Social Media in India: Methodology and Scope

Posted on 07. Oct, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

With the advent of social technologies grabbing marketing spaces, many brands can be seen embracing social media for adding value to themselves. Dell, IBM and Starbucks are some of the best examples of companies having a majority of their marketing efforts directed towards social media. In India you can see Tata, Airtel, Reliance BIG, HT Media, Toyota and many more doing the same. Hence we at 20:20 social thought it would be interesting to see how different companies are performing in social media specifically in the Indian Ecosystem and document it in form of a report.

In this report we want to look at 2 sets of companies; International companies having a separate social media presence specifically for India and Indian Companies again having a social media presence in their parent country; and rank them on the basis of their presence and engagement. This is to ensure that Companies are compared on an equal platform since most of the international companies have been using social technologies for quite some time while many Indian Companies have recently realized their importance. Also as we want this set of companies to be internationally recognized, we have chosen Forbes top 50 International companies having Indian presence and top 50 Indian companies in Forbes 2000 list as our sample space.

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Social Media in India: Airtel Review

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

This is the second post in a series where we will review performance of companies (and brands) using Social media to connect with Indian customers. In the last post we had reviewed the Indian conglomerate Tata. For this post we will review the Indian telecom major Airtel. Airtel is currently the biggest telecom operator in India in terms of annual revenue and operates in businesses like mobiles networks, home phones, broadband, internet and conferencing services etc.

The most prominent presence of Airtel in social media can be seen through their community platform built around the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon (ADHM), which is to be held on 1st of November this year. The first interesting thing you will notice on the website is the runner’’s wall, where all ADHM community members can share their running stories. The platform also encourages discussions on the joy of running and you will see hundreds of registered ADHM community users discussing their running sagas on the discussion forums.With topics ranging from ”whom would you like to run with?” to ”how to improve your running stamina” the ADMH discussions not only keep the participants engaged but also encourage those who are still not sure of their participation. Interestingly, ADHM community also gets running and health experts to participate in the discussions, who impart valuable health and fitness related information to the community members.

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