This year, I gathered even more data – from a total of 395 birthday wishes compared to last year’s 134. I received the first birthday wish on May 10 at 4:21 pm via Facebook, from one of my former classmates in the U.S. Other birthday wishes started trickling through from 00.04 am on Twitter. The flow of wishes especially across social media platforms continued until days after my birthday.
Here is a breakdown of the birthday wishes I received in 2010 and in 2011:
The above comparison mirrors the recent surge of social media in India more broadly. I drew out what I think have been the key trends in the industry in India, based on the birthday wishes I received.
1. Facebook has the lead: From 92 wishes in 2010 to 332 wishes – and counting – in 2011, it is clear that Facebook has grown significantly. In less than a year, registered Facebook users in India have doubled to a staggering 24 million.
2. Twitter has finally arrived: Although I had a Twitter account in May 2010, I don’t remember receiving any wishes on it at the time. Instead, this year I received 31, an indication Twitter is making headway in India, too. It is becoming especially popular as a medium through which to share news.
3. Orkut is dead: While many of us still have our accounts on Google’s Orkut, it is basically dead for all practical purposes. The fact that I didn’t receive any wishes on Orkut this year is an indication this social network has lost its remaining sheen.
The statistics on emails, calls and sms did not show a significant shift.
Honestly speaking, I came up with the idea of writing this article when I faced the daunting task of having to reply to all my birthday wishes, especially on Facebook. Responding to each wish personally looked too daunting a task, so I thought that to begin with, I would share this article instead.
It will be interesting to draw this comparison again in a year’s time, to see what it says of the evolution of social media in India.
If you noticed similar trends, please share your thoughts and experiences in the Comments section.
Social media has proved its worth as far as B2C companies are concerned. Even B2B companies have started using various social tools to leverage this technology which can help them to grow their business. Many B2B companies have adopted Enterprise Social Tools like Yammer, Chatter, Socialcast, Qontext etc. But these tools are for internal communication, collaboration & knowledge sharing within employees. As far as lead generation or business development is concerned Linkedin has proved to be a very good tool for B2B companies.
1. Create your Company Page: Company page is like a LinkedIn face of a company. You can provide information on the individuals behind your brand and highlight how consumers use your products. Your Company Page offers tools to bring your brand to life. There is a testimonials tab too on LinkedIn page which can help build credibility and generate business. For reference you can check the LinkedIn page of Digital Vidya.
2. Create Management Team: It’s also important create a team from within your marketing department & train them in the nuances of social media tools & how to utilize them. The roles & responsibilities of the team members should be clearly defined so that there is no mis-match. For a small organization even a single person can handle the account. It’s important that the team members should have well polished profiles on LinkedIn so that potential clients should have nice impression of their LinkedIn public profiles.
3. Connect and interact: Participate in the relevant offline industry events & network with people who can be your potential clients or leads. Connect with them on LinkedIn. This can be made easier by including your LinkedIn URL in your email signature, on your business cards and in the contact section of resumes, websites and blogs. Join the groups where these people are active and start & participate in discussions on those groups. This will build your reputation as a thought leader with these people in the long term.
4. Join relevant LinkedIn groups: Joining relevant active groups on LinkedIn is very helpful as many members of these groups run regular discussions on various topics & share insights with each other. This builds up your brand as a thought leader which you can use to the advantage both individually as well as for your organization. You never know when your prospects on these groups will approach you for the business. But be sensitive to the group dynamics, and don’t ever try to dominate the conversation. Your materials should be a resource, not a sales push for you or your prospects. Also participate in LinkedIn Answers. They also help in creating a brand for you where you can get rewarded by other users with best answers. These are passive activities but can be very valuable in the long term.
5. Track Prospects : An effective keyword search can be used to reach out to the right people. A useful tip for lead generation is to check the list of people who have viewed your profile. This lets you know who is interested in your company, and they are the prospects you can target. To reach them ask your first-level contacts for introductions to their first-level contacts (your prospects) and so on. Evalueserve has done a lot of business through LinkedIn & they swear by this tactic.
What other ways you can think of to generate leads on LinkedIn? We would love to hear!
It’s been almost 1.5 years since the time we started Digital Vidya. In this duration, we have conducted 50+ workshops (across India and Singapore) and trained 1000+ professionals. While it started more as a hobby (you know one of those things that you do on the sides just because you like it), the rise of Social Media forced us to take a relook at it.
Social Media as an opportunity space is growing rapidly and our expectation is that it’s going to become only bigger. Considering that we have been in the middle of this evolution (revolution?), often times we have faced this question: “Do we want to play a bigger role in this industry?” Finally, over last week, we answered this question with a “yes”. Or was it “YES”? Or may be “Yes”. Fine, let’s move on.
The point is that we, the team behind Digital Vidya, decided to play a bigger role in the Social Media industry. So, we moved to the next level of questions: a) What that bigger role is, b) How do we structure our presence (should we extend the scope of Digital Vidya or float another entity).
For deciding “the bigger role”, we reviewed our strengths and came up with a starter list where we could add maximum value to our customers. Going forward, we’ll be offering the following services in the Social Media space:
Social Media Workshops: Of course, we have been doing it for a long time. Not only it is business for us, we enjoy it so much. So, we’ll continue to do the workshops.
Social Media Strategy: To be successful in Social Media space, corporates need a well thought-out strategy which is aligned with the business objectives. We have found during our workshops that this tends to be one of the biggest gaps in execution because people don’t realize that they even need a strategy. Given our vast experience in this area, this became an obvious choice for us.
Facebook Marketing: With nearly 700 million active users, Facebook is a big opportunity for Brands to actively engage with the customers. Again, given our extensive experience in managing India Guide and Digital Vidya Facebook Pages, it became an easy choice.
Social Application Development: Social Applications (including Facebook Applications) go a long way in spreading the word about Brands. And we have deep expertise in this area (didn’t we develop Soch.la in one month; from seed of the idea to the launch). So, this was also a no-brainer for us.
While we are starting with this list, we’ll be open to expand our offerings in areas where we consider ourselves qualified
We call this new arm dvBytes. Digital Vidya will continue to evangelize Social Media on various community channels. Our public workshops will continue to be under the Digital Vidya name. However, when it comes to work with a single customer for their specific needs, dvBytes will take over.
So friends, please meet dvBytes, your friendly neighborhood social media partner. We are sure that we’ll continue to have your love and support in this new endeavor.
Yesterday, Digital Vidya was represented by me & Pradeep Chopra at Social Media Club Delhi’s monthly Meetup organized at NASSCOM’s delhi office. The agenda was to share about the challenges of building a Social Network from scratch, pitfalls to be avoided & how to raise the interest of investors. Session was lead by Pradeep. Famous blogger Gautam Ghosh, Director of Media Redefined Praval, Karthik Nagarajan of GroupM, Meera Sapra of Zoho & Simarprit of Compare Infobase were some of the prominent personalities among the audience.
Participants at Social Media Club Delhi Meetup
The session was taken in the form of Q&As & all the essential questions from the conception of idea related to Soch.la to the development & launch of the platform were handled effectively. Detailed insights were provided to the participants on various challenges a technology startup has to face which can range from software bugs, technical issues, getting the initial mass, scaling, funding etc. Some of the Questions discussed were (Slideshare is embedded below):
#Why name ‘Soch.la’? #Why only facebook login so far? #How’s it different from facebook & twitter? #How does follow/following work on Soch.la? #How are new features decided? #How’s Soch.la being marketed? #What have been the major challenges in the development of Soch.la & what’s the way ahead?
One very interesting video regarding Leadership was shared which is embedded below:
Overall it was a very satisfactory session as it was interactive & participants joined in the discussion & asked interesting questions to Pradeep.
We are pleased to announce our Guest Speaker for the Delhi Social Media Bootcamp on May 13, 14 and an inspiration to all Social Media enthusiasts, Devesh Mishra – a taxi driver who’s effectively using Social Media for his service. Watch his famous YouTube video embedded below to know more about him!
One of his highly satisfied customers (he was a foreigner) created this video & uploaded on YouTube so that he can benefit from Social Media. He will share his story as in how this Video has helped in his business as well as if he has taken any more initiatives in Social Media.
Let us know if you would like to join us as we’ve limited seats only!
For all those you don’t get a chance to meet him, what would you like to ask him?
After I talked about the future of “search” in my previous article, lets now look at what a brand should do to win in the new “search” paradigm. It starts with listening, a simple act in the digital world the importance of which is yet to be fully understood or appreciated. Listening to conversations about [...]
Here we are presenting a guest post by Nallini Mistry on Social Media job profiles. She discusses various attributes which the hiring managers need to look at in the potential candidates. Recently Gagandeep Gill (delhi based social media consultant), starting a very interesting discussion on Digital Vidya´s LinkedIn Group. Major questions which have been addressed [...]
Here we are going to present a post by one of the participants of our recently concluded Social Media Bootcamp in New Delhi. Post has been published as it is. In India, with very less alternatives available to get trained in social media, a few social media agencies have taken up that responsibility. Digital Vidya [...]
Recently Digital Vidya invited a very famous Twitter personality from India, Pramit J. Nathan in it’s recent Social Media Bootcamp held at New Delhi. He has over 165,000 followers on Twitter! During his session on Twitter he explained how to gain popularity, credibility & mass following on Twitter. Here we would like to capture the [...]
Recently Pradeep Chopra, one of the co-founders of Digital Vidya got interviewed by The Tribune on his entrepreneurial journey. This interview was published in their Jobs & Career column to inspire young & budding entrepreneurs. Here’s the summary of his interview. 1. Starting Entrepreneurial Journey: Pradeep along with his IITian friend Kapil Nakra co-founded Whizlabs [...]
