calendar. Press event to showcase photographs.

Maybe this idea has flaws too. But the positive side is the next idea might be even better.

According to AdAge, the average ER on Facebook brand pages is 1.4%. This is based on a six week period data of the top 200 brands on Facebook. In another study, SocialBakers puts the average ER at 0.09% for pages with more than 1mn likes.

As many people have written about, these average ERs seem too low. If I have one lac fans on my brand’s community, I might be engaging with just 1,400 or 90 fans if I’m an average performing page. (Taking into account Facebook’s EdgeRank, my update might be reaching just 8.2% or 8,200 fans but that’s another topic.)

However, if we take the top 50 Indian brands on Facebook, we realise that 38 of the brands have more than 1.4% ER. The average ER for the top 50, which are all 1mn plus communities, is 3.5%. The average ER for the top 10 is 2.9% and top 20 is 3%. These numbers seem to be better benchmarks than the global average. What do you think?

Also, one more interesting observation is that four fan pages have more than 10% ER and one particular fan page has 22.16% ER. Two of these brands are TV channels, one is a shampoo brand and the last one is a eCommerce brand. It will be worthwhile to learn what these brands are doing there in order to get this kind of high ER.

(Do note that the ER period is the Facebook default which is of one week. Also we have taken only top 50 brands. The ERs are as on this date.)

What does this mean to competitive organisations in the marketplace?

Harley Manning, co-author of ‘Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business’ explains that from 1990 – 1960, organisations with the manufacturing edge, like Ford, owned the market. From 1960 to 1990, organisations with the mastery of of distribution, such as Toyota, P&G and Walmart, won the marketplace. Post 1990, companies with information centric products and services like Amazon and Google thrived. Today is the age of the customer. The only source of competitive advantage today for organisations is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience. Having a good customer experience creates loyalty, willingness to consider for another purchase, willingness to recommend, and reluctance to switch to a different provider.

Seems he is right. According to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience.

A look at some of the names of companies that provide the best customer experience will further strengthen this point. The list of companies includes very popular names like Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Starbucks, and Disney among others.

In India, when you think of companies that provide good customer experience, perhaps names like Maruti and Flipkart come to mind. However, the majority of companies out there are yet to embrace a customer experience strategy fully.  According to an Oracle study, businesses are still weighing the importance of customer experience and only 29% are just getting started with a formal customer experience initiative, while a mere 24%  consider the state of their customer experience initiative to be advanced. The good news is perhaps that 72% of Indian executives agree that customers are willing to pay more for great customer experiences.

What is also interesting is that 81% of the Indian executives surveyed believe that delivering a great customer experience today requires leveraging social media effectively. Indian executives also felt that improving the online customer purchase experience is the number one priority for customer experience program.

Let’s take a look at the role of how online platforms in the journey of a digital savvy customer today. The sample journey illustrated below will help understand this better:

As we see in this example here, digital savvy customers are today using online tools and sites to look for information and make informed decisions. Researchers have validated this. The Google Auto Shoppers Report that says 8 out of 10 new and old car buyers use the internet throughout the purchase process. Another report, the Google Tech Shopper Report 2012 said that 7 out of 10 buyers know the exact brand and model they want to buy with the help of online research before entering the store.

When it comes to purchase, 8 million Indians are today going online to shop various product– the top ones being consumer electronics, apparels & accessories, and books.  Online travel is also a huge market globally projected to reach US$533.8 billion by 2018. We are already talking about eCommerce apps on Facebook.

In the post purchase stage, customers are turning to social platforms for service and support. 1 in 3 customers prefer social customer service over phone, according to a Neilson study among 2000 US social media users in July 2012. According to E&Y Social Media Marketing – India Trends Study 2013, social media-savvy organisations have speed up processes or have shown a special favor for their online fans.

To provide a better experience to any digital-savvy customer today, it is imperative to understand and evaluate the customer journeys across the key online platforms – website, search, and social media; and address the gaps and opportunity areas in what you are providing to the customer in each stage of the journeys.

(To be continued…)

Figure 1 represents a typical PR plan restricted to media relations. First, we identify the key messages to be delivered and the media to be utilized to deliver those messages. Post that, conduct a series of appropriate PR activities to get the desired results.

Figure 2 shows how we can create an integrated PR campaign:

Step 1: To start with, instead of just identifying key product USPs for a media story, we can bring in other factors into the consideration set. If we take a new mobile phone with the best night time camera for example, the product USP looks good to be leveraged. However, if we take a common food item or apparel, perhaps there is not much you can talk about unless is it a new product, therefore is there something happening in the market today that will appeal to our customers and something that your brand is associated with, like a sporting event? Perhaps we might consider engaging our customers around our brand essence like ‘satisfaction to the taste buds’ or ‘smart wear on the go’ for example. This identification will be based on what is your objective behind the campaign.

Step 2: From our consideration set, let’s pick up one proposition that according to us will have the maximum effect in reaching out to our target audience.

Step 3: Now let’s identify how do we aim to tell the story. There is an unlimited number of possibilities depending on how creative one can get, including:
a. Telling the story ourselves in an interesting manner – calling in a celebrity, creating an interesting video, etc.
b. Let customers experience and share: Game, contest, reviews, some sort of participation, etc. (created around the theme of the message)

Step 4: Having identified how we want to tell the story, we can pick up the best platform that will become the hub of the campaign – a microsite for a contest, a Facebook app, an event where we invite celebrities and customers, etc.

Step 5: Provide support from the remaining platforms (traditional and digital) to the campaign. This need necessarily not be just about sending traffic to the hub. The campaign can still be a series of online and offline activities if they are around the same theme and all together build up the main story. If we take the example of the phone with the best night time camera, and create a contest on a microsite asking customers to share their best pictures taken in dark surroundings, traditional PR can support by hosting a night photography contest event offline (at night) and perhaps call the local press to the event. Can we involve some renowned photographers to become the jury and speak to the media? Can we invite photography clubs to participate in the contest (offline and online)? This can go on and on. So a simple photography contest can become something like this on slide 2 below based on creativity, budget, and ambition.

Enlarge diagram

Views are welcome.

To share my two cents on the discussion, and to put it with examples, if you look at the recent case study about Allen Solly from Blogworks organising an End of Season Sale promotion on Facebook, it can be seen as a good marketing case study using social media. They got a good number of sales through the campaign. However, the campaign also created a number of positive conversations and buzz for the brand, which can be seen as a good measurement for PR.

If you look at the famous Old spice ‘The man your man could smell like’ campaign, the company created the Old Spice man who promised women that he is ‘the man your man could smell like’. The Old Spice man posted videos replies of queries posted to him by fans online near real time. On Day 1, the campaign received 5.9mn YouTube views. Twitter followers increased 2700%, Facebook fans interactions went up 800%, Oldspice.com traffic increased 300%, and unit sales of Old spice body wash had more than doubled from the previous year. In this example, all the views and interactions achieved can be seen as PR successes while the sales can be seen as a marketing success.

For marketing, a Facebook fan page success measurement can be size of community (or captive audience or customer database), for PR it can be how the customer/fan sentiment has moved from negative to positive and how many times the company messages are viewed and shared. For Customer Service, it can be decrease in customer complaints or number of issues resolved online, which translates to perhaps decrease in cost.

Social media is just a channel and different departments can benefit from it. What is important is that since they all are reaching out to the same customer, who will only look at the organisation as one entity and not as marketing, PR, or Customer Service; all outreaches need to be coordinated and integrated.

In the times to come, we will see a lot more adoption across departments. One possible scenario is an independent digital team in an organisation that caters to all functions. The recent EY social media study reinforces this. According to Shel Holtz, an internal governance issue needs to be addressed in many organizations. Competing (or even cooperating) departments will require a cross-functional entity that looks after the interests of the whole firm.

Such cross functional teams are already in practice in some organisations in India.

Check out this diagram of how I think different organisations in India are managing social media between its marketing and PR departments. On which level do you think your organisation is at? Be aware though, the movement from one level to the next is sometimes not so much about understanding the medium or capability but of competition between functions, budget control, and politics.

Related read: PR agencies losing out social media to speciality firms and ad agencies

While the study has taken bit more time than we initially anticipated, the results we got now are interesting. The study provides answers to some pertinent questions around social media marketing among social media-savvy organizations in India. We also added our perspectives and findings from E&Y thought leadership papers and secondary research to provide depth.

As you go through the study, you will realise that while answering some of the key questions, the study also highlights opportunities as well as areas where organisations need to work on. It sort of attempts to set a benchmark in the industry and will help organisations that want to leverage social media better. For social media savvy organisations, it also prompts a look inside to see where they stand and how they can go forward.

We just published the first edition of ‘Social Media Marketing – India Trends Study 2013’. These are the top findings. A detailed version of the study is available here at the E&Y website.

Why social media:

1. Most social media-savvy organizations in India use the medium to build communities

95.7% of the surveyed social media-savvy organizations in India use the medium to build communities and advocate usage while 76.1% use social media as a platform to highlight brand news. Around 16% of organizations, which use social media for both the above reasons also use it for customer service, lead generation, and research indicating high social maturity and moving toward getting business meanings out of engagements.

Which social media platform:

2. Facebook most important platform for marketers in India for engaging customers, followed by Twitter, YouTube and blogging

Almost half of the social media-savvy organizations are already using emerging platforms such as Pinterest, Google Plus, and Foursquare. More than half of the social media-savvy organizations surveyed regularly engage with bloggers or online influencers who have authority and strong following.

How does social media fit in with other marketing/communications campaigns:

3. Social media-savvy organizations in India have conducted campaigns where social media is the leading component

Social media-savvy organizations in India speed up processes or show special favor for online fans

Social media formed a leading component of campaigns of 87.5% of the respondents. More than half of the surveyed organizations have speeded up processes or have shown a special favour for their online fans and followers that they wouldn’t normally do for their offline customers.

How do organizations engage with their social communities:

4. Popular practices
a. Type of content: A majority of social media savvy organizations prefer to post generic updates instead of brand updates.
b. Frequency of updates and responses: Social media-savvy organizations posts multiple updates a day
Majority of social media-savvy organizations respond to fan queries within 30 to 60 minutes on Twitter and within 30 minutes to a few hours on Facebook.
c. Contests/promotions: Picture contests are the most popular contests among social media-savvy organizations in India — most contests are organized monthly.
d. Policies: Majority of social media-savvy organizations in India surveyed have social media guidelines for better governance and online monitoring programs to listen to conversations; however, less than half have crisis manuals.
e. Tools used: Many social media-savvy organizations in India use tools for online monitoring, response management, or managing social media platforms.
f. Social media for research: Almost half of the social media-savvy organizations in India have conducted research using social media tools to get customer feedback and understand more about customer behavior.
g. Mobile: Half of the social media-savvy organizations in India have created mobile phone apps and one-fourth plans to create one.

How do organizations use social media ads:

5. Majority of social media-savvy organizations use social media ads to promote online campaigns and brand awareness, and find them beneficial

83% of the social media-savvy organizations surveyed said that they have used social media ads, with majority of the ads being used to promote a contest/promotion or for brand awareness. 88.6% said they find social media ads to be beneficial in achieving those objectives.

How do you measure social media success?

6. Majority of social media-savvy organizations in India measure social media efforts through platform-specific parameters

81% of the social media-savvy organizations surveyed said that they measure their social media efforts through platform-specific parameters such as likes, people talking about this, etc. 46.7% of the organizations surveyed said they have not measured revenue from their social media efforts. On the positive side, some organizations are already measuring social media efforts through leads, sentiment, brand visibility and have seen increase in revenue from social media efforts.

Social media budget:

7. Almost half of social media-savvy organizations spend 1%–5% of their marketing budget on social media, most social media budgets are below INR10 million

41.5% of social media-savvy organizations said that around 1%–5% of their marketing budget in spent on social media. Three-fourths of the organizations surveyed have their social media budget below INR10 million, while a little above a quarter of the organizations surveyed have social media budgets exceeding INR 20 million.

Which department manages social media:

8. Majority of social media efforts in India are managed by marketing teams

76.7% of social media-savvy organizations said they have their marketing department handling social media with the rest being handled by a cross functional team/across functions or by the PR/communications team. Other than marketing, 34.6% said they use social media for thought leadership and 26.9% said they use social media for CSR. A majority (70.2%) said they have an in house social media expert in middle management.

Agency structure:

9. Majority of social media-savvy organizations in India use standalone digital agencies as compared to PR or ad agencies

73.8% of surveyed social media-savvy organizations have chosen standalone digital agencies as compared to PR, ad agencies, or freelancers. 59.1% of the organizations surveyed also said that they are happy with their current agencies while 40.9% responded with either a ”maybe” or a ”no.”

10. Future of social media:

Social media-savvy organizations in India are very optimistic about the future

Social media-savvy organizations are very optimistic about the role of social media in their organizations. Though measures such as sales and leads are not very evident for all organizations, they have realized that it plays an important role in generating insights and engaging with customers on a continued basis. Social media has helped organizations to create their own communities of fans, customers or prospects. In the future, organizations hope to focus more on social media and are looking forward greater adoption within their organizations.

I recently volunteered myself to the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting’s Digital Volunteer Programme. According to the Ministry’s blog, the programme is aimed at creating volunteers to help spread the government’s schemes and programmes on their social networks.

While the intention is good, the programme runs a high risk of being perceived a free-publicity seeking programme and a state run network of people who will retweet anything and everything mindlessly in the name of volunteerism. In course of time, these volunteers’ tweets and updates will be seen with an amount of skepticism that is present when any brand manager, PR professional, an agency person, and a paid media outlet update or tweet about their brands or clients. In that process, the credibility of these people will be lost and the programme might end up into the bin. Finally, social media engagement will be seen as a failure and this will have its implications on the  government’s overall adoption of the medium.

As a volunteer and a digital professional, I’m concerned about this. How do we ensure that this does not happen?

This is not the first time organisations are reaching out to active social media users, prosumers, efluencers, early adopters, bloggers or called them what you like. Microsoft created the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional programme to acknowledge experts who share their passion and expertise of a Microsoft product. The programme has awarded many influencers and bloggers worldwide and in India too. It is considered good to have an MVP badge adorning your blog. Intel initiated the Intel Insiders programme in 2008 through which the organisation recruited influencers to form their social media advisory board. These two organisations were clients in my previous organisations and I have been lucky to be able to look closely at these programmes.

There are three suggestions I would like to make to ensure that the programme is successful. I’m not suggesting that the team managing the programme is not doing any of these, but since the programme just started, now is the best time to give all the feedback.

1. Respect the independence of volunteers: There is a certain line that comes out when I read about this programme in media stories i.e. volunteers will help assist in disseminating government initiatives and plans on the net. We need to remember that volunteers merely agreed to help spread word on matters of mass/national interest using their social networks. They may agree to the government’s initiatives or not. They may congratulate the government or even criticise it. They will add their opinions and make an interesting discussion. However, in no way, a sane volunteer will agree to become a Twitter bot to retweet whatever the @MIB_India tweets. The managers of the programme need to respect people’s independence and adhere to global guidelines such as the WOMMA code of ethics. Thankfully, the Ministry’s blog say ‘you can talk about government’s initiative’, so I presume that they know what I have just written on this matter.

1. Give them good ammunition: The media love exclusives. Every time a news channel broadcasts a news story before other news channels can get their hands on the news, they put in the word ‘exclusive’ in big bold fonts on the screen. Bloggers too love getting exclusive information. You would hardly see any blogger getting really excited about receiving a news release from an organisation. However, if they can fiddle around a new product themselves and discover something interesting that others might not have noticed, that’s a big kick. Volunteers need to be given exclusive information. It is not exciting to have a press conference, a news release, the Ministry’s social media channels repeating that same announcement, and finally asking volunteers to help spread the word. While there cannot be exclusives all the time, occasionally you need to give your volunteers information that nobody else knows. That way, there is some value in becoming a volunteer. Smart organisations sometimes even reveal their announcements on Twitter and Facebook first and see the news spreading to the mainstream media from the social media channels. They even give their volunteers access to senior management, facilities, and provide exclusive experiences.

1. Proactively build the community: Microsoft and Intel have organised a whole lot of events for their volunteers. A number of proactive activities are planned and taken throughout the year. That way, the community flame remains bright and the volunteers know that it is a live programme. There is nothing exciting about a dead community, whether online or offline. A dead community attracts spammers and makes members indifferent, but an active community encourage more advocacy and instil a feeling of belongingness and pride.  Only people then will tweet for Bharat Nirman and be a proud voluntweeter.

My best wishes to the team. Let’s hope this works out for social good.

Now during this age of Facebook, those contests have their 2.0 versions. Upload a photo of yours and get likes. Tell us why you think you want to go to XYZ and win prizes. There will always be takers for such contests but I personally wont want to participate. Probably I think they are silly. None of my colleagues or friends, at least in the the working class, would participate. But still today you will see so many contests like this on many Facebook pages of brands. Even if the brands are for people in college, let’s say, I wonder if they don’t want more exciting contest than ‘uploading their pictures’?

So it was refreshing to see Flipkart’s a little different puzzle on its Facebook page called the ‘Six Degrees of Connection‘. As a digital marketer, the thumb rule was to always make easy questions to get many participation. Now here is the complete opposite. I don’t know how many people participate on this difficult puzzle but Karthik said the contest have grown well. Well if they want to engage their fans with meaning, maybe this will do the trick. I won’t mind myself seeing participating in this type of contest as there is some ‘challenge’ and some’ intelligence’ in it. What I think about Flipkart’s contest is though instead of vouchers, they should give some acknowledgement, online or offline, or souvenirs. Participants might want to show that off the souvenirs to their friends more than trying to win Rs.500 vouchers.

Months back, a movie blogger colleague, Shrey mentioned about a movie quiz of Flixter where they asked difficult movie questions. He said you really have to know a big deal and remember scenes from movies to answer those quiz questions fast. Sample this: In the movie “The parent trap” where did the two twins meet?

Saw any intelligent contests on Facebook that you want to share?

Similar to uninteresting and unintelligent contests, one type of engagement I think is in danger of losing steam is the cause related campaigns. Every brand is trying to gain a ‘like’ or ‘a share’ by caring for the environment or some other cause that I don’t know how much value these campaigns still hold. Unless it is very strong and genuine, like the Earth Hour, most of us are not going to be easily convinced.

1. Start planning when your child is 2 & half years: Some schools (eg. Mother’s International, Delhi and Step by Step Noida don’t take nursery admissions because they don’t have any more seats, at least this year). If you want your child to be in a particular school, better you admit her in pre-nursery so that you don’t face rejection next year.

2. Refer to the top schools list to get a view of the good schools: Hindustan Times comes out with an annual top schools list. You can refer to this year’s stories below and short-list schools. However, remember you might not always want your child to be admitted to the top school always. There are various reasons like being far from your house, not liking the school’s culture or their way of teaching, the fee is too costly, your child’s age,  some facilities are not there, you like another school better, etc. etc. So one of the school in the list further down might actually be better off for your child. (In my opinion, this ranking of school is not a good idea. Like last year, we can have a list of schools without ranks. What are 3 year old children supposed to think or say, ‘something like – my school is No. 1 and yours is No. 2′, just because one school is not at his/her locality? It gives unnecessary stress to parents when their kids just wants to learn A,B,C. It is sort of putting our kids on to the rat race when they should be enjoying and learning).

3. Remember age range are different for different schools: Various schools have different age criteria. Your child might be eligible in one school and yet miss out in another school by a few days. For example, DPS Noida starts 2013 nursery admission for kids who were born on or after Oct 2, 2009. My kid was born on Oct 1, 2009. She is about the same age as everyone in that nursery class or in any nursery class, yet she was not eligible.

4. Prepare for the parents’ Q&A: Prepare yourself some nice questions and answers. You don’t need to prepare two dozens of them but few good ones that you can use as a bucket list. You will be asked these questions when you meet the school principal or in the admission form. Amity International Noida called up the parents one Saturday morning and gave them around 10 -15 questions to fill up in half an hour. They are probably going to check the answers before they announce the short-listed candidates. Some of the questions were a) why do you think your child is unique? b) what kind of role will you play in his/her upbringing? c) what do you expect the school to provide to the child, d) what qualities would you like in your child, e) what if your child is not good in studies, etc. If you haven’t done yet, it is a good idea to read up some good parenting books and practice good parenting so that your answers naturally come out fine. For the last question mentioned above, if you answer something like ‘my kid has to be good in studies and we will make sure of that’, it automatically sounds like you are one of those who are going to put in a lot of pressure if the kid doesn’t go your way.

There will be tricky questions as well. One of the schools asked what we can do for the school? They were probably not asking for donation even though it seemed like that. You can answer such questions by probably offering some tips to the school or its students based on your work expertise. For example, if you are a doctor, perhaps you can say you will be happy to sound off the school on important safety measures kids should take during specific seasons. Or if you are a teacher, banker, clerk, administrator, marketer, or whatever; perhaps offering a guest lecture to the students one day on familiarizing them on  a specific topic, smart money usage, how to save money, how States are run, how do companies run, etc. And actually these are nice things to do.

5. Give your child some indication of what is going to happen: In your city, interviewing the child might not be allowed, but in others often the school teachers will give the child some toys and observe how he/she is doing with those toys. They might ask simple questions like what is the colour, what is the shape, etc. Probably if your kid has gone through a pre-nursery school, he/she would be familiar with these games. However, it is good to just let him/ know the night before that ‘maam’ will ask some questions and he/she can answer like that.

6. Dress up your kid and yourself smartly for the interview: Probably I have spent too much time in client servicing and consulting, but I thought it was the least I could do when I’m meeting my child’s teacher for the first time and that meeting might probably decide whether she gets admitted or not. I saw some parents turning up looking like they haven’t washed their faces after waking up, with loose t shirts, pajamas, and chappals, and I thought ‘their kid deserves better’.

7. Try online: You can submit admission forms in many schools online. When you start admission hunting in starting September, visit the schools’ websites. That’s the obvious thing. But don’t rely completely on them too. Some schools work like the saarkari types and don’t update their websites in time. Pick up the phones and call the schools. Watch out for the ads in the newspapers, which is often a small insert. Often forums like SchoolAdmissions.in can give you updates on email.

8. Chill: It is not as difficult as it is made out to be. Every child is bound to get admission somewhere or the other. What else are we supposed to do to get our kids admitted!!

Check out:

1. Top schools in Noida
2.Top schools in Gurgaon
3. Top schools in Faridabad
4. Top schools in Ghaziabad
5. Top schools in south west Delhi
6. Top schools in south east Delhi
7. Top schools in east Delhi
8. Top schools of central Delhi
9. Top schools of north Delhi
10. Top schools in west Delhi
11. Top international schools in Delhi and NCR
12. Top schools in Delhi and NCR, Parameter wise ranking
13. Top schools in Mumbai

Are there any more tips you can think of? Please leave them as comments below and you will be helping out other parents who are reading this.