Social media consultant, Sanjukta Basu agrees and adds, “A lot of followers may be disappointed, but for someone who has say, 50,000 followers, a mere 500 unfollowing them will not make a big difference to their Twitter profiles.” She thinks that this phenomenon is not very different from advertisements on other media. “We have celebs endorsing products on all types of media, from TV commercials to print ads. Then why not on Twitter?” She says, “While such Twitter endorsements may garner a large number of followers, whether or not it ultimately translates into business for these brands, remains to be seen.”

Brand Communications – test of retention rate

We are constantly surrounded by brands. Everywhere we look we can see brands but how much of the brand communication is retained by our minds? What is the recall rate?

Here’s a simple test I always follow.

• Did you read today’s morning newspaper?
• Tell us what section did you read? News / sports / Entertainment / Classified? Which sections do you usually read?
• Do you remember the name of at least one brand that you saw in today’s newspaper. Which one is it?
• Do you remember a brand that you saw last evening on TV? Which one is it?
• Name a brand you saw on some outdoor media while coming to this Conference. Which one is it?
• Do you remember any celebrity name associated with the brand?

A simple test of brand retention would tell us that only the big brands who can afford to run a 360 degree multimedia ad campaign are retained in people’s mind. In addition celebrity endorsement also plays a big role. Traditionally, only the large businesses have been able to hire an ad agency or PR agency and run such advertisement and brand building campaigns. The entities in the small and medium (SME) sector, solo entrepreneurs, start-ups on the other hand have always used means like pamphlets and flier distributions, newspaper ads or networking and word of mouth marketing.

With internet and social media everything is changing. Social media is a digital version of the good old word-of-mouth marketing.  Today, social media is the most easy and cost effective means of communication.

Definition of social media

To simply define, ‘social media’ is a collection of simple, easy to learn and adapt, freely available internet based tools and platforms that can be used to reach out to a worldwide audience. The defining factor about social media is the ‘ability to establish real time dialogue in multimedia formats.’ Traditional media like Ad films, Radio, TV, Newspapers, outdoor hoardings, corporate websites are all one way medium. On the other hand social media tools like blogs, social networks, picture and video sharing enables two way communications which is friendly, open and democratic and simply put, ‘social.’

But ‘cost effective’ is not the only factor

We should not talk about social media just being cost effective. That sounds like social media is relevant only for those segments of entrepreneurs who cannot afford mainstream media brand communication. No, it’s not a case of “grapes are sour.” It is not just about the money, had that been the case these top most brands in India wouldn’t have joined the Social Media bandwagon.

Even NASA uses social media

As a matter of fact an entity like NASA wouldn’t join the social media Bandwagon if they didn’t see that cost effective or not social media offers a whole new kind of brand communication that has never been possible using any other form of traditional media.

So why is everybody joining social media?

Because of the revolutionary magical difference between traditional media and social media – the ability to establish a dialogue with, listen and respond to the consumers whenever, wherever and in whichever format.

• Real Time
• Two way communication
• Longer shelf life

Every brand has a story; every entrepreneur has a story, a cause a mission with which they start. Social media gives the brand an ability to tell their stories.

The Social Consumers

The number of internet users in India has crossed 100 million this September. It is predicted that in 2 years India would overtake United States in being the largest country to be on internet. There are currently 38 million Indians on Facebook. This large number of people are the social consumers.

Social consumers are different from traditional consumers in that they no longer take purchase decisions by simply watching a TV commercial or outdoor hoarding or newspaper ad. They want more from a brand. It is no longer enough to tell, “We made this cream, if you apply it, you would become fair.” The social now wants to know – How and why I would become fair? Who else have become fair? What were their experiences during the process?

So how to connect to social consumers

The social consumers go to their respective social networks to find out about a brand and then make a purchase. They go with the brand that extends a friendly hand towards them, a brand that shares its stories heart to heart with the consumers.

A brand can achieve that only by being present on the social networks, using the same tools and platforms that the consumers are using for their day to day communications.  The brand has to rise over the same old sales and target oriented greed and have to show love and respect for the consumers. They have to show that they care to listen and respond that they are sporting enough to handle negative remarks with dignity.

Slide 13 – some case studies

• Ananta Spa and Resorts – What they did right
• Emami – What they have missed
• Fortis Hospital – How they handled

We would discuss the above 3 case studies in the next few posts.

To be continued

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Women Entrepreneurship Unplugged’ and it had sessions on ‘Emerging Business Opportunities for women,’ ‘Funding Matras,’ and Cost Effective Ways to Create Brand and Sales Leads’

I was fortunate to share the speaker’s table in the 4^th session with Dr. Neena Sinha, Professor, GGSIP University, Meena Kapoor, Co-Founder and CEO, Netway India and Astroyogi.com, Seema Giri, COO, Astrowix.com and Pooja Kumar CEO & Founder, SME Networks Pvt Ltd.

Samyukta Media and I am truly honored and humbled by this memento. This puts a responsibility on our shoulders, we have to perform.

2nd Women Entrepreneurship Conference, Session 4 Panelists, left to right, Pooja Kumar, Dr. Neena Sinha, Seema Giri, Sanjukta Basu

Some of the other speakers of eminence were Neena Malhotra, President, FICCI Ladies Organization, Ester Martinez, Co-Founder & Managing Editor, People Matters, Sairee Chahal, CEO Fleximoms, RK Das, General Manager SIDBI and others. Here’s complete list of the speakers.

I completely enjoyed the day’s sessions and found them very informative. I particularly liked the session on ‘Funding Mantras.’ It was very motivating to hear the development bankers talk about how banks today are becoming more and more proactive in supporting women entrepreneurs from micro, small and medium enterprises by offering them bank loans. Mr RK Das, General Manager SIDBI gave a handy check list of things one should keep in mind while applying for loan. He talked about collateral free loan and mentioned that for a loan upto Rs. 10 lakhs the bank is not even allowed to ask for collateral.

He further mentioned two important online resources specially designed by SIDBI to handhold young first generation entrepreneurs through the process of seeking a bankloan.

www.msmementor.in

www.msmestartupkit.com

One of the most interesting moments of the day, one of my personal favourites was when Q & A round at the end of 2^nd session, a man asked this question to the panel

“How does your husband react to your entrepreneurship ventures?”

Sairee Chahal, CEO Fleximom replied,

“Let me throw the question back to you, when was the last time a man in a similar conference was asked, how does his wife respond to his ventures?”

There would always be sacrifices and adjustment to be made at the family front when you start a venture. For centuries women did all the adjustments, now its time for the men to understand and adjust. If they can’t, well too bad for them!

In my next post I would briefly discuss the fourth session topic and share the details of the talk I gave on “Cost effective ways to build a brand and generate sale leads.”

As many as 91 patients and staffers died a horrible death in Kolkata’s well-known hospital when a blaze in the basement engulfed its annexe building early Friday with noxious smoke, trapping helpless patients while doctors and others fled to safety.

This horrific incident is allegedly a result of the utter negligence on the part of the AMRI hospital staff and authorities. As soon as the news were out, Indian people on social media started pouring their outrage and lament over the incident. The Emami group a brand mostly known for its product ‘Fair and Lovely’ is one of the owners of the AMRI hospital. And as the outrage poured on Twitter ‘Emami’ became trending topic because everybody was angry at the brand and suggested people boycott all Emami products.

In between the angry tweets there was this irrelevant auto tweet from the handle @Bipasha Basu Fans:

Bipasha Basu’s New Ads for Emami Vasocare Lip Moisturiser – GET LIPS LIKE BIPS!

And this is why brand must engage actual people to handle their social media marketing and not let BOTs to send auto tweets which are ridiculous and irrelevant. Such tweets are bound to add salt to the wound and can prove very harmful for the brand’s social image.

Here’s how it looked on the twitter stream:

As a social media service provider, since our very business is based upon this medium, it is imperative that we hold a strong opinion against such a proposition by the Minister which is both unconstitutional and technically impossible. However this post is not just about Mr. Sibal’s proposition to control social media but also the backlash that followed on the Indian social media scene which we think went slightly over board. I would be writing a full story on this for Global Voices Online here I am just conveying my personal opinion on the matter.

It is agreed that Mr. Sibal’s proposition was unconstitutional because as long as the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression is available to us under the Constitution any attempt to ‘pre-screen’ our voices, thoughts, speech, expression would be a violation of that right. Sure, no right is absolute, every right comes with reasonable restrictions, but in this case, these restrictions cannot be imposed even before the right is exercised. Where the voices, thoughts and expressions of a person is found offensive, derogatory, inflammatory, defamatory or whatever have you, the person would be liable under the Constitution to be prosecuted. But no law can possibly control what we say before we have actually said it. They cannot control what we are going to post on Facebook or Twitter assuming it might be offensive. Therefore ‘pre-screening’ is totally against the constitution given the technical impossibility.

That said, it is just as much unconstitutional or at the least, uncivilized, unethical and immature on the part of Indian social media users to call him an “Idiot” and to hurl him with other abuses and insults no matter how much you disagree with him/her. A popular Blogger on the political blog Kafila urged everybody to raise the slogan “Kapil Sibal is an Idiot”

I urge you to write KAPIL SIBAL IS AN IDIOT as your Facebook status message, use the hashtag #IdiotKapilSibal on Twitter, and write a blog post with the above title, because there may soon be a day when he may prevent you from doing so.

And hundreds and thousands of bloggers did so. They called Mr. Kapil Sibal an Idiot on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and every other social networking sites. They also made and floated thousands of sarcastic photo-shopped images, humorous videos, jokes to scale up the insults. They didn’t think before doing or saying. And this was pretty much the same people who applauded Mr. Sibal few months back when he had launched the Akash Tablet, the world’s cheapest Tablet.

Social Media is the digital equivalent of word of mouth communication. A social media furore is the digital equivalent of an angry mob in a riot situation. A powerful blogger urging thousands and thousands of the citizens to call another fellow citizen ‘Idiot’ thereby instigating them to insult and ridicule a person is the digital equivalent of a local leader instigating a mob to take to violence. Once instigated the mob doesn’t know where to stop. Murder, rape, loot and plunder then follows.

If a certain move by the Government is unacceptable the citizens must raise their voices against it, but the voices should be civilized, ethical, logical and rational even when the medium is internet. If social media voices and citizen journalism is to be taken seriously the users must show the same maturity and responsibility as traditional media players and professional journalists.

A backlash on the internet calling someone “idiot” is just as unacceptable as some youth slapping Sharad Pawar or another attacking Lawyer Prashant Bhushan in the offline world.

One morning artist & designer Greg Burney announced on Twitter that he’d make a portrait of his first 3000 followers for free. People soon started following him in hundreds and thousands. He now has over 5000 followers. He is a designer at Dashing Industries and via this way, everybody now knows about his design company.

Moral – Always give an incentive to people for Liking your page / Following you on Twitter etc. Nothing comes for free.

The system is based on an open source free mapping software called Ushahidi. Ushahidi mapping software was developed and first used during the post election crisis in Kenya in 2008. Since then organizations across the globe have used the platform for various cause and crisis driven crowdsourcing initiatives.

Crowdsourcing: As the word suggest crowd sourcing is the process collecting information, multi media content, news, views, opinion, reports, facts, funds and other helpful resources from the masses is called crowd sourcing. With the help of mobile technology and social media crowdsourcing has become one of best ways to

In India the only use of Ushahidi software was for the initiative ‘Vote Report India’ during the last general elections, where people could SMS any election violations at any of the polling booth and all reports were aggregated on the website. The said initiative is now defunct and that is a matter of grave concern.

In a country with such massive mobile outreach it is rather shame that none of the estimated 3.3 millions NGOs registered in India have yet taken up this software to report incidents of violence, corruption, knowledge sharing etc. The Indian NGO sector needs to take up social technology for making change. There is a need to give power to the people to tell their own stories in their own words rather than always playing messiah for them. Indian NGOs have to come out of their traditional mind set and use technology themselves and empower the people with the same.

While the Ushahidi platform has been hailed as one of the greatest innovation in the field of technology for social good, its use have been very limited so far. Below are some of the known use of Ushahidi software across the globe.

In our next post we would discuss why Ushahidi platform is yet to be used in a large scale by organizations, what are the challenges people face while using it. We would also discuss two of India’s best crowdsourcing initiatives – Video Volunteers and CGNet Swara

We are going to launch our brand new website.The home page of the website would feature a short social media story. We invite you to write that story.

See the picture above. This is the opening scene of our story.

Now, use your best imagination and write a story in 200-250 words containing the words ‘samyukta media’.

5 best stories would be up on our website, along with the author’s photo, name, bio and a link to author’s blog (or any other social media identity)

3 best stories would receive gifts from us like CDs, Books, T-shirts.

RULES

1. Not too many rules

2. Just observe the picture and write a story. Must add the words ‘Samyukta Media.’ Try to keep within 200 to 250 words.

3. Obtain the contest code from Samyukta Media Facebook Page – Click Here. If you are already part of our page, you would find the code on the Like page here

4. Share your story in any format you prefer, you can email it to ADMIN@SAMYUKTAMEDIA.COM us or put it on your Blog / Facebook and share the link on our Facebook Wall

5. Remember, you must give the contest code to be eligible for the contest.

6. That’s it.

A day prior to my impromptu SWBT trip to Pushkar I logged on to twitter and gave a shout out about the exact date of the annual Pushkar Camel Fair 2011.

I got responses from many Twitter users, some of them I was already following and some I started following after getting a response from them. That is how it usually works on Twitter. If you have a good amount of follower and are active on Twitter, your name gets recommended amongst the ‘Who to follow’ list. When people follow you, you get a notification that so and so has started following you. Now it is upto you to follow them back immediately or wait till they initiate a conversation with you so that you know that the user is a genuine person and not some bot (automatically created non-human Twitter users).

Starting a conversation on Twitter is the key.

Amongst the many responses there was one response from a user by the twitter handle (a twitter user name is called ‘handle’) @anantapushkar. The response was relevant to my need and so out of natural curiosity I looked up the user’s profile which informed me @Anantapushkar is a Spa and Resort Center based at Pushkar.

A brand communication had begun right there. So far as brand outreach and connecting new people was concerned the communication team of Ananta Spa and Resorts were already successful but the story didn’t end here.

I noticed that they were actively tweeting about the Pushkar Camel Fair by using common hashtags #PushkarFair2011 or #Pushkar giving out information about the mela schedule, dates, directions and general conversation around the fair. What appealed to me was that instead of loud ‘we are awesome’ styled shameless publicity they were giving out relevant information that people actually needed along with subtle messages about their brand and services.

I happily followed back @anantapushkar – they scored again. This time they got a new follower with over 2500 followers of her own.

The third time they scored was when I was on my way to Pushkar. Soon as the bus left Ajmer city and took the hilly roads towards Pushkar I saw big signboards of at least 4-5 different hotels, resorts and cafes. One such board was of Ananta Spa and Resort.  The name immediately rang a bell because I remembered it from Twitter. The other names that rang bells were Pink Floyd café and Little Tibet Garden all were names I had seen on Twitter as part of the conversation by Pushkar visitors tweeting from the ground.

7 days later as I write this case study I don’t remember any other brand names from Pushkar except the ones I saw on Twitter and had a personal communication with.

And it’s not just me, we all get to see a whole bunch of sign boards all through the journey towards any tourist place, how many of them do we remember? Ask yourself.

I remembered Ananta because they successfully engaged me in a conversation on a topic that was relevant to me, they made a personalized connection and created a comfort zone for me.

As a first time visitor to Pushkar all spa and resorts centers doing business in the town would be same to me but I would prefer to check into the one that had created that comfort zone for me over social media. That’s human psychology.

To conclude Ananta Spa and Resorts scored on social media communication because:

• They were actively Tweeting about something that was important to people visiting Pushkar
• They didn’t continuously throw around their marketing agenda but were subtle and confident about it
• They listened more than speaking, they listened to me first and then started a conversation
• They invited people to visit their Facebook page not to witness their awesomeness but because there was something useful for Pushkar visitors there, the program schedule and updates.
• They established personal friendly connection by doing simple conversations like, how do you like the Fair, how is your stay, is this your first time to Pushkar.

The fallout – the not to glamorous bit about the story

In spite of being good at their social media communication, Ananta barely has 20 followers on Twitter which is terribly low. But there is nothing to be disheartened about. Low follower count could be for many reasons:

• Perhaps they have only recently started using twitter
• Pushkar is a lesser known travel spot
• Pushkar Camel Fair is an annual event  and not an event about which people need information round the year
• Finally, number of people going to Pushkar and also using Twitter to find information or connect to hotels and resorts are very low. After all this story wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t login to Twitter and gave a shout out to begin with.

Pushkar is annually visited by over 500,000 people from different parts of India and the world. From my simple research there were not even 100 people on Twitter talking about Pushkar during the Fair. This is a challenge but the situation would change soon. There would be time when hundreds and thousands of the Indians would be using Twitter from their mobile phones.

My message to the Ananta Pushkar’s Communication team:

The Ananta Pushkar Spa and Resorts team is doing something right on social media and they would reap the benefits in the long run, very long run. They should continue with their efforts to establish a healthy personal contact with influential people / photographers / travellers / travel writers (like they did with me) to potentially turn them into patrons.

Patience is the key. The return on investment is waiting somewhere down the road.