Social Media Strategies and Technologies

Well, I am not writing this post to throw more  rants at Indian companies, brands and marketers for not actively using  online platforms to engage with their consumers but would like to share my understanding of why people expect Indian businesses and brands to be on social web channels and what drives the adoption of social media among Indian organizations and consumers?.

Addicted social web users like you and me believe that social web is a great platform  for individuals, businesses and society. Everyday we read,share and discuss,  how companies or brands across world (mostly west) are using social web channels for customer service or engagement, online branding and reputation management, as a marketing, pr and communications medium so we think why the hell our guys don’t get it? when they can benefit from using it.

While the rest of  the world is catching up on using new media platforms for business exposure, engagement & growth, it is very common for us to get surprised on why very few Indian businesses  focus on new media platforms.

Sanjay Mehta has written a great post on “Why Customer Service In India Sucks and How Social Media Can Change It?”. Most of us are frustrated with the customer service attitude of many Indian brands because we already had enough of the poor experiences and looking for some communication channel with brands or companies to participate in conversations with us related using their product, service experiences while listening to our (customer)  feedback but why still many Indian marketers or brands doesn’t consider it as a medium to focus on?.

My recent conversation with Anaggh played a small role  in writing his insightful post on “Indian Brands and Businesses On Twitter - Social Media Case Study” and my comment on his post was the primary motivation behind writing this post and sharing my thoughts.

Why Indian Businesses Doesn’t Focus On Online Web?

Everybody like you and me know that our brands/marketers doesn’t focus much on online platforms as a medium to share, connect, engage with consumers as part of their brand communications. I think the main reason could be the stats on Internet users from India isn’t as encouraging as it is in the west for businesses to seriously consider online media as new platform for their brands engagement with target users and also most companies  think that their target consumers aren’t their yet or very few people in India use online media so it’s not worth spending resources to create a brand online communications - but slowly this psyche is changing and will change in future, thanks to rapid growth of Internet and mobile usage in India.

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Exchange4Media and Blogworks have conducted the “India Social Media Survey-2009″ with an aim to capture insights from brands and marketers in India to understand social media landscape. I find this is an useful resource for Indian social media community as it shares social media experiences, case studies & learnings from brands and marketers.

For the benefit of social media marketing community in India, blogworks has released a free digital  version of this report - a must read if you are a marketer or work for brand in India and interested in using social media platforms for business.

Key Insights From The India Social Media Survey - 2009 Report:

• Social media enjoys good credibility among Indian brands and marketers.

• Over 90% believe that social media platforms have impact on business/brands and 85% think that social web influences consumer purchase decisions.

• Just like global trend,  majority of respondents in survey believe that social media will have huge impact on business & marketing in next two years.

• Organizations are realizing the potential of new media platforms and they believe engagement is the key driver for success.

• More than 80% of respondents think that Indian brands and maketers have very minimal or basic understanding of new media platforms.

• Outsourcing social media[marketing] activities is still in infancy stage - only 15% of survey repondents used social media activity outsourcing.

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One of the most successful digital/online marketing campaigns in India was Sunsilk Gang of Girls - which was started with an aim of promoting the Miss India pageant sponsored by Sunsilk in 2002  and later turned into a social community platform (with networking , blogs , message boards & chat etc) exclusively for girls to discuss and share content related to beauty,hair, makeover & random stuff etc.This case study report was released by bcwebwise - which handled the implementation of Gang of Girls campaign.

Key Results from Gang of Girls campaign case study are:

•  Total Registrations on Gang of Girls as on 6th,May-09 – 7,28,461
•  Avg Monthly Page Views – 30,00,000
•  Avg Monthly Hits – 1,20,00,000
•  Avg Monthly Unique Visitors – 97,086
•  Total Number of Gangs as on 6th May-09 – 42,934
•  Average Visit Length – 11.06 minutes

Update after some useful rants from @anaggh: While Sunsilk has done some offline advertisement to support this initiative using their traditional marketing channels to create awareness among their target group/users, the numbers like how much money spent? was not available to me but this campaign related numbers like no of users, communities and page views etc were shared by bcwebwise that ran this campaign for Sunsilk and also gangofgirls website shares these numbers regularly - I feel that the success of this campaign is majorly driven by the community element and platform that encourages young women to share/discuss interesting things revolving around their life stream.My intention behind sharing above numbers was to make a point that Indian consumers are ready and infact use new media platforms :).

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