Social media, the beast that cannot be controlled
In the last few years, social media has seen many twists and turns in the way brands have engaged platforms to tell their story and engage consumers. The power of social is the voice that it gives to consumers, and if done right, converting consumers into brand ambassadors. The other side is that it also empowers people to expose a brand’s weakest link. This was best captured when Anurag Bhatnagar, Director, Client Services, AKQA India said that social media is a beast that wields power but cannot be controlled.
Mr Bhatnagar made the comment at the recently concluded Socialathon 2014 in India.
Even the best of brands sometimes forget that social media networking is like a party. If you don’t socialise and connect with other people, and only speak about yourself, no one would invest time with you. “No one has the luxury to sell directly from the word go. It is not about you, it is about the product and consumers. Large organisations, such as Nestle, have invested in command centres, with large teams working to exactly know the conversations on social media, and not just about their brands. They want to know everything and make that the starting point for something new and innovative. If you take a look at Citibank and take the example of their Twitter account, it’s not about any offer, they instead started bill vs. bill campaign, asking people ‘whether you purchase from heart or wallet’, and from the interaction, they try to see if they can capture something and play a role in future engagement,’ commented Karthik Nagarajan, Head of Social, GroupM India.
Should businesses be social internally before they are socially externally with audiences? “It is not about internal or external but whether businesses need social or do all businesses need to think social. They need to think of it from consumer perspective and what the consumer needs. The amount of jargons we use today in social media has little to do with consumers. No consumer talks of conversion rate; these are just for our understanding when we get technical with social media. When you sit and plan for a product, you need to put yourself in that place and see how that connects. You need to see how the journey from a consumer perspective,” commented Amit Tiwari, Director, Country Head – Media & Digital, Philips India.
Bringing another perspective on the subject, Kapil Gupta, CEO, OMLogic Consulting pointed out while customers becoming evangelists for a brand is good, from an organisation’s perspective, employees already engaging with the brand start to promote the brand to others as well. “TCS recently talked about how they turned their boring IT and took it to the next level socially and got their internal employees participated. It is important to get people activated internally too,” he said.
“There are challenges in building in-house social media and at times, it is directly connected with drop in productivity. The key word here is balance. You have to also remember that if you are allowing this, you should be prepared for negative comments as well on social platforms since freedom cannot be imparted selectively,” remarked Shabir Momin, MD & CTO, Zenga TV.
Zomato’s recent ad that covered food, fashion and technology, the Ice Bucket Challenge that is currently trending across the globe to raise awareness about Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and some of the other similar work on social platforms was discussed as examples on how conversations can be created without the brand, product or service being at the centre of the message.
