Social Media Strategies and Technologies

An interesting TED talk by Clay Shirky on “How Social Media Can Make History?” as it empowers people from consuming information to participation, producing content to enabling new kind of co-operative structures which aid people to create organized groups or networks to help in collaborating against repressive regimes like China to report on real news, bypassing the censorship. He also explains the evolution of media from past 500 years and why social media has great potential to create a history - a must watch for all even if you not a social web enthusiast.

You can find the TED talk video, below:

I completely agree on his perspective that information flow is now many directional  with consumers becoming producers in the new media world and social web empowers people to connect, share & collaborate for digital activism at larger scale as we have already seen during 2005 tsunami, Obama campaign, China 2008 earth quake subsequent protests and recently during Iran election protests.

What is your take?, I would love to hear your thoughts.

The engagemendb.com, which aims to be ultimate social media database and a comprehensive guide to corporate social media efforts that build brand engagement has released “ENGAGEMENTdb Report 2009” based on how brands leverage the social web to interact with their consumers in colloboration with Altimetergroup and WebPaint.

This study aims to measure how deeply engaged the top 100 global brands are in a variety of social media channels and understand if higher engagement on social channels is correlated with financial performance.You can read the review by  CharlenLi on the most engaging brands.

According to this report, the top most engaging brands on the social web are:

You can download the entire report from engagementdb site.  Do you agree that “Social Media Engagement” is a necessity for all brands?.

Update: You might also like to read this post on econsultancy.com

Recently, I visited Printo store in Bangalore to get my business cards printed before heading to Buzz140 conference in Chennai, India and surprised to see how this startup is  connecting with their consumers to collect feedback about customers experience  and to also encourage word-of-mouth marketing about their service.

How many brands in India have this kind of attitude?. Do you see a change in Indian brands customer service management? - would love to hear your thoughts.