Social Networking: boon or bane

For the uninitiated, initially, social networks were networks
or meeting places set up by people who wanted to ‘keep in touch’ or team up
after starting their career. Facebook as we know it today, was akin to a
school/college yearbook — a photo album, the only difference being that it was
in the form of an electronic billboard, where one could look up old colleagues
and exchange information. With added impetus from technological advancement,
developments in networking technology and mobile phones, over time this
electronic billboard evolved to social networks as we know them today.
Presently, social networks, among other things, are :

à Forums for sharing materials;

Social networks are unique in the sense that, while they
serve ones personal needs, they are equally useful in meeting one’s business or
professional needs. The following examples would illustrate this :

Having understood this background, lets get on with the
basics.

There are various types of online social media — from social
networks of friends and professionals, to microblogging services, to video
sharing sites. To name a few:

The world’s largest social network, with hundreds of million
users, began when a small group of Harvard students, led by Mark Zuckerberg,
decided to keep in touch with each other. It soon opened out to other US
campuses and eventually in 2006, to everyone.

At one time Orkut India’s most popular social network, this
Google-owned service was set up by former Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten in
his spare time. Once a hit with users, it is far behind in the global popularity
stakes. Orkut has faced some issues because of its previously open nature. After
legal problems in 2007, Orkut substantially cleaned up the network, but by then,
the damage was done — ‘high-end’ users had begun switching over to Facebook.
(Incidentally have you tried google buzz ?)

Quite popular with musicians and actors, who use the site to
host music and movie clips, this site was picked up by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp
a few years ago and its immense popularity made Google give it a lucrative
advertising deal.

YouTube has started a video revolution — it’s as simple as
that. The service — which allows anyone to upload video clips on to the net —
from your baby’s first steps to a music video that you recently shot — commands
a big chunk of Internet traffic today. According to estimates, every minute of
the day, over 10 minutes of content is being uploaded on to the service. (In
fact, you can watch IPL3 matches on this network).

Hulu is a video service promoted by US TV network NBC and has
high-quality online broadcasts of their shows. Apparently, users from India
cannot access Hulu.

Other sites include Vimeo and DailyMotion.

Twitter :

This is a blazingly fast-growing service : one estimate put Twitter’s growth at a staggering 1,382% a month with an estimated 100 million users. (A Harvard study estimated that 10% of these users, by and large, cre-ated 90% of the content.) Twitter essentially allows users to send out their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Only a third of Twitter users are active, though, and India has an active ‘Twitterati’ of an estimated 10,000 people. Several Indian companies are now embracing the service. Immensely popular and highly useful during breaking news events such as 26/11. Some of the users who have left their indelible mark using this tool — Sashi Tharoor and of course Apro SRK.

While some dismiss them as a waste of time, Internet sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have exploded in popularity, giving easy access to a potentially huge amount of new business.

Business and social media :

The ultimate transformation that is taking place today is within the business landscape, worldwide— and increasingly so in India — where compa-nies are beginning to leverage informal social net-works to engage customers, soothe ruffled feath-ers, strengthen their brands and even hire people. For companies in India, the reasoning is simple : While Indian PC and Internet penetration rates are relatively lower than the West, India has one of the largest Internet population in the world — some 60 million regular users (not including mobile access). Moreover, these users are the most sought-after customers with high disposable incomes, and companies with clear online media plans are waking up to the fact that they can reap the benefits of engag-ing with this audience. Those that don’t, risk losing the customers that they already have or slipping behind their more savvy competitors.

Here is a real life instance of how social media can influence change :

Take a look at the interactive digital marketing site that Tata Motors built when the Nano was launched. This site had games built into it, where people could customise colours and pick their favourite ones —thereby (ahem) sneakily helping the car company figure out which ones to use on the Nano. (A clever idea, but far removed from a social media forum.) However, when Tata Motors did launch the Nano, there was no mistaking its intention to use a full-fledged social media strategy. The company set up groups on Facebook and Orkut hoping to target the numerous official ‘Nano’-centric groups that had parked themselves on the site. To its complete surprise, it found that one unofficial group on Orkut dwarfed the official ones — and it would have been a fatal mistake to ignore members not under the official Nano fold. A spokeperson for the company said “We engage with people on these sites, too. We react to criticism of our car and try to explain our position. Also, we often find that before we can react to the criticism, there are other members who come up to defend the car.” As a matter of fact even presently, the official groups on these two sites, at around 17,000 members, are much smaller than the largest un-official group on Orkut with around 52,000 members.

Here’s another example :

Maruti Suzuki India is, strangely enough, a pioneer in online social marketing. Realising that there are several online communities for the highly popular Swift, it has created an online platform to bring together the 2,500 disparate online Swift users’ clubs in India. Earlier this year, the company actively enlisted bloggers and talked to the community during pre-launch activities for its latest Ritz.

There are others — Herseys, Dominos, Apollo Hospitals, Nokia — to name a few.

Avoiding traps :

Its important to understand that social media isn’t for everyone and should not be used for everything. For instance, the Chief Marketing Officer of a large corporate group shared his experience saying online social media is not an ideal platform for business to business (B2B) interactions. “It is a great way of getting messages about your company across, but I would neither buy nor I would sell anything using social media,” she says. Also, having a presence in online social media or running ads there doesn’t mean that the company will emerge an overnight success. In fact, far from it. “It is a misconception among many that this is a procedural thing, which it’s clearly not. It is a highly creative space that requires that marketers identify the space, the nature of stakeholders involved, what makes people tick within that space and, importantly, to listen to people—and not try and sell things to them.” According to experts, the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to use the medium to push their products.

Another problem is that of measuring success. Even though there are advanced analytical tools available on the Internet, classifying a ‘successful campaign’ in social media is extremely difficult and can also be manipulated using something called ‘click fraud’. There are few benchmarks to measure success online unlike television adverts. A company can claim any number of sign-ups for a digital campaign, but never release how many were translated into sales. Also, beware of social media experts. The landscape is littered with them, many of whom have no legitimate professional experience in the field. Much like the Internet company era, social media is the new in-thing and these hucksters are simply surfing the next big wave, hoping to get rich.

The second part of this article will be printed in the next issue of the BCAJ. Watch this space for the pitfalls and the dark side of social marketing.