Archive for September, 2011

Bloggerati of the Fortnight: Anshul Tewari

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

ATA journalism student for life, a blogger by choice and a social entrepreneur that is how our Blogger of the Fortnight, Anshul Tewari would like to be known. Anshul founded youthkiawaaz.com in 2008 to voice his opinion about the social and political scenario in our country. Today, youthkiawaaz.com is India’s largest online platform for the youth to express themselves on issues of critical importance.

After having worked with leading national and international media houses, Anshul took blogging and social entrepreneurship to a whole new level and successfully so. He created this excellent platform for students and the youth in general to express themselves- a feat that is remarkable considering Youth Ki Awaaz has hundreds applying for internships every month.

With an editorial board of 12, executive team of 5, about 600 writers, correspondents, freelancers, student journalists from around the world, youthkiawaaz.com is today a registered media firm. Anshul also runs a research organization called Youth Research India.

Anshul has been a part of various national and international social enterprises and has been the driving force behind the cause, working on all aspects of the organization, from content and editing, to the executive aspects. This passion is reflected in the posts that come up on the blog. Hand picking every member of the team so that each of them share the same enthusiasm about the cause they are about to take on has maintained the rise of blog’s credibility.

Youth Ki Awaaz was awarded the Best Blog on Social Causes in India, and has won various other awards including the World Summit Youth Award for best practices in online journalism, by the International Center for New Media (ICNM) in 2010.

A graduate in Journalism from Delhi University, Anshul has worked with the Indian Express, The Financial Express and the Wall Street Journal India, online. He says, “Social change is not something that can happen instantly. It takes the effort of one entire generation to make sure that the next generation sees a better world.” And for putting in this effort, Anshul Tewari is our Bloggerati of the Fortnight.

Click here to read more from our Blogger of the Fortnight series.

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Social media and social responsibility

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Over the past few years, social media has become an important tool of marketing. Big brands have invested in the new media hoping to hook the audience to their products. And, with the success of the platform, the brands are now looking to leverage the tool for enhancing their brand equity via social causes’ route.

Social responsibility goes social

With growth of Facebook and twitter and the rise of social media marketing, it is no surprise that then this medium would now be used to promote corporate social responsibilities (CSR). While the brands are slowly starting to embrace this route, many social causes have already been promoted to good result via Facebook and other social platforms.

                    IAC

Social Causes Promoted via Social Media

Not just local public cause, social media has played key role in national causes. The public led campaigns against issues in countries like Libya, Egypt and India has shown what this medium is capable of. And if harnessed properly, the medium can deliver like none other.

Reaching the masses

In India, there are 31 million Facebook users, while the total number of active users on social media is expected to be 45 million by year 2012. This platform is growing and how. There is no denying that social media provides the easiest, and most cost effective route of reaching such an audience.

                      Causes 

Engaging the influencers

A key tool for any cause based program is to have the experts opinion put forth. A doctor talking about a health related issue makes the cause look that much more credible. Social media provides this opportunity to all the brands.

With over 40000 active bloggers who have built a major clout with their writing, brands can engage with these writers while talking about the cause and make them understand their fight. They in turn would then promote the cause and bring credibility to program.

                     Philips

Philips LinkedIn Innovation in Health

Not just blogs, lot of professionals are on social media, who can be engaged through their inputs and dialogues with general public in order to make the cause support that much more real and beneficial for normal people.

Key Benefits:

It also provides key benefits that any brand looks from a CSR or cause promotion. It helps brands in:

  • Improving Social Welfare
  • Establish differentiated brand positioning
  • Create strong consumer bond
  • Enhance brand equity
  • Boost internal morale
  • Drive Sales
  • Drive market value of firm

Acceptance of the campaign

A lot of skeptics have questioned the acceptance of a social media campaign. The fact that it is perceived as a youth platform makes them feel the whole seriousness of the issue would be lost. What they are not realizing that in a country like India, 66% percent of the population falls in the youth category. Thus, addressing them on their choice of platform is key to making them talk and think about the cause. And that’s not about it. 

End Cause

The result of a social media campaign can be gauged through response generated either through number of people who have registered for the cause or amount of money donated through the program. Also, the success of the program can be gauged through how well the program has been able to improve the lives of people who supported the campaign. There are no shortages of examples of the same in India. Brands like Fair and Lovely have contributed majorly towards growth of the society via this platform. The Fair and Lovely Foundation has reached out to over 300 girls in just 7 years and changed their lives.

FAL Foundation               Aircel

Brand led campaigns

Similarly Aircel has managed to build a support of over 300,000 people for save the tiger campaign. The major highlight of this campaign was making people believe that they can contribute to a cause which previously they though they can’t do much about.

And that is the victory that social media can lend to a corporate social responsibility or a cause promotion by a brand. It can make people feel important; it can make them feel like a responsible citizen. That they can make a contribution to any cause that they feel for through this channel makes it that much more powerful.

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Socializing with your employees: Part 1

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Organizations are wrestling with questions about how to fend off, fit in with or foster the use of social media by employees. Still, many firms haven’t considered some of the potential benefits of using internal social networks as well as external tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

These days you can find lots of advice about how to use public social media—such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—for marketing your company to prospective customers, partners, and employees. However, companies can gain solid benefits from using social and collaboration tools for internal purposes.

Setting up Facebook Groups, Internal YouTube channels, Internal blogs and micro blogging through yammer are just few tools that can be used from main stream social environment for internal communication. The richness of these platforms in terms of visual and audio capabilities make them much more engaging and entertaining alternatives to plain memos and group mails.

Group

Internal Group Page on Facebook

One of the best examples of social media employment for internal clients is the IBM model for social media. The tech giant has had an open policy for social media and has seen employee engagement sky rocketing, providing a much improved work environment and culture in the organization. According to IBM they represent their brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. The brand is largely shaped by the interactions that employees have with customers. This decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

Same rule, different tool

While Social Media makes a good case as a business tool with option such as:

· Listen to customers

· Promote new products, news, events, etc

· Position your organization as thought leaders

· Build relationship with new and existing customers

· Increase brand awareness

· Competition analysis

· Resolve Customer service issues

These very tools can be used to build a very good case for using social media for internal customers i.e. employees of an organization. All it needs is listening to the other side. The social media tools can be used to:

· Listen to employees

· Promote new products, news, events which the employees can then benefit from and spread news about

· Seek participation of employees in thought leadership program and thus building pride in them

· Build lasting relationship with the employees

· Increase internal brand awareness

· Resolve HR issues

· Share classified information and competition analysis

· Communicate with employees quickly during crisis

These suggestions are not without base. It has been observed the companies that use social media, achieved year on year improvement in employee engagement of 18% compared to just 1% in case of those who didn’t. (http://goo.gl/H4PP4)

While the above mentioned points are the broader areas of usage, social media can be used as a collaborative tool within an organization as well. We shall discuss how social media can be used for specific purposes in part II of this blog.

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Socializing with your employees: Part II

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Continuing from where we left of, we shall now see how social media platform can be used to improve the structure and efficiency of an organization.

Collaborating for Success

With help of any given platform, an organization can help teams work

      ● More effectively and efficiently

      ● Ensure teams have access to most accurate and up to date information

      ● Enable remote working

                IBM

Collaborative blog from IBM

This not only leads to better work output but also builds connection. When employees feel connected to their organization, a unified purpose and each other they will be more engagement and more efficiency. Also, this reduces the scope of internal crisis as most matters are resolved via two way communication over an informal discussion.

Social Brainstorming

Social Media is also budding ground for good ideas to be sowed and germinated. Once someone proposes an idea, others can contribute to it and over a healthy discussion, the idea can take shape. Since it’s available over a platform at any given time, the constrain of a brain storming session in a closed environment and in fixed time span is eliminated, thus, giving it a feel of an open session.

A spontaneous idea that leads to a thread of comments on a Facebook group may prove to be far more productive than spending hours inside a meeting room trying to solve a problem.

Peer Recognition

Another important aspect of using social media is recognizing and highlighting achievers and the ease with which they can be rewarded. Any individual when recognized in front of his/her peers feels special. Social Media is just the right place for an individual to be recognized by his organization in front of his friends and colleagues. This builds a sense of pride and also inculcates a healthy rivalry amongst the workers.

               People

Sharing profile of employees in internal communities can boost
confidence amongst employees

Getting Personal

Social media also gives big organizations the opportunity to show their human face. Wishing people on special occasion via a personal message can go a long way in building a lasting relationship which would prove very productive. This will hold well during a crisis. When you want that extra mile from employees, then as an organization, you also need to walk that extra mile.

Giving Voice

A social media strategy to handle employee grievances is an effective tool for online reputation management. While it may be difficult how an employee conveying their grievances in front of other employees can help, but it is better than them going public in front of external clients. Being heard is the first and almost entirely the most critical step in complaint resolution. A heard employee may equal to a satisfied employee.

Chain of communication

Social media tools such as blogs can be a great way of educating people about new products and giving detailed reviews. Bring in YouTube with video demonstrations of new products and you have an attentive employee set readily willing to understand and discuss new products. Make it innovative and your employees themselves will make it go viral thus not only giving the brand an internal viewership but also the possibility of garnering millions of eyeballs from external audience.

Blog

Sharing on internal community gives a chance for employees to interact freely irrespective to their position in the ladder

Payoffs

While it may look that bringing internal communication and HR issues on social media is a risk, with organizations having to give up on lot of control, but no policing is in fact a very good method of inculcating self control and restrain.

When people know there is someone out there to listen to them, they are less disgruntle and more constructive. They may even take the effort of using their bad experience to come up with innovative solutions to tricky problems.

This is where true employee empowerment can be achieved. This will not only help you strengthen your organization but also give you the best word of mouth publicity of them all. Employee Advocacy.

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Posted in Corporate Communications, Employee Relations, Social Media | 5 Comments »

Bloggerati of the Fortnight: Paavani Bishnoi

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

She is a dreamer and a nature lover who is an industrial designer and into colors. She is also a Photographer, tweeter, trends spotter, toy & game designer but above all, a blogger par excellence. That is how our blogger of the fortnight, Paavani Bishnoi can be described.

A post graduate in Industrial Designer from National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad, India) and bachelors in Information Technology, Paavani is an avid blogger. Blogging since early 2003, Paavani loves exploring the unseen with camera lens and at times experimenting with edibles items in her kitchen and if there is a mood swing, she also indulges in instant poetry.

But what is amazing about her blog is that it covers a plethora of topics. Right from advertising and brands to designing and poetry. Not the one to shy away from anything, Paavani has gone on to give quite an in-depth review of technology products such as mobile phones and also written about category facts for Indian Potato chips market.

Not that people don’t write about these sectors, it is the fact that while she writes crystal clear analytic posts on such topics here travel posts are poetic and dreamy. “Spending two days at -15 degree in Finland was really freezing. But I liked Helsinki, it was warm in an unknown way.”

Paavani is the first to accept that she is not a poet by nature but more of instantaneous poet. She describes that her poems are born out of sudden connect with few words which she then weaves in to a flow and produces a master piece.

बारि–शे–दांज

आँसू बहूमूलय या बारिश की बूँद,कया पता
गरज कर बरसे,या चुपचाप हूए लापता।
वो बडती धङकन थी, या बिजली की कङक
दूर छूपे है इतने जहॉ ना जाती कोई सडक।
सूनहरी धूप से झाँकते रूई के गौलौं
हाथौ से ना पकङौ, नजरौ से टटलौ।

Like most bloggers, Paavani too is a clever photographer. Her images come across as true and genuine by themselves. They are like an artist’s inner most thoughts being projected to the world.

                         a-journey

It is the sheer brilliance of Paavani that her blog can narrate on so many topics with such ease and comfort that the reader feels he is being exposed to an expert’s opinion in every field that the blog touches upon. Not many can achieve this level of writing and for that Paavani Bhisnoi is our Bloggerati of the Fortnight.

Get to know more of our Bloggers of the Fortnight.

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