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.

Moreover we will limit our scope of research to either company websites building conversations around a social object like a lifestyle, passion or cause bigger than the company itself. ( eg: Tata tea for jaagore.com) or Community platforms like Sunsilk gang of girls or social applications like Tata Indica Xeta Shootouts.\n\nHaving said that we will particularly look into four things to rate Companies” social media engagement and presence :

1) Social Object: Since communities and conversations don”t happen in vacuum, they coalesce around a social object which can be a lifestyle, cause or passion. We will see whether the company’’s website/ community platform which is meant to engage users or utilize their social behaviour is built around any social object ( See our position paper)

2) Infrastructure for engagement: Brands/ companies can engage their consumers on various levels of engagement like content consumption, curation, creating, collaboration, trial, purchase and recommendation. We will see whether the company’’s social platform has infrastructure to engage consumers on these levels of engagement.

3) Interactions on the social platforms: Once seen that the company has infrastructure to engage consumers, the next logical step would be to see that till what levels on the ladder of engagement ( consume, curate, create content etc.) do the consumers actually interact.  We will be rate companies on their company to user and user to user conversations in social media.

4) Multiple presence: Many companies like Tata, Reliance, Airtel etc have multiple social media platforms and we think that some credit must be given to this.

Also as there is a scope that many outliers who do not appear on the Forbes list might be doing something exceptional worth deserving a mention and for this report we will also look for some such benchmark examples.

However we would like to keep the scope and parameters open to readers for discussions. Any comments, suggestions are most welcome

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.

Unfortunately, in the past it has been seen that such community platforms promoting a mega offline event die out post event completion. However we see ADHM community as a social platform designed around the passion for running and has the potential of retaining itself by building more user engaging models and applications.

Other than the ADHM, Airtel is also using social media to promote its multi-million dollar deal with Manchester United football club which would give access to ManU’’s football content over their mobile phones. The Airtel-ManU web platform takes you to a virtual Old Trafford stadium where you can book seats beside your friends and get virtual props. Interestingly, there is a well designed reward and recognition system which ranks you on your engagement on the platform. There are points associated with downloading ringtones, wallpapers and inviting/recommending friends and the highest grosser gets free tickets to Old Trafford. We feel that this platform is built around a very strong social object (lifestyle, passion, cause) which is the passion for Soccer and can be used to interact with users on multiple levels of engagement. Royal Challenge whisky is doing something similar for cricket in social media and we would await Airtel’’s similar feat for Indian soccer fans.

Finally, we talk about Airtel broadband services interactive social platform built around the ”fast life” lifestyle where impatience is considered the new way of living for the youth. It features some youth icons namely ”The Impatient Ones” with their blogs, favourite videos and tweet updates. The channel also holds contest for selecting the next ”impatient one”. Hence we see a platform where users are getting to interact with their icons and also getting a chance to become like them. In the near future we see this community using many other social applications to build more conversations around ”an impatient way of life” to engage their target audience.

Summarizing, it can be said that the Indian telecom major Airtel is making a significant online social media presence. It has chosen some very strong social objects (lifestyle, passion, cause) in all of its platforms like soccer, running & adventure, fast life etc. Hence they have got very good foundations to build  rewarding communities along their brand. It is just a matter of time that we see them reaching highers levels of engagement for the users