Indian Social Media

What a moment for me to write such an insightful post after today morning’s incident. Just to quickly recap. One of our concept’s marketing manager came running to me and shared that he is running a contest which would gather lot of page likes for the brand page. However, he also added that he has seen a drop in the page likes since yesterday evening.

To my knowledge, I immediately checked the Facebook page and discovered that you can even comment and like any update or content of the page without even liking the page. Now, that’s a great turn-around by Facebook. Wondering all the contests which encourages users to comment, which in return compels them to like the page, ends here…

Brands will no more be able to run any contests using the “share your comment” or like your friend’s post option anymore.

However, I even tried tagging the “unliked” page from my profile too, which is very much possible, since the “Like” criteria does not exist anymore for a page. Hence, I am able to even tag a page without liking the page.

I quickly tried searching for relevant articles on the same and found not a single article to my research at-least, which mentions about this feature. In the meantime, I would consider this as beta testing phase for Facebook developers. In the meantime, I have created a screen-cast using camtasia studio to quickly demonstrate towards how this works!

The way I look at this development in the marketing perspective. No more buying likes by compelling contests. Marketers have to strongly think about their strategies and have to follow the simplest way to engage users. For instance: Here is an example of “Pizza Hut India’s Vanishing page” due to such contests. However, this example was referred by a connection on my twitter network i.e. Preetham Venkky. Having said that, they can no more play around with these technical features and have to strongly think about their content strategies. Which means, they have to start spending time in brainstorming and creating newer engaging content for the users.

Hence, the chain reaction starts here! The marketing managers have to stop building their expectations in driving page like, rather they will have concentrate in a more transparent approach. At the same time, 360-degree marketing approach will play key role here.

I am wondering what would be the next steps for Social Media agencies & marketing managers going ahead to build their Facebook likes

I think the same applies to even the Social Media agencies. They will have to stop coming up with the ideas of “Like based contests” and have to seriously think of taking a more process driven route or rather suggest strategies which can deployed gradually within the overall marketing communications. I think this is what all our Social media gurus have stating in their conversations and blog posts.

Hence, content will always be king and can never be a substitute for any feature rich products.

Yes its more than a check-in when somebody uses a Social Location sharing tool for the first time to tell others that he is about to experience something for the first time which also indicates the venue owners to certainly make a note of it. It’s the new aged customer who intends to inform brands to certainly take care of his likes and dislikes. As a consumer he / she is always in two minds whether their experience would be worth sharing or worth their choice!

This is my 4^th week in a Retail industry and have already started exploring Location marketing. Definitely, Location sharing tools are top of my mind all these days. Taking these tools towards the overall Marketing Mix is not only challenging but also exciting towards a visionary step of Landmark Group.  Being part of Retail Group, brand & Business in retails live on a very strong loyal customer base. They understand that the repeat value of customer is stronger than receiving a new customer every day. Hence, we could see Loyalty programs, regular rewards and gratifications takes place too often in this Business Segment. The Retail industry does form a strong family of their customers in their long run and hence intends to take these relationships in multiple levels and in multiple forms. Hence, the new way of enabling your customers returning to the brand again and again is driven by Location sharing tools.

All this while, Location marketing tools were just like any other tools, until we created our first set of specials for one of our Hospitality Brands. The Campaign management towards specials is awesome and tedious too as more important insights come out of the overall efforts made to it.

All this while, I was thinking, how Social Location Tools would affect people’s lives?  How would it really matter if an individual is sharing his / her location? Let’s look at a marketer’s point of view. In this massive world of competition, customized & personalized offering has already started taking place & Location Marketing is one of them.

Nowadays, as the amount of Smart phones rise, the power of choice equally rises amongst the users. These smart phones have actually enabled the power of choosing multiple options. The users are literally on the edge to make the smartest decisions of their likes and dislikes. Recommendation oriented marketing has always been in the DNA of the people and their networks. But, these technologies have literally empowered these recommendations to a whole gamut of opinions which decide the fate of any brand nowadays. Hence, to further verbalize, these smaller groups of recommending networks when join such networks, they turn out to be a massive power house of deciding factors. However, I strongly feel that Social Location sharing tools not only throw insights towards such opinions and disagreements, but it also intends to indicate brands that they have to listen to their customers even well. Till the year 2010, we have seen many such discussions where listening to your customers have been prominently indicated.  Perhaps, having said that, very little is being expressed towards how to listen to your customers.

Location marketing opens many such doors where Marketers’ can listen to their customers far more effectively, as it is more specific and relevant to the brand. It not only gives your insights but, it also enables a brand to see their services being experienced by their customers gradually in all forms. Right from entering to the venue till he / she leaves the venue. It keeps them on the edge of sharing every single step that you provide them to experience with your brand. In Social Media, I spend my maximum time to figure out ways to measure my overall Social Media efforts. Hence, I followed the same thing in this case too. Tools like sprout Social & Foursquare Business Dashboards provide excellent insights of your customers and also gives you the exact details of your customer’s likes & dislikes.  However, My experience with foursquare has been very effective in understanding my customer’s expectations and hence building similar marketing strategies to effectively engage or rather meet his/her expectations.

While, I am creating multiple foursquare specials for my brand, the learning’s out of setting your campaigns are immense and does provide me clear directions of a new & effective marketing mix. Tools like Foursquare not only provide you the instant Customer data of their locations, but in the long run, it will also define your territory based business prospects compared to your competitors. All you need to do is enable Location marketing within your marketing mix and build your marketing strategies to enable instant consumer touch-points.

Addition to it, Location sharing tools can not only be used to rewards customers but also helps the brand to build its reputation & awareness chain. Imagine a furniture brand can use location check-ins by their own delivery executives to inform that how frequently and to how many different places they have been delivering the furniture on daily basis. This certainly focuses the reach of their service and seed an awareness check-point for their future or newer deliveries. This can certainly happened via tips on Foursquare. The newer deliveries certainly mean new business alongside marketing within various locations. However, all this is possible only if there is a strong process chain involved!

I am certainly learning more and would love receive your opinions and experiences in this context!

How many of the Social Media strategists think about identifying problems first, rather than setting up objectives. My suggestion would be, always consider problems as the objectives for the brand.

I have been working with many brands now and some were successful and some were unsuccessful. But, with every unsuccessful brand, I have earned experience of not been able to identify their core problems in getting into Social space. However, my clients have been always over-demanding There had been instances, where I could not convince them et’ all. But, I realized lately, that many a time we end up following the objectives which are set by the client for us and always fail to realize many other facts which leads to majority of the failures in Social Media space. My advise  to every agency is to set their own set of Objectives on behalf of clients.

So what are these objectives actually in Social Media. These objectives are actually problems that every one faces while engaging with the Brand, but fail to verbalize or rather realize it  ;)

Let’s take it up gradually. How many of us face the problem of gathering fans / followers on Facebook & Twitter? I am sure everyone of us. May be that’s the top most priority for most of the marketers in India . They think getting random users as fans & followers would serve their purpose and they can literally sell stuff to them, but they tend to forget their target audiences should be their customers first Plan to target them first.

To enable any successful long term Social Media strategy:  I would rather say there are 4 problems than would consider as objectives to be addressed. Many of us intentionally or unintentionally tend to ignore these problems. However, I would consider these problems as my core objectives for any successful metric.

• How do we make people to talk to each other(i.e. word of mouth problem)
• How do we generate that instant buzz about the brand/product/service among people/consumers (i.e. awareness problem)
• How do we handle multiple communications or multiple target audiences (i.e. communication complexity)
• How do we reach out targeted audience sometimes who are not present on Social Platforms or fundamentally they don’t need to be online (i.e. connecting the end users)

For me this is a “Social Media Blue Print” Though I have been inspired by one of the best books in Social Media i.e. “Groundswell”. I have used this Social Media Blue Print in my daily Analysis of Conversations, Strategies and even Social Media Implementation. Logically, it is exactly one should look at it and not just beating the bush around by creating multiple profiles, pages, posting marketing messages, push marketing and what not!

However, to make it happen, one needs to go through the basics. If there is a word of mouth problem, that means your own customers are not talking to each other or they are not aware that you are alive in the Social Media space. Or rather integrate your social media efforts in the offline space and enable them to share their experiences, opinions. You need to start opening doors for such interactions to happen. This will certainly enable your customers to talk to you and as well as trigger conversations within “consumer to consumer”. This would be the best way to even drive influence towards new customers. Let us make this happen first and all you need to do is to manage those conversations and identify opportunities to participate and propose newer services. However, most of the Social Networking platforms are designed in that way which would drive the influence of a consumer to consumer interactions to newer consumer circles.

Similarly, how do we solve the problem of awareness for newer brands: If they are consumer facing brands, then the best way is to retain all their offline interactions on Social Networks or enable such features on the website for the brand to utilize those interactions for future opportunities. Or create some unique, crazy content and seed them in right networks, or push it via online influencers so that it can travel across various networks and build that instant buzz. Please don’t ask me what that content would be. You guys are smart enough to decide on it

what about…Communication Complexity, what if you have 2 different audiences, for eg: take up safari Tour operators. How do we identify or rather target these audiences. The first one would be the end users, who are adventurous and would be experiencing it and other would be wild life enthusiasts who make opinions of those experiences, possibly (wild Life Photographers, wild life Bloggers, Photo bloggers etc)

Finally, how to establish a niche product / brand in Social Media space. I have an opinion here. How about targeting people who can influence these end users. Take an example of  MRI scanning machine. The end users who would be utilizing it are not expected to be on Social Networking platforms or specifically online, the best way is to identify influencers who would connect them in either ways.

However, Social Media interactions itself is all set to be explored deeper and deeper  to identify where is your audience, how do he/she behave or what do they like and where do they interact.

Hence, by addressing these problems, one can easily achieve success in the Social space. Remember, all this is a process and cannot take place overnight.

I am sure, one of you would definitely implement these in your overall Social Media Programs. Hence, would request your opinions and experiences and together we would analyse and conclude newer insights and newer ways to address it.

If Somebody tells me that Social Media is all about conversations, I would definitely agree. But, if somebody tells me that what is that one big idea to attract new and existing customers, I would say, Social Media is not meant for them. My sincere, apologies to marketers who aggressively look for one big idea or a series of ideas.

There is no big idea in Social Media, its all about processes involved in Social Media. What does a process mean? How about dovetailing your Social Media activities within Customer Services (Its a process!). How about regularly listening to your customers, by integrating Social Media within the traditional marketing efforts. There is a lot of process involved when it is actually integrated within traditional Marketing efforts. How about involving your customers via Loyalty programs? (customers who are regular purchasers use loyalty programs, they collect points, they ask queries, they ask for redemption of their points) Even this is a process which needs to integrated and trigger conversations

Lets refer some of the known brands using Social Media in Hospitality Industry, Starwood Hotels using Social media purely for Loyalty programs which naturally triggers conversations. Also we have known DELL & HP, majority of their Social media efforts are know via their customer Service & crowd sourcing channels which engages users continuously in queries, solutioning. I really don’t see any big idea here! Is there any?

I discovered another instance while talking to my friend who is involved into banking. He gave me some very useful insights about how banking process triggers and generates conversations. For eg: customers are engaged with Banking almost on daily basis, (Account checking, Calling up phone banking officers once or twice in a week to ask for queries / solutions, Reversals, deposits, debits, card loss and many more. How many times people would have talked to themselves when they look at their Bank Account Balance, imagine there are some extra charges which was deducted. You immediately call up customer service to know about it. That clearly indicates that Banking itself is a process to be integrated within Social Media channels, for brands to understand and know everything about their customers.

I was reading some Social Media books and I found an interesting aspect by the Author, he says, always look at a community involved in a brand. For eg: a Product like Volkswagen Beetle can and will have community around it. Another product like Royal Enfield. We can see may clubs organizing Himalayan Trips and people join such communities. However, If you don’t see a community in a brand, then Social Media might not be relevant to them. If at all  Social Media is all about communities as addressed by some Social Media Gurus!

I have a different aspect to it. I would rather look, if there is a process  within the product / offering. If there is a process which binds your customers regularly with you, then utilizing Social Media is very much relevant to you. Because in such cases, there are higher chances of your customer finding you on Social Media and interact with you. Or rather you integrate your Social Media channels in your traditional marketing and give your customers another channel to interact and resolve their queries instantly. Another good example would be for Retail Industries. Consider the amount of Shopping malls are in the rise and trying to attract customers of all segments (premium, semi premium, middle class etc) one can engage their customers on daily basis. As their customer walk-ins are regular and so as their purchases, in such cases integrating Loyalty programs and Customer Service channels would be one of the best strategies for Retail Industries too.

These facts are real and we very well know about all these and most of the times we ourselves are involved in it and hence conversations are generated by various types of interactions. Is this an Idea? or a process which enables continuous engagement and involvement Please share your opinions!

There are 2 scenarios in it, Just like SEO. Social Media should be equally integrated and should be part of the overall process

• On Page Social media

• Off-Page Social Media

Both the scenarios are equally important; as it serves similar purpose of allowing our customers to interact with us or rather get our consumers more closer to the brand. However, the face of communication in the online space for any brand is the website in the first case and then the rest. But, unfortunately 85% of the brands globally fail to do so. Hence, they have started relying on the freely available Social Media platforms to listen to their consumers or rather engage with them via conversations, interactive applications etc.

• In the current scenario, it is imperative to have social media scenario in both ways, which means enabling Social Media on the website via embedding 2 way response mechanism such as embedding real-time comment windows or conversational opportunity via online chat or via embedding public forums within the site itself. However, having social media integrated with the website will have higher benefits in terms of Control; Authenticity & Reliability at the same time yields excellent SEO results. Embedding Social Media on the site also helps retain our consumers with the site forever and not just end up with a visit

• Social Media for every website is equally important to enable 2 way communications for the consumers as it is the first and most reliable source of information for anyone to refer to or go-through. It is even easier to promote via other mediums of advertising & Communications

• In the second scenario, which is an off-page Social Media, which is again using tools like Facebook, twitter, Video sharing, Document sharing & Social Web-casting are equally important for a website to integrate with and to make sure there is a continuous stream of information which is been updated or shared regularly (I would call it as conversations & Opinions). This certainly adds lot of value to the overall page ranking of the site & definitely references to the actual site via citations and makes it more search engine friendly.

I have been in Social Media for more than 4 years now. Have been involved with many brands across many industry verticals. However, thought of sharing some important insights on each of these verticals in detail. I have not tried to elaborate on these things in detail, but hopefully these insights will come handy to most of our Social Media Enthusiasts.

After a long debate with my friend Anniruddh Shanbhogue who equally helped me in gathering these insights. Here is the list for all of us.

Auto:

• In-depth Listening (Keeping a track of the brand’s share of voice, complaints & Queries
• Unveil and launch new products through Social Media with the help of Social Web-casting, Teaser Marketing campaign & Video Virals
• Addressing customer queries & grievances regularly in order to identify the loops of the product, after service, delivery issues
• Using corporate blogs to communicate their messages & Emailers
• Heavily relying on Social Applications, Mobile Applications & Mobile Barcode Marketing

Banking / Credit Cards

• Enabling online communities in which business owners can interact with one another and access a variety of helpful resources
• Majority of the Banks have utilized real-time conversations as the mainstream communication
• Using corporate blogs to communicate their messages & Emailers
• Heavily relying on User generated forums to understand the problems relating to products, communication, service issues

(I specifically don’t see any efforts made in “Listening” specifically in India. But, at the global level good efforts are made towards Listening and addressing queries & Complains)

Retail

• Maximum usage of Social Networks, Social Application, Mobile Application & Location based marketing
• Using virtual world to market and organize specific events around product launches
• Using online Couponing systems such as “Groupon” to gratify customers and building loyalty programs around it

Consumer Goods:

• Building social media campaigns around Loyalty programs
• Utilizing Virtual worlds to build events around product launches
• Location based marketing: Such as Foursquare badges & Quick Response Codes
• Leveraging entire stores online via Social Shopping

Telecom

• Most of them are experimenting through social games and other platforms to engage with customers.
• Leveraging creative Avatars using social networking (e.g. ZooZoo)
• Using blogs to target specific categories within Telecom industry like VOIP and also maintaining corporate blogs to communicate messages to its consumer base
• Targeting influential Bloggers to spread their marketing and product messages

Media & entertainment

• Engaging with the audience using Mobile/social  Applications, Social Games, Influencer Meet-ups
• Heavily rely on Socially enabled micro- sites
• Usage of mobile coupon codes to engage its audience in contests.
• Social Franchise Marketing

I shall add some more verticals to the current list. However, request everyone of us to add or share more to it.

What  do we do with the current data lying on most of the social sites.  Do we leave them as it is or develop an online listening strategy to tackle the issues. The experience I am going to share now is the next level of Social Media Monitoring. However, many of us call it as “Social Media Intelligence“. That’s how this topic is known through all our “Social Gurus”

In my opinion “Social Media intelligence” is just an advanced stage of Content analysis to understand our strategies and efforts well.

Let’s take an instance of the current scenario. There is a major chunk of data lying on most of the Social Sites which is very useful if it is analyzed well. However, I see many companies addressing them as and when it appears. I think that is decent strategy to cope up with the current scenario.

But, what if we are to plan a campaign or understand a scenario where we analyze our consumers based on their social opinions and behavior. I am sure it is very difficult to identify exactly what would a consumer want to specifically point out. This is possible only if we can analyze the current data using some real good text analyzing tools.

The text analyzer should cover all the aspects of writing styles of we humans. For eg: “I am talkin” or “I am talking/speakin” is same for us to consider our tool to capture. Similarly, “This iphone is kick ass or insane” will be considered to be in favor of the brand. All we need to analyze is the actual human english (the way they converse with their friends). The English they use while writing might not necessarily grammatically correct.  How about the SMS chat lingo? But, we should be able to analyze the similar kind of data as well. There are many such combination one could plan or define to achieve optimum results (could be around 85% accuracy) This can be only achieved if we can define our own set of rules while analyzing our data.

Unfortunately, our standard style of using search engines or tools does not allow to filter the data in the best possible way by even analyzing the human writing lingo on Social sites.

However, I don’t see such robust technologies which can even follow that sort of data mining / analyzing process. I have observed something slightly inclined to such approach in “Buzzmetrics”, but it only allows you to set conditions while searching.

This logic very much seems to be in favor of an offline data, as many of the data developers or data consultants would prefer that. The consultants would consider the analysis post campaign.

But, I have a different perspective here. How about using this data for Pre-campaign & Post-campaign as well. The Pre-campaign data will be the data to understand the current perception of the competition, based on which we will try avoiding making similar mistakes as our competitors did.

In short, I don’t see any of the online Social Media monitoring tool which holds all these capabilities in depth. Which still holds us to understand our consumers and their perception.

If you do come across any such tool which helps analyzing the real time and offline data in the way I look at it to be…Please share with me and would analyze it further.

However, Will continue sharing my next research and analysis on “Social Media Intelligence”

Please do share your valuable insights.. here..

Its been few months, since I have been exploring some interesting facts around engagement. However, I could finally analyze the Social  Engagement into 2 categories :

• Active Engagement

• Passive Engagement

Let’s look at both of them in detail. The active & passive engagement plays different roles based on how it is been utilized either by brands or by end users

To begin with Active Engagement: The Active Engagement category largely signifies users involvement towards every conversation made by a marketer, brand, individual. However the active engagement plays a key role towards buzz around the brand. Ideally, the active engagement is defined towards how users have been monitoring brand’s conversations and how they have been responding to them. It also signifies users contribution towards Ideas, Content etc. to the brand.

However, I don’t see any marketers or brands in India actually analyzing their Social Media engagement in these categories. All we see is they consider every engagement based on number of followers on Twitter and number of likes on a Facebook page.

Lets break this myth and let me share some key insights on how we can actually measure it. Take an example of a Facebook page insights. The Facebook page I am referring to is of one of my client i.e Volkswagen India. Lets look at the insights section, specifically the monthly active users. The current page likes is around 5100+ and the current monthly active users are 3,272. Technically speaking, the engagement level is more than 50% which is excellent and insightful. The active engagement might involve various parameters such as Likes, Comments, contributions (fan photos, videos, sharing). All these parameters match up to the Active Engagement.

Similarly, we can define engagement on every single platform, such as Video sharing, Photo sharing etc. This also defines the performance of a brand in the Social Media space. Also, based on such engagement statistics, predictions can also be made towards the future positioning of the brand. It is difficult to achieve such engagement without enabling key strategies which will also give users a reason to be a part of it.

Coming to the next category i.e Passive Engagement; Most of the times we end of achieving great statistical results, such as page likes, views.

Taking an example of one of my old client i.e Pantaloons in India. They have been very keen to earn page likes in a short period of time. However, they chose to go ahead with Facebook Ads, and in Just 4 flat weeks they achieved more than 1.5 lac page likes. Stunning Isn’t it!

But, if you actually analyze their current Facebook page which holds 5 lac fans, does not have enough engagement. To elaborate it, they do have a huge community, but the community does not reflect an healthy engagement. What is the use of having 5 Lac fans, when the response rate on each post is not even 1%. I just calculated the overall percentage of the engagement of the Pantaloons Facebook page. It comes to o.3% Monthly active participation. This means that users are not contributing to any of your engagement tactics. This would also mean that one needs to analyze what’s going wrong

This is where I would repeatedly convey the fact that Social Media is completely organic and even paid marketing tactics will not be able to achieve the desired results. However, even if you have carried out such tactic, optimistically looking , it is also a great opportunity to henceforth carry out exclusive engagement strategies. All it will deliver is multiply the current community i.e 5 Lac to 10 Lac in next few months, build large number of conversations, contributions from the users in the form of content etc. Also gives a greater opportunity for a brand to utilize such date for their product innovation, research and also understanding their consumers with deeper insights.

So to sum-up, I have tried taking such an example to define Active & Passive Engagement. However, I am still analyzing to gather more insights for every Social Media approach. I won’t state my current analysis to be final. All I can say is this is just the beginning for each one of us.

Do share your thoughts and request everyone to share your insights to my analysis and make our conversations useful to everyone of us.

We still see many brands attempting to engage bloggers and other online influencers to engage and involve in various brand initiatives

However there are many brands I have come across who still don’t agree that engaging online influencers is a real good idea. I don’t blame them anymore, as this is something which I have been experiencing with some of the brands I am handling.

Lets understand, Brands don’t believe in repeating their strategies if it does not work in the first place. As there is so much to it which they are accountable for. However, it is the duty of  every Social Media consultant  to keep them informed about the repercussions.

The approach should not end here. In-fact, Brands and online Influencers should work hand -in-hand to achieve a common goal and objectives. I would like to share some of my own experiences with the online Influencers. After every brand Engagement, our work goes again to the square one, which involves follow-ups with them in order to encourage to share their experiences. During the process, I happened to speak to one of the Blogger and just mentioned that my client carried enough motivation to finally consider this medium and agree to believe in a strategy which involves online influencers. My client did not even know how it is going to be handled or how would they face such gatherings. Having said that, some brands really take pains to encourage such strategies as it does involve a complete mindset shift. This will evolve in the coming future, but the initial encouragement plays a vital role for every brand towards why they should engage online influencers. However, this does not mean that they should expect every blogger to write positive about them. But, all they expect is at-least sharing of their overall experience with the brand and deserve to be addresses at-least. I strongly think, this is very important for every online influencer to think about it and even reciprocate the same.

Just as we educate our clients that encouraging Online influencers is must, the same goes to the online influencers too. Brands deserve such encouragements and hence can embrace the medium.

I think every experience should be shared, good or bad. As every experience is worth sharing

It has been more than 3 years now and I have seen Social Media evolving from concept to implementation. However in 2010 Social Media has taken some interesting footsteps by serious Marketers.  Marketers are getting serious about Social Media and finding extremely important for their overall media mix. But, that is not enough, finding it extremely important is good but getting it right is equally important.

I see many brands still revolving around quantity and quality. However, some Advertising Gurus who wish to venture into Social Media just because they feel Advertising has reached to its limits and can do nothing more to it. These Gurus are transforming themselves to be called as Digital Professionals or so called “Social Gurus”

But, I absolutely don’t see any change in them. However, I have spent some time with these so called Advertising Gurus as for me they are just trend followers are getting Social Communication completely wrong! Well they are also known as Social Strategists. However, they are still following similar strategies for Social Communication as it was before in all other communications. Somehow, they are completely forgetting that is all about People communication and all the more it is “Social Communication”. I have a very logical approach or a logical differentiation of what it is exactly.

A Social Media strategy should have Human elements and not Strategic Elements:

Let’s have closer look at what it is at an individual perspective:

Human Elements are:

• Thought Leadership
• Innovation
• Communication
• Motivation
• Trust / Respect
• Commitment
• Relationships
• Team spirits & Team Effectiveness
• Culture
• Responsiveness
• Awards & Incentives

Strategic Elements are:

• Vision / Mission
• Values
• Objectives
• Key Programs or events
• Priorities
• Goals & Metrics

However, there cannot be strategic elements involved in a Social Media strategy. It should always have Human Elements rather! Well I understand it needs time to completely get transformed-thinking in place. But, one has to start doing it if he/she wants to get the Social Media thingy get right at first place. May be, brands have to re-think or re-strategize completely when it comes to Social Media Communication.

Take our own example, Being an individual we play different roles at different places. We live with 2 different cultures i.e Social Culture (Fun, informative, humor, togetherness, friendliness, opinionated etc and a Non-Social Culture (workplace, professional life and many more). Hence, if a Brand wishes to approach a consumer through Social Media, it has to consider only Social Elements or rather human elements attached to his communication. Hence, there has to be a dedicated Social Strategy developed and deployed.

Most of our brands in India are completely missing it. However, I keep sharing, one has to be part of Social Media space to realize this fact. Many of us are either following Gurus or not been able to get the logic right when it comes to implementation of Social Strategy

The most important breakthrough I would consider in India would be a complete shift in thinking of Marketers and our Advertising Gurus