The underbelly of Indian social media industry

Posted by Aditya in Social media marketing on January 26, 2010

Having been on the hunt for a social business executive to join our team here at Superchooha, I have had the pleasure (and sometimes horrendous) experience of meeting over 40 applicants in the past 3 weeks. Some shocking facts that I have come to realise from the experience:

Disclaimer

I’m not a social media guru / evangelist / stalwart in any way; but hell yeah! I know when things are going the wrong way. And yeah, this is not a rant – I am seriously surprised at the situation.

The industry is in a disorganised mess

For most of the agencies out there, social media is about Facebook and Twitter (and maybe Foursquare 2 years down the line) And this holds true for firms who have been around for more than 2 years now. Shame.
Weekly deliverables are in terms of of X updates on Twitter and Facebook! Billing is generated in terms of number of conversations achieved (relevant or irrelevant)
Huge amount of mailers are sent to randomest of email databases to increase the number of fans on Facebook

Well, if you have fallen prey to this system of doing social media then:

Is this really social media strategy / consulting / execution? This looks more like social media outsourcing to me!

People are stuck on social media marketing

I deeply, truly believe that the SMM hype bubble is about to burst soon. And it’s gonna take the whole industry down with it unless radical changes are made. Brands will soon realise that Social Media is no more the cool thing to impress your boss. We need to start giving actual value to the organisation – externally and internally
Though measurables like hits / time spent on the landing pages are good ways to judge success; they fall short of the actual business results that strategic social media can provide.

Conclusions

Expand your viewpoint. Move away from the SMM bull**** and harness the true power of communities within and outside your organisation to deliver results.
Move social media away from being platform-centric to results-centric.
It’s not about the technology, it’s about driving a cultural change from within the organisation.

Lack of dedicated and professional new media teachings in Indian curriculums

Tags: Social media india

Vivek

I agree to the first part but I would differ with the conclusions -

While I have seen people doing the so called "social media marketing" in the outsourcing fashion -where fake accounts are created and stress is on the numbers and not really the actual relevance of the conversations.

However at the same time the fact that calculating ROI from Social Media stills remains a task and precisely that's the reason the Social Media Marketing agencies have been driven by numbers and not the emotion behind the conversations. Platforms to track conversations like Radian6, Trackur are good but still not the best - which eventually leaves corporates with no option but to out source it.
Also to expect every organisation to dedicate a team to develop expertise about Social Media and then to engage actively on social media platforms is too much - They would prefer outsourcing the task to the PR agency. And in the end the conventional PR agencies screw it up thinking that its a way to reach out to customers rather than letting them reach out to you.

my $.02
Aditya Rao

1. Thanks for writing such a detailed viewpoint of yours.
2. I think your conclusions are the same as mine :) We both see the need for change, but you have also outlined the facts why this change would be hindered! Thank you for that :)

3. I do not have anything against organisations outsourcing social media. But the outsourcing should be done in terms of strategy and tools, not content creation :)
Tanuj Lakhina

I don't think Social Media is going to fade away or its bubble is about to burst soon. Its a new concept, especially in the Indian context. Many people are not aware of what its supposed to do and many also question its usefulness. The impact social media makes can be seen on many instances but how its adding to a business' productivity cannot be commented upon as it has different implications based on different companies. Many websites still go in more for SEO activity than SMM activity while both have their merits and demerits.

As for usage of medium for social media activity, Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare are the most used ones and the most reliable ones too because there is a wide audience here. Many Indian users have shifted from Orkut to Facebook and many use Twitter as well. Foursquare still has a year or two to make an impact here, as you clearly put. I agree its not just about these two popular socialising platforms but their popularity cannot be doubted.

I agree with your idea in regard to sending out E-mails to random address and pay outs based on number of tweets as highly ridiculous. Moreover, sending E-mails like that would be more of spam rather than building a reliable user base.
Aditya Rao

1. I did not say that SM is about to burst .I said SM marketing hype is gonna end.
2. As you very well put, the popularity of Facebook and Twitter shouldn't be ignored. Of course not! But creating a twitter handle and FB fan page and then writing updates on it should not become the focus.
Amit Klein

I totally agree... people are focused too much on the tools rather then the objectives. Treat social media like any other channel and measure returns not so much in "engagement" but sales, leads, conversions, support tickets closed, and any other business metrics.

BTW you should consider switching over your comment system to Disqus or IntenseDebtate, then i don't have to fill in those three fields and the captcha :)
Aditya Rao

agreed!
and done :)

The underbelly of Indian social media industry

The industry is in a disorganised mess

People are stuck on social media marketing

Conclusions

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