Indian Social Media Landscape

This post is being re-blogged from Microreviews. The Indian Telecommunication Industry is considered one of the most competitive as well as most marketed industries in the world. Cheap rates and brilliant advertisement campaigns have become synonymous to Airtel, Vodafone and Tata Docomo. So, with all this in mind Microreviews set out to check the social media (the in thing as they say) presence of the major telecom players in India.

Microreviews starts this journey with Facebook.

• Bharti Airtel : There are apparently three or four facebook pages which Airtel has. One of these has around 10000 fans which is a big number by Indian Social Media standards. The page seems to have quite a few details of the offers coming out and stuff but doesn’t seem well maintained at all. The display image is of a person, who I really don’t know and I expected to see the Airtel Logo at the place of that pic. Going to the information section gives you a shock. It is apparently the page of Airtel Srilanka. The other pages of Airtel India also fail to impress and can be found here. Coming to facebook groups of Airtel now, they seem to be dominated by Airtel Srilanka again. The facebook group of Airtel Srilanka can be seen here and here. Both seem quite active. However, when I apparently go in for the Airtel India’s facebook group, they have got their website wrongly stated as http://www.airtel.co.in . It suddenly seems that this facebook group does not belong to Airtel at all. There are a couple of other groups, which may or may not belong to Airtel and can be seen here. I did find out a facebook game by name Airtel Special 5 and did not feel like taking it. Airtel Srilanka, overall seems to be doing better than Airtel India as far as facebook presence goes.

This post is in continuation with the last one where we were announcing a series of changes at Windchimes. Since our inception in October last year, the social media landscape has undergone a wide change. We decided to capture our learning from the work we have carried out for our clients and new trends in this field on our website.

Also to carry on with our tradition of providing value to readers, we have compiled a social media handbook which is Free to download. A simple 3 step registration and you could have your very own copy of it! The handbook cover a variety of topics on social media – some of it quite basic to get the users new to this medium up to speed. It also dwells upon the principles that this medium adopts along with in depth discussion and examples of each platform.

Our other changes on the sites have originated now from the endless discussions we have had with our clients on social media – resolving their queries and citing out Indian case studies and examples. We have started offering several new services too and you would get a hint of that along with the workshops that we undertake.

The time to write this post came sooner than I had planned. Like most new ventures, Sandhya and I too started Windchimes (in October ‘08) with business plans for the first six months and then for next 3 years. Six months because, in India, our financial year starts in April. We were not completely sure of the assumptions that we had made for making those and had to play it by the ear.

And well, it turned out to be better and soon we were out looking for a big place to set up and grow our business. That by the way, in Mumbai is never easy. We did find a place to our liking and parked ourselves here. What worked out better were the mavens we got on board – a young bunch of exciting people full of passion and energy!

I love YouTube. I think it is a brilliant concept and has given an avenue for self expression like no other. A random search on YouTube will reveal videos ranging from the truly useful to the sincerely bizarre. Some of my all time fave videos on YouTube include Where is Matt, everything from Common Craft and Bridal Skincare (what can I say… I am partial!). Infact Where is Matt with hits to the tune of 20,057,638, has got so big that Visa used it for their traditional TV campaign! Three cheers to the power of online video…

In India too one can see companies making the shift, with brands like Fevicryl owning a vault of over 50 DIY videos, each serving the purpose of helping a consumer understand how to use the product.

Now that marketers are increasingly planning to invest on online videos to reach out to their consumers, they also need to understand how to get more people to watch these videos.

Windchimes blog recently earned official badge of achievement as ‘Successful and Outstanding Blogger’. Liz Strauss describes in detail the idea behind running the successful and outstanding blogger program in detail and how you can earn it too.

She states on her blog that this badge is awarded to bloggers who “take the conversations to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger”.

Successful and Outstanding Blogger Badge

You can view the directory of all the blogs that have been awarded the badge. As Liz says, “Good Conversation shared can only improve the blogging community”. We couldn’t agree with you more Liz!!

An announcement.

Sally Hooton, editor of the DMI magazine, approached us recently to write an article on social media. It was our privilege to be associated with DMI, the world’s only global business title for direct and interactive marketers based out of United Kingdom. The article talks about social media in relevance to India in conjunction with our research on social media.

The article can be viewed in the online format on Page 36.

If you would like to download the article then do click on the Scribd Link given below.