Pranav Bhasin

Its been some time since I reported an event on my blog, so I thought why not start with this weekend’s Social Media Club Bangalore meetup.

The Social Media Club Bangalore was started around 2 weeks back when Vijay ( @amnigos ), Hrish ( @dhempe ), Freeman ( @freemanindia ), myself ( @amnigos ) and a few others met up at Jaaga and shared our coordinates and learnt more about each other. This week, Gaurav Mishra ( @gauravonomics ) was in town, so SMC Bangalore got a double boost and hosted two back to back social meetups.

The first meetup was a panel on “Indian web 2.0 startups targeting the global market” involving myself ( @pranavbhasin ) and Vijay ( @amnigos ), morderated by Kaushal ( @ksarda ). There was a good crowd turnout with the discussion and queries delving into very practical areas of using social media to promote a startup. Some of the bullet points from the discussion are ( in no particular order ):

• Social media is about conversations, not conversions
• Have tangible and measurable goals for your social media campaign, but do not link them directly to user acquisition
• It is possible to get trial enterprise users via email marketing, but difficult to convert them
• Indian audience behave differently than global counterparts online in giving feedback – Indians only give feedback when there is a problem whereas global audience will give feedback when they like something too
• Indian startups targeting the global market well: Zoho, Deskaway, FusionChart, Dimdim
• Indian users will pay for a physical product but will not pay for a subscription
• If you plan to start up, focus on revenues from day 1 – not every company can scale to the size of a facebook
• Tips for startups: launch quickly, test multiple designs, ask users for feedback, iterate endlessly, build in virality
• Brands should use the social media effectively. They should not spam users based on certain keywords
• Agencies need success stories from multiple markets before they recommend a new social platform to clients
• The only way for a social platform to grow cost effectively is through invites from present users
• Non-users always give positive feedback
• Figuring out a revenue model is more important than acquiring users
• Mentions on big tech blogs only result in temporary traffic peaks, not long-term users

Here are a few photos from this meetup ( all pics here ):