Social Media in India: Tata review
Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews
This is the first post in a series where we will review performance of companies (and brands) using Social media to connect with Indian customers.Here we will review a large Indian conglomerate – The Tata group. This 140 year old group of companies is currently headed by Ratan Tata and operates in a large number of businesses like software services, energy, materials to products like cars, watches, beverages etc. The group was lately in the news for acquisition of Cores, Jaguar & Land Rover and for launching the world’s most economic car – Tata Nano. We researched the umbrella of Tata companies and found Tata Motors (especially Tata Nano), TCS, Tata Docomo, Tata Tea and Fast Track watches worth discussion in this review.
We begin with Jaagore.com ( meaning ”be awakened” in Hindi ) , the Tata tea and Janaagraha (a non profit NGO) initiative for awakening Indian youth. Jaagore.com ‘one billion votes’ is an online voter registration campaign with the mission of generating one billion votes in India. Launched around the time of 2009 general assembly polls in India, it created a lot of media hype. This social platform gave all the necessary information to the user on how to become a registered Indian voter along with registration status. Moreover the ‘awakened’ were encouraged to recommend the initiative to their friends and invite them to join the movement. The Jaagore volunteers took the initiative offline and went to colleges to talk about the campaign and get people registered on Jaagore.com. No doubt in the first year itself it had more than 600,000 registrations. Post the Jaagore success during the elections; Tata tea and Janaagraha have relaunched the Jaagore campaign to eradicate corruption in India. They are currently using the same web platform to publicize their TV advertisement and get members to pledge against corruption. Awakening the Indian citizen and making them aware are clearly an excellent choice of a social object for Tata tea. Also the current Jaagore platform shows excellent member engagement around content consumption, collaboration and recommendation. In the near future, we would like to see engagement building around other steps of the ladder of engagement like content curation, creation, trial, purchase etc.
A substantial social media presence can be seen for Fastrack, the Titan (Tata group Watch Company) brand targeting Indian youth. Impressively, although the company has a 140 year old brand heritage, yet it has a fresh and youthful appearance on social media for Fastrack. What we like most about their facebook and twitter outposts is that they are more than just official pages and we see them brimming with activity. There are genuine interactions on the platform and the brand participating in them, which is something you rarely see. For example, on Fastrack’s facebook page you see more than 90 brand to user and user to user interactions in the last 15 days, which is commendable given that most companies just post basic content without initiating any interactions. With 800 tweets and 7,500 facebook fans, Fastrack is making great use of social media. The Fastrack official website fastrack.in is a cool community platform which entertains users through comic strips, wall discussions, avatars and chill zone. What we love most is that it is concerned whether your internet connection is ‘Go-Kart’ or ‘Bullock-Kart’ ( broadband or dial-up in fastrack.in lingo). In the future, we would like to see more social applications that aid youth interactions to build a vibrant fastrack community.
Another Tata brand using social media for its marketing applications is Tata Docomo. The Indian conglomerate and the Japanese telecom major JV is making some news in the social web. Their web presence is limited to Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Bigadda and Youtube with no single dedicated community. However, the interaction levels are high and users feel a ‘personal’ touch in communications.
Other Tata entities like Tata Nano, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services: Tata’s software services arm) and Tata Motors also have a huge fan base on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Similarly Tata Indicom interacts with consumers through its coporate blog. We expect that these Tata companies will graduate from outpost pages and corporate blogs to cohesive communities built around strong social objects.
Summarizing, here is a conglomerate that has let each of its brands nurture its own social media identity. Most of their social media outposts are brimming with two way interactions. Not only have they touched civic social causes with jaagore.com but they have also developed youth centric engagement platforms like fastrack.in. In the future, Tata Group can bring people together around larger than life social objects to form strong communities with a shared purpose not only because that would mean more economic rewards for Tata but also because big corporations like them can do it with their resources and brand power.
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