Ways to Use Twitter & Facebook to Build Communities & Generate Business

Twitter & Facebook have been at the centre stage as far as consumer internet is concerned. Tens of thousands of blog posts have been done all around the world citing the importance of these & various other social media tools which companies can leverage to connect to their customers directly. In this post i would like to cover some ways using which companies can build communities & generate business via social media tools mainly twitter & facebook. These were presented earlier by my colleague Pradeep Chopra at 'Gripel Social Media Marketing Excellence' and a very high profile 'Click Asia Summit'. Both these events were held in Mumbai.

Here's the gist of these presentations:

1. Twitter can be utilized by businesses first of all to listen the existing conversation going on among consumers about their brands. They should also track the conversation going on about the competitors. This will help in two ways. One is that you will come to know pros & cons of your products & services and how the consumers think of you. Second is that you will come to know about the weaknesses (which you can take advantage of) or strengths (which you can emulate or surpass) of your competitors. Apart from listening, also participate in the conversation & actively engaging with the consumers.

2. Twitter & Facebook both can be used for online reputation management. You can avoid disasters simply by being alert about online conversations about you. In fact you can convert the potential criticizers into great evangelists if you can solve their problems quickly & on time. And it helps to spread the word online very quickly. So, manually tracking the online conversations about your brand is a great necessity these days. Several tools are also available for this purpose but all of them have certain limitations.

3. The way Dell has done business worth millions of dollars via Twitter is a case study in itself. Similarly several small businesses are also doing business via twitter these days. One good indian example is Pune & Mumbai based Faaso's restaurant. They have an interesting Tweet-to-Order business model which is a great success in these two places. So, definitely, businesses can look forward to exploring twitter as an additional touch point to do the business. And it helps spread the word very fast if consumers like your products. Similarly various brands are doing business via their facebook pages.

Rest of the article with detailed examples & slides can be found out here.

5 Ways to Use Twitter to help Learn & Educate

Twitter celebrated it's 5th birthday day before yesterday on 21st March & has covered a long journey since the first ever tweet done by Jack Dorsey (one of the co-founders of twitter) and then the millions of users & billions of tweets latter it has shaped & added a new dimension to the way we communicate. Jack celebrated the 5th anniversary with his tweet read by millions around the world . Twitter has had many uses in these 5 years whether it be for professional or personal use. Here we would like to discuss Twitter's impact on education & how it can be used for better management in a class or training room.

1. Information Organizer: With Twitter, it's very easy to organize the information around a particular agenda, theme or topic. Any relevant hash tag can be defined. When different participants in a room tweet about the topic being discussed with a particular hash tag, we can read all such tweets in a single stream by clicking on that hash tag or by searching or making a different stream for that hash tag on some twitter client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Even tools like Twubs can be used to organize the hash tags. So, the students or participants can learn a lot by following particular hash tag where people usually tweet only about the relevant stuff. For example, #edchat is a hashtag used in some countries for educators to follow the discussion around educational material & techniques.

2. Parent-Teacher Interaction: If School & teachers have twitter accounts, this can be used very effectively to have individual contact with parents of the students & can be used to provide important information on the upcoming events, parent-teacher meets, cultural functions by students, report card etc.

3. Personal learning tool: Twitter has changed it's tag line twice from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" & now to "The best way to discover what’s new in your world". It shows the way evolution of Twitter has taken place from just a casual network to more information, knowledge & news driven platform as it is today. So, it's not strange when millions around the world follow relevant Tweeple similar to their interests or lists to gain knowledge & stay updated. Even school/college students can use it for information purpose apart from the professionals.

4. Holistic participation: Twitter has emerged as a very good tool to have real time interactions in a classroom while a lecture is being delivered or in a seminar hall. All the students or participants can contribute & participate in the discussion with each other using any web enabled device. It helps, as an online medium like Twitter removes their inhibitions of feeling scared to speak up or ask questions openly in the live session. All this has been beautifully captured in this video where Twitter experiment was conducted in a UT Dallas classroom by Professor Rankin.

5. Backup tweets: As Twitter doesn't keep your tweets after a certain period of time, it's important to backup your tweets since many of our tweets contain useful information which we may want to go back & refer to. There are various ways to backup mentioned in this post of RWW. I personally prefer BackupMyTweets.

What do you feel about these ways? Can you think of more ways where Twitter can be used in education or learning?

Online Behaviour vs Offline Behavior

I wanted to do a blog post on this topic when a friend of mine got enraged from my comments on Facebook although not directed at him. He even called me on phone & threatened to not make such comments again. In his anger he even said that i am 180 degree opposite of what i am offline. Although i will not go into much detail here as it is personal but still i would really like to think upon this aspect of our personality that is it true that our online behavior is different from our offline behavior?

Let's start with our offline behavior, we engage with other people in our daily lives at various junctures, whether it be at home, office, market, Gym, Park etc. We do official work at the office, at the same time we have fun with our colleagues. We do meetings with our clients or prospects. At home, we interact with our parents, have breakfast or dinner together & discuss various things or news with each other. We have a particular style of talking to different people at different situations. With friends we can joke around & talk all the rubbish stuff which we can't do with our parents or elders. At office our talks mostly pertain to official matters, new deals, things to do etc. Sometimes we are serious, at other times we laugh. With some, we have cordial relationship while with others it's bad which we try to turn around into positive. There are so many possibilities in the life of an average human being that we may have to write a separate book on it. And every person's behavior is different from any other person. It can't be same for even 2 persons. Some may like your behavior, while others hate it. Personally, i try to behave naturally with anyone in any situation. I have a firm belief that natural behavior always lets you take the right action.

On the other hand online behavior doesn't require that much effort as required in offline since offline involves all your senses plus physical action whereas for online even a smart phone is enough. On online mediums we don't have physical contact & no real face to face interaction although we can see each other's face digitally & converse over many devices these days. But the point is lack of physical presence actually makes you more creative & at times spices up the words you use in online chats or on facebook/twitter etc. We even tend to loosen up with someone on social networking sites even if haven't interacted with that person even though he may from your school, college or office where you could have easily interacted with him. These days so many dating sites are doing a lot of business but why? Because, people feel it easier to converse with each other with spicy messages & smileys on social networking sites rather than starting the discussion online. From online they take it offline latter on these cases. Sometimes, we tend to pull each other's legs (inherent in our nature) on social networking sites especially on facebook since it has it's own culture with pokes & multiple friends conversing under the same thread where we take stand on some point. Whereas in offline world, we usually tend to avoid heated discussions as it may lead to fights or confrontations. Anyway there is a risk of misinterpretation of your online comments because they have no emotions & emphasis attached to them, you mean to say something but it is interpreted in a totally different way!

So, the point is online mediums make it lot easier for us to express ourselves in various ways. Many things which we would like to share offline but couldn't share are shared easily in status updates on facebook & twitter. So, definitely there is marked difference between our online & offline behavior & it is up to the other people how they interpret our messages & even we need to take care from our side not to hurt anyone intentionally.

New social media platform: Soch.la

I recently joined Digital Vidya as their social media evangelist. The immediate role being to promote the new social media platform Soch.la (pronounced as a single word SOCHLA) conceived, designed & launched within a month by the team at Digital Vidya which is a feat in itself! The idea behind this platform is to allow the cricket lovers to share their opinions with their friends while the live matches are going on. The platform is still in beta & suggestions are being welcomed from the users to suggest changes or improvements. And the platform was opened to the public on feb 27, 2011 during the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup. Initial reaction from the users has been very optimistic & the development is going on with full enthusiasm!

So what's Soch.la?
In short it's a social media platform "By the users, For the users" or as of now "By the cricket lovers, For the cricket lovers"! Fans can do live commentary while they are watching cricket matches & share their opinions, jokes or have fun in their own style with their friends. Since all of us are commentators (casual but real), that's why Soch.la is the Largest Cricket Commentary platform! And in the process, one can discover many new friends! The idea is to let the platform be shaped by it's users & Digital Vidya assisting them to shape it up.

Join Soch.la & enjoy the live criket matches and let me know your feedback or any suggestions on how we can improve the platform further?

Update:
I would like to add some of the reactions here by the users out of the many captured on Soch.la:

Experience at social media bootcamps organised by Digital Vidya

Social media was a huge buzz word in the year 2010. There were big debates happening around the world on the virtues of social media & how to leverage that. Social media is fast becoming a part of our life & soon the assimilation will be such that we will stop referring it as a 'social media' because it will be as natural to us as any other medium of communication. Interestingly, these days some universities around the world have started courses on social media marketing. Thinkers like Jeremiah Owyang have done extensive research on the emerging role of corporate social strategist & the increasing importance of social media within & outside the companies. With so much effort going into this space, Digital Vidya in India has been unique in conducting social media bootcamps, which intend to impart social media marketing knowledge to marketers from different industries.

[caption id="attachment_115" align="aligncenter" width="560" caption="Participants at the bootcamp"][/caption]

Recently i got invited to be a part of their 'Twitter for Business' & 'Social media for business' bootcamps as their twitter partner. Here's what i experienced in these bootcamps for 3 days.

1. Trainers:
Digital Vidya usually have 2 trainers in all of their bootcamps. Pradeep Chopra & Kapil Nakra are the co-founders & lead trainers who are having extensive experience of over 10 years into digital marketing. Although Kapil was not a part of these bootcamps but Pradeep was joined by Shrinath Navghane for Twitter specific bootcamp & Bhaskar Thakur for overall social media bootcamp. Both of these are successful entrepreneurs. All these guys make a very potent & credible team!

2. Participants:
All the participants were from diverse industries in senior marketing roles. They had arrived here to learn the new age marketing concepts & apply the same in their companies. They were coming up with interesting examples from their industries which was giving a very good perspective as in how social media marketing can be utilized. The diversity of participants also helps in networking which i did well over there.

3. Course Content:
Content was in the form of excellent slides, hand-outs, exercise sheets, resource guides etc. Case studies both Indian & international of various companies were discussed intelligently spread over different sessions. Various aspects of social media application like community building, brand promotion, sales, engagement, online reputation management etc. were discussed in these case studies.

4. Live exercises:
What i liked most were the sessions where the participants built upon their learning by developing social media strategies for their companies & then they presented in front of the group & healthy debate happened around. This added to the learning of all the participants.

5. Guest speakers:
Digital Vidya has a practice of inviting industry leaders or practitioners in the space of digital marketing to take sessions around specific topics. Like we had a session by Mahesh Murthy (founder of Pinstorm) on how to effectively handle communities on facebook backed by interesting data & another session by Achint Parekh & Lavin Mirchandani (both co-founders of SMC Mumbai) on online reputation management.

6. Certification:
At the completion of these bootcamps, all the participants were given certificates by Pradeep which certifies them as knowledgable social media personals.

[caption id="attachment_115" align="aligncenter" width="720" caption="My certificate"]
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To end the bootcamp on even happier note, all the participants were given some really cool freebies! :)

More Information:
Here's the coverage by other bloggers in the past on their experience of these bootcamps:
1. Praval
2. Permeate360
3. Prolific Dyslexic
4. Youpid
5. Vijayendra Mohanty

Also i found out the list of previous participant companies & testimonials from participants on Digital Vidya's website.

My Recommendation:
I would earnestly recommend these bootcamps to anyone who wants to learn about social media marketing or want to sharpen their skills in case they are already practicing social media marketing.