Indian Social Media Landscape

Not long ago, blogging was considered as an online diary or journal where the writer documented his/her day to day activity. It was a space for people with creative bend to showcase their talent. It was personal and it was only shared with a select few. Circa 2011 and blogs have evolved into a vital communication tool that every brand is looking to incorporate in their marketing plan.

Keeping this in mind, it is important that this social media tool be well understood and its potential be highlighted. Here we look at key ways of making a corporate blogs work for your brand. To start with, a corporate blog need not be serious and perched on an ivory tower. Like any other social media tool, blogs too can help you build a friendly relationship with your consumer. Splash some creativity and humor in the content, especially, if your brand personality is such. Be vibrant, colorful and vivacious. It can go a long way in making your blog reach out to your target audience.

A colorful blog title can personify your brand image

Being a blog should not restrict you to just putting up articles. Break the monotony by posting, video blogs and/or photo blog posts. Not only will this make your blog more interesting, it will also present you with the opportunity to showcase your product features without suggesting that you are advertising your product. Also, it can help you in letting the world know about your organization, its culture and ethos of the place. It also helps in building a strong employee-employer relation.

Add photos to your blog

Another way of building employee-employer relationship is by allowing employees to post on your corporate blog. Empower them to promote the company’s products through informative tutorials, advice, and reviews that not only sell the products, but also offer some valuable tips. Not only will this help in content generation, it will also help in giving face and name to the organization.

Blogs need not always be about the products. It could well become a research platform for your company. Inviting the readers to suggest the kind of product they would want to use can help in getting valuable consumer insight at a very low cost. Adding comments and a rating system can make the blog highly interactive. The aim is to experiment with ideas, something that you can’t do with your website.

Make your blog user friendly and sharable

An important point to bear in mind is to be unique in your style. Stand out and be seen. Change your blog theme to reflect colorful seasonal themes. Add animation to bring alive your blog. The more effort you put in, the more appreciation you shall get. It is not about being different for the sake of being different, but because you truly are.

If changing your style is something you cannot suggest as a brand, then choose a very simplistic, neat and corporate look. Have a professional and simple blog design. A clutter free approach helps in easy navigation and a more pleasing experience for the reader. A decent mix of pictures and words will be enough for you to get your point across. Be simple in your language as well. Always remember, the idea is to let people know what you are talking about, not to send them on a wild hunt through online dictionary sites.

Neat and clean look for a corporate blog

Another sure shot way of getting people to your blog and keep them hooked is by inviting guest bloggers. Everyone is keen to know what a celebrity has to say or what a famous person thinks. Having such a person write an article on your post will help you achieve huge readership. Also, sharing of these posts will make your blog achieve virility like never before.

If you don’t have access to celebrities, then turn the table and give access to your readers about inside news and pre launch stories. Share all behind the scene action, through videos, photos, descriptive blog posts, and interview with people who have been part of the development process of the product.

Share exclusive details on your blog

These are just a few ideas on how a corporate blog can help you and your brand connect with your audience and potential customers. Like any other communication tool, there is no set pattern but being clear of the idea and your personality would be a perfect way of defining your blog personality.

Read more about blogging, here.

Do you use Quora? Should you use Quora? In the last couple of weeks, Quora has become the trendy pick as a breakout site for 2011. Traffic increased tremendously in December but then more than doubled again in early January, as per information released on Quora couple of weeks ago.

What’s the noise all about?

Quora is an online knowledge market, founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in January 2010, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers on many topics and allows users to collaborate on them.

Quora’s service allows users to ask questions and give answers. Additionally, users can comment on the questions and answers and “upvote” or “downvote” the answers. An “Answer Summary” can be created to reflect the consensus of the community. This summary is a wiki that can be edited by any registered user. Recently a blogging feature called Quora Posts has also been added.

Upvote and Downvote Option

Who is behind the noise?

Co-founded by Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s former CTO) and Charlie Cheever, it received funding from Benchmark Capital in March 2010, valuing the start-up at a rumored $86 million. Matt Cohler, a former Facebook executive, has taken a board seat at the company.

Co-founder Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever

Why so much of noise?

On December 26, 2010, Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist who earlier was at Microsoft and is known for his prominent blog Scobleizer, blogged ‘Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?’ This effectively endorsed the site as the next big thing.  PC Magazine, Techcrunch, TNW and FastCompany were amongst the many media outlets that quickly followed.  This, coupled with social graph on-boarding with Twitter, Facebook and email integration, lead to truly viral growth.

Pegged as a reverse blogging site rather than a simple Q&A site, Quora is trying hard to establish itself as an alternate to Yahoo Answers. According to the co-founders of the site, Quora is canvas waiting to be painted upon. “When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.”

What seems to be giving Quora the edge over other sites is the fact that each response has to be supplemented with the user’s real identity. This makes the answers that more authentic and believable. People say they feel smarter after they use Quora.

The magic of revealing the identity lies in something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time. The signal to noise ratio is extremely high. Quora is a great place to find answers about products from prominent people involved with them. It’s also a great place for those prominent people to disagree, publicly. And this gives it a clear advantage of being live and buzzing.

How is the noise being created?

Quora is solving the problem that Google’s been trying to solve forever – creating the database of intentions. The most important thing about searching is to have a properly framed search string that will lead the searcher to the desired result.

In most of the cases, this perfect question has already been framed and been answered. All one needs to do is find it. And that is exactly what Quora is doing. This cuts out the link web that google provides for a query, or avoid the mindless answers people post on Yahoo answer. And unlike Linkedin, where you may get a great answer, you are not restricted to how many questions you can ask or look for.

Has Quora found a voice in India?

Not yet. Though according to Google AdPlanner, Quora has 30,000 unique monthly users in India — around 8% of total Quora users. Most people who use Quora in India are just beginning to get a feel of how this unique platform works. But make no mistake, going by the rate at which Scribd became the place to research for information in India, Quora will soon be amongst the most popular research site. Just for reference, while researching for this article we came across this question on Quora: “What are the key differences in economic policy of China and India?” which had two responses. Suffice to say, this is a great starting point for any researcher.

Finding its footing in India

Quora could do to Google and Yahoo Answers what Facebook did to Orkut and MySpace, make Q&A sites more social and fun. Whether the noise and excitement survives post the initial euphoria will have to be seen. It’s early days but the concept could do well if the quality of the answers remains high and spam remains low.

To read more on Question and Answer site, check our previous post.

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.

In the second part of the series on – ‘Who is afraid of social media?’ – we continue to focus on the concerns that stop social media from playing a key role in internal communication.

• ‘Our culture is very different’

Yes it’s true that social media works better if the organisation has a young, tech-savvy workforce with a flat structure and a democratic and open culture. But there are enough examples across the world where conservative companies with an older workforce have met with social media success. All it needs is time, patience and consistent efforts.

It is important to recognise the company culture and customise your social media plans accordingly. You might have to tweak your plans and phase out in a manner that makes it more acceptable and easier to adopt. One needs to pay heed to the fact that even if the organisation has been traditionally conservative about communication, in the future the Digitally Advanced will form the ranks and their communication needs will be better met using social media.

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.