The findings of the report are as follows:

• 30 million Indians who are online consumers are members of social networking sites
• 20 million of these spend time on social networking sites daily
• Indians spend more time on social media than they do checking personal email
• Over the next six months 45,000 online Indians intend to join social networking sites each day
• 1/4th of online Indians were able to recall brands using social media
• Having a social media presence connotes ‘innovation’ ‘customer friendliness’ and a sense of ‘cool’
• Nearly 40 million Indians are using online reviews to inform purchase decisions
• 67 percent of Indians who are on the web use online reviews to help them make purchases
• 60 percent Indians who are social media users are open to being approached by brands

Now the big statistic -> Social Media in India is growing at 100 percent and is likely to touch 45 million users by 2012

We are believers that this medium will impact marketing in a big way. If you looking for a social media agency then contact us here.

Apparently i wasn’t doing much this weekend and thought i would kill time by doing something which is rather productive.  So i happened to note down things that i have seen in the Social Media Space in India. And Guess What! It turned out to be so good that i made a presentation out of it

Coming to the Presentation, its about Social Media Marketing Practices in India where i have shared my Views on How 2010 has been for Social Media and whats in store for Social Media in 2011

Here is a close look at what the hell am i talking about..

Down below in the Comments Section, do let us know what You think  on how 2011 will be for the Social Media Marketing Sector in India

Last year has been a fantastic one though. Facebook has crossed 14 million users, Linkedin has crossed 7 million, the whole of bollywood and cricket world is on Twitter and even youtube has made strides with live streaming of IPL. On the whole its been a dream year for Social media in India since last Diwali to this diwali.

We at WATConsult too have seen a lot of changes and progress over the last year. We have grown to a 30 people (almost and growing) team. We have added some fantastic clients (and continue to add them each week not having time to update the new logo’s ;)) and we have done some case study stuff work and won great testimonials as well as client confidence. We have outgrown both our current offices and are currently scouting for a big fat space to accommodate our folks.

But above all of this what we have managed to do is get a fantastic team on board. I say this because last night I was at the diwali dinner with my team and when I was reaching home I realized that the fun in building companies or running them is only because of the people you work with and the culture you build. The culture at WAT has been one of openness friendliness and respect. Its the buzz that keeps everyone going internally. Its when you feel that buzz you know you are going in the right direction.

Half of our jokes were twitter related or facebook related and it was great to see the team have a great laugh at them. It was also fun to suddenly see people get into work related discussions in the middle of dinner and be very engaged in the same. It felt great to know that the team connected strongly both with social media and with WATConsult. I felt like a proud parent of sorts

Lots of people have asked me that whether this social media fad will continue or no. My answer has always been that once people make it a part of their daily lives then its very difficult to change their habits. My belief is just like our offline dinner jokes were based on activities we did online I think a lot of others would feel the same offline impact of social media as it grows. I am an optimist and yes Social media wont be omnipresent and like any medium there will be heavy, light and ultra light users but it will redefine communication and that is the paradigm shift.

Sometimes brands and people both need to stop over analyzing what social media is and what it can do and just enjoy the process. Enjoy the joyride of free flowing conversation. The world wont end nor would it stop with social media but it is definitely changing and thats where the fun is

By Rajiv Dingra - CEO WATConsult

We are also announcing two new initiatives in the social media field in India i.e. Socialtrakr.com our social media group blog on social media trends and Socialmediacourse.in - India’s first social media certified course.

Check it out below:

The projections too are bright with social media poised to reach 3.1 B$ globally in 5 years and with India already among the top 10 countries visiting twitter and with more than a dozen social media sites on India’s Top 20 one in no way can ignore social media marketing as a critical form of  marketing in todays times.

What needs to be done though is Social Media Marketing needs to be differentiated from other forms of online marketing for it to be well understood by marketers. This post is an attempt at chalking out the key differences..

Social Media VS SEM/Banner Advertising

1. Asset creation VS Renting Of Assets - The first key differentiation is that of creating an asset. Social media media allows you to create an asset be it a twitter account with 100 or so followers or a facebook fanpage with 1000 fans. Its an asset that you can leverage, grow, scale and benefit from as long as you keep investing time in it. SEM i.e. search engine marketing and Banner adds are nothing but space buys or media buys on such engagement oriented assets or content orient assets like a blog or portal.
2. Conversation VS Clicks - While SEM and Banner have the promise of clicks social media has the promise of conversations. I have delved upon this in an earlier post
3. Two way Vs One Way - Social Media was clearly not meant for push marketing or the classical one way dialogue and hence one needs to look to converse rather than push media on social media vis a vis a banner or text ad where the communication is clearly focused on the product.Social media is about understanding the interests of your target audience and then conversing with them on diverse topics

Yes we always have felt and seen for ourselves that deaf clients = bad clients in social media. Infact even deaf people can converse as they can take the help of sign language. So incase a company is deaf by virtue of not understanding how to lissen on social media then it either can hire a sign language instructor ( i.e. social media agency) or learn the ropes by reading about it on the web or take the help of a hearing aid (social media monitoring services).

In short - LISTENING is the most important and always the first aspect of social media. Now one can listen by monitoring existing social platforms or one can listen by creating a social platform that invites users to express themselves.

]]> http://www.watconsult.com/2009/05/social-media-insight-ii-social-media-isnt-for-deaf-company/feed/ http://www.watconsult.com/2009/05/social-media-insight-i-its-not-marketing-but-conversations-that-click/ http://www.watconsult.com/2009/05/social-media-insight-i-its-not-marketing-but-conversations-that-click/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 08:13:27 +0000 Rajiv Dingra http://www.watconsult.com/?p=87 Social media has been a buzz word for sometime now and constantly the worldover marketers are trying to decipher better ways of leveraging this phenomenon. Some are measuring their success in social media via no of viewers while some others are applying no of clicks as the metric.

Over our 2 years in social media consulting we have discovered that few brands in India (the main market we cater to) have seen conversations as the metric for social media.

We believe that social media suffers from the legacy that Search engine marketing and other banner driven campaigns have created for the online medium. What brands have failed to comprehend that a conversation i.e. a outreach and reply to an outreached message might be far more powerful and impactful than a click to a website.

Social media also suffers from the marketers myopic vision sydrome that is to see the tool as a way to reach out and not as a tool to ‘hang out’ among people who matter. For example lets say you are at an exhibition with 100 prospective customers.. which approach would you think would work? An approach of shoving you business cards in their faces and moving on to the next person in order to reach out to maximum people or the approach of striking a conversation with one prospective customer - discussing business with him/her and making sure he is sold on your concept/product etc.

Well to each his own but we feel the later strategy works far better in the long run. It also tells your customers that you care to listen. This is because is conversation is always two way and not one way.

So in conclusion we would like to say that Social Media isn’t designed for marketing its designed for conversations.

Still Living in the CPC (Cost per click) Era?

Lots of marketers still look at clicks as a metric to measure the effectiveness of any campaign online. I guess its got to do more with the revolutionary adwords model of google which shifted the metric for online advertising from CPM to CPC and made it far more measurable and accountable than any other medium.

Does CPC work for SMM?

Social Media Marketing entails engaging with users on social media sites like blogs, social networks, video and picture community portals, knowledge sharing communities like qna’s and wikipedia etc. While engaging with users the goal is the following:

1) Identification of Audience ( Analysis of Social Media Channels and identifying your target audience - TG)

2) Spreading Awareness (this could be for a brand, company, products or events.. basically whatever requires social media marketing from the clients end)

3) Creating Engagement (Involving the TG in a conversation which could be topical, industry oriented or issues that concerns the brand i.e. basically befriending the TG)

4) Propagating Evangelism

(Recruiting evangelists. Recruiting here doesn’t stand for formal recruitment it stands for identification of those users that will drive the brand message to others and making sure they are rewarded with either a title i.e. group moderator etc or there is an end benefit in notional terms i.e. I helped spread awareness on aids or I was having more information than my friends on a certain topic.)

5) End Result Viral Impact (Social Media Marketing efforts should have a ripple effect which in turn becomes buzz or viral)

Now as you would notice in the above process it doesn’t matter whether how many clicks (infact its very difficult to track clicks as well as they coul come 1 month later after you had the conversation) did the user do or whether or not he visited the site what matters is how many conversations took place that were meaningful. Because if the conversations were meaningful word would spread and eventually there would be a buzz impact.

Short term Vs Longterm

Also with the on-off capability of the web marketers patience with building awareness is very limited. For example the google ads on any ads on the web can be turned on and off almost instantaneously. But the social media marketing campaign is unlike these normal ads that can be placed on a google or rediff homepage. Its not an on and off campaign instead its a gradual scale up exercise that require far more strategy input and qualitative execution than a click and upload banner does.

Conclusion: On the whole marketers are caught between the ROI metrics of the traditional online marketing campaigns where clicks are of prime importance and conversations are close to zero. But with social media coming to the party and with marketers and companies alike indulging in it I think conversations/engagement as a metric to judge campaign effectiveness will be given more emphasis in the future.