by teamrec
Dave Evans defines Social Media in the following way:
“Social media is the democratisation of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers. Social media uses the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, group creations and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Myspace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (music), YouTube (Social Networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality) and Flickr (photo sharing).”
Plan and define your brand image – When your profile is accessible by millions of internet users worldwide, you need to be very sure how you want be viewed and assessed by them. You can use it for purely networking with your friends and share messages, photos, videos or you can use to cultivate an image for yourself and viewed by fellow netizens accordingly. For doing so, you need to be very consistent in the messages you are leaving on the various social media networks.Social media is definitely different from the traditional media. In traditional media, communication is always one sided, but in social media, audience can participate by adding comments and even edit the story as well. As a student of marketing, I am fascinated by it’s various facets and Social media marketing one of the facet I am enjoy participating and learning a lot. A lot has been written by experts on this topic on various platforms, but I will be sharing my own experience and practice as a student and newbie, and those are as follows:
Set Goals: When you have decided about the create something executing (your planned image), set a measurable, achievable and relevant goal. You can’t get to make your brand built across all network, across the globe with the word “go”. So, you need to create the group of followers very carefully on relevant number of networks which you can manage.
Don’t let the store empty : If you drop some interesting message once, your profile may attract lot of hits on it, but it will keep continuing only when you keep posting similar interesting message. One of the biggest mistakes you can do in social media marketing is to set up a profile and then not maintain it. Would you like to visit a store which always empty? If somebody visits your profile and sees lot of activity happening, he or she may also chip in and continue awhile if finds some interesting messages either you or your fellow group members.
Root out vague goals : There are lot of things happening around and you want to voice your opinion on it. My advice; never get tempted. A lot of talking on different topics will dilute your brand image because you can’t be expert in everything and meaningless opinions will create a negative impression about you. Create a couple of topic, on which you will continuously and always write and it will become your referential.Have a destination – You may be on various platforms, but you won’t be able to draw audience, if you don’t have a permanent destination, you can’t hold your audience around yourself.
Clarity of your message – It becomes more relevant, when you are using twitter because you get only 140 characters to express your point, even if you are Barack Obama. Apart from that, unlike other traditional media like TV and Radio, where messages comes for less than a minute, one may forget it after sometime or may not notice altogether, but when you are leaving message online, then it can referred again and again with the help of various search engines. So, clarity of message is crucial and important in social media.
Make somebody responsible – It’s better you manage your brand image of your own, but if are too busy and can’t do it yourself, then please hire somebody who understands your priorities and your point of view.
Connect with power users – As I mentioned earlier, twitter has crossed more than 5 billion twits long time back, but how many of us know about them unless and until something is coming from Shahrukh Khan or Sachin Tendulkar. I am a commoner, you may not want to hear me, but if I am regularly being seen in the company of big people, then you may want to know about me also. So, get into the group of people, whose opinion matters. If they endorse you, then it’s even better.Be what you want be known as – No brand image can be sustainable without substance. So, it’s very important that you better be what you want to be known as.
Use the lull period – Millions of users are on different networking platform, but not everybody is committed enough. You can be new entrant but your commitment can see you through and make you more popular than other group member.Long Term Commitment – Branding anyway is not a short-term activity, it’s ongoing process. You will have to commit yourself to whatever you are promising. Otherwise somebody will take your position in the mind of over-informed audience.
In this flat world, creating brand image will cost you nothing, but you need to be very consistent and concerted in your efforts, otherwise you will end up doing more harm, because your audience is equally informed and qualified, if not more. Keep twitting and keep blogging. Social media is a great place to hang around.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr. Mukul Bhartiya is currently working as National Category Manager with Aditya Birla Retail Ltd, looking after pulses category. He has 10+ years of experience in the field of Sales and Marketing in Food FMCG, Food Retail and Commodity Futures.
He is a MBA from Center of Management Education, VAMNICOM, Pune run by Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.
He has shaped up and established the business of different organization in different geographical locations, i.e., Staples business of ABRL in Mumbai, Staples business of Reliance Retail in Rest of Maharashtra, Commodity Futures business of MCX in Bihar/Jharkhand and Retail & Consumer marketing business of NAFED in all over India. He has also worked on formulating business strategy of agriculture commodity marketing for NAFED for 2 years and designed strategy for procurement and disposal of oilseeds under Price Support Scheme during the period of 2002 to 2005.
He has been given appreciation letter for presentation and review of business activities of NAFED by Estimates Committee of Parliament, which reviews the non-plan expenditure of Government of India.
He has done a project of International Trade Development among cooperatives in India, Iran, Kuwait and Sri Lanka for International Cooperative Alliance. This project was presented in different meetings of ICA at Thailand and China during 2004-05.
He has published an article titled “Edible Oil Market Scenario” in market outlook segment of May-June 2003 issue of Oils & Fats Today.
