Indian Social Media Landscape

This is a repost from Microreviews.

Success keeps us motivated. We are elated to have received a huge response to our first two posts in this series( Facebook Presence and Twitter Presence of Indian telecom majors) . So we move on in our journey to check the website/blog presence of Indian telecom majors. Websites and Blogs, as you would all agree, are an extremely important as a part of a company’s social media portfoilo.

So, Here we go.

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.

The title is borrowed from the traditional proclamation – ‘The King is dead. Long Live the King’. What is basically meant (and I am taking this from Wikipedia) is that in certain monarchies of France and England, the transfer of sovereignty occurred instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. In this blog post, I am using it to highlight that how a stand alone non interactive website (basically 1.0) is dead and without fail, its time for websites powered by social media (Websites 2.0) to take over!!

It is very common to see companies scrambling to get their website up. In few cases, some basic essentials of website are missing, but in most the marketers have no clear agenda on why they are building one. It’s not too surprising to see websites being made because it is a standard launch activity to do. It is more like a job in the task list at the time of product launch. The brand manager gets it executed because it was expected out of him or her.

Most number of mails that we get revolve around content for blog. It appears that most bloggers start off writing about a certain subject and then slowly lose way. That happens because they feel that there aren’t many readers on the subject they are writing!! Well, maybe that could be the case if you are writing about very specialized subjects. For most of the others there could be other problems plaguing us.

We have listed out few of them. Check out for yourself if your blog is not party to this.

·         Blogs are fairly unregulated in content. But be careful and sensitive to what you write. A lot of impressions are formed about you as a person while reading your posts. I have read many blogs that talk about ‘sex’ or ‘race and caste discrimination’ but treat the subject with so much maturity that it generates healthy debates and comments.

I hear people saying that blogging has really caught on. I wouldn’t go that far – possibly the term ‘blogging’ surely has caught on!! A lot of people do start their blogs and then get lost somewhere down the lane. A lot of it could possibly because of the low hits their blogs are generating. I think it’s mostly because some of the essential aspects of a blog are missing!!

So, it wouldn’t be bad idea to explore this subject more. What we are going to do here is clean up the dust that has settled on the blog, enhance it with few tools and list out few essentials that are a must for each blog!!

1.    First things first. Your blog is your own identity!!

Blogs are a reflection of you as a person. Feel free to write in your own inimitable style. The same rule applies for corporate blogs too. Each brand enjoys a certain personality and character and blogs have to remain true to that brand value.

Don’t worry about being judged. As long as your blog post uses language that is simple and easily understood, there is no right or wrong here.

We have received mails from people who would like us to explain the basic terminologies about blogging. Apparently, these are terms that are widely used without correct interpretation available.

To a lot of you who have already started blogging, you might run through it and let us know if we have missed out any terms that can be included in this list

We have categorized all the terms into different sections for better understanding. With these terms, you will definitely be in a position to start your very own blog.

Blogs and Blog sites:

Blog – It has been derived from the term ‘Web log’. It is usually maintained by an individual, with regular posts containing text matter, pictures or videos. The key feature of blogs is that readers can leave behind their comments thereby making it interactive and participative.

Blog Post – An entry written and published on a blog is called as blog post.