Indian Social Media Landscape

I find most corporate communicators are wary of social media when it comes to Internal Communications. While they are more than happy to embrace social media otherwise; when it comes to marketing to the internal consumer, a very important constituency in any good communicator’s plan, they will not touch social media with a ten-foot barge pole.

Today, I will try to help you understand what stops most internal communicators from using social media to increase and strengthen relationships with their consumers – the employees.

In the old way of doing things, companies make use of intranets or websites as static tools. Employees can search and find, but have limited ability to participate and contribute. In the new way of doing things, things are interactive and collaborative and use social media tools such as social networking sites, blogs, collaborative research, discussion forums and wikis.

This is the second part of the article on how Mr. Barack Obama used social media to win the presidential elections. Do read the first part of the series

4.    Use of Audio Visual Media:

The campaign managers created a page on Flickr where people could see pictures of his campaigns, his personal moments with his family and as a presidential candidate reaching out to people. All these visuals created a sense of him being there everywhere. It gave the opportunity for people to follow his campaign virtually and see the success he was getting in each state.

On his separate channel on You Tube, there are more than 1800+ video snippets uploaded with close to 20 million views. These numbers may still look small when compared to TV but remember all this publicity is FREE. In fact, so famous were Obama’s videos, that it induced Will.i.am to come out with a music video “Yes We Can”

(This is two part series article)

I just had to use social media as his middle name. It is important to analyze how Barack Obama could leverage his views and personality to reach out to voters using social media tools. American elections created history of sorts – one and the most obvious one being elected as the first African American as President. Second and not so obvious one being use of social media for his presidential campaign by his campaign managers.

Let’s break it down into steps.

1. Voter Generated Content:

First thing that stood out of the campaign was his website. It allowed the voters and fans to not just learn more about him but also organize meetings and fan clubs on his behalf. Voters could download tools and use them in a manner they felt best to help them organize meetings. There was a ‘download’ section where voters could use donation widget, get campaign materials and Obama badges.

People customized content from his website