Pranav Bhasin

Since Thomas Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, going global has an added charm to it. And while there are plenty of opportunities at home, Indian companies are increasingly looking to acquire a global footprint and establish their leadership in other countries too.

But isn’t going global really expensive? How do I know whether there is a market for my product outside? How do I find the right kind of partners to talk to? I don’t even know their language, how do I setup my team? These are just some of the questions that come to mind as soon as you start thinking about a global company.

Thankfully, social media has changed the world and provides answers to some of these questions. While there is no perfect solution, no way to completely avoid the risk, here are the 5 ways in which you can leverage social media to your advantage if you are thinking of going global:

1) Test the waters

Before you make any decisions, understand more about the market you are looking at. Find out the names of your competitors in the target countries and set up twitter search alerts for them. Identify the keywords that define your business and setup twitter alerts for them for the target country.

Listen in to conversations on these channels for a few days to understand the intricacies of the market and the key problems that the users of existing product face. This is a quick, free and easy way to see whether your product will fly in the market or not.

2) Connect with potential customers

Users on twitter are extremely candid and will typically rant about something they don’t like and praise something they like. Once you have an understanding of the market, the next step is to talk to some of the people who are reporting problems about existing products.

Assuming that your product solves the problem they are talking about, briefly suggest your solution to them and see if it interests them. If you are able to establish a conversation with someone, you may also want to ask them to try your product ( assuming it is accessible over the internet ).

This is an extremely effective way of having conversations with your potential customers and getting some real feedback about your product.

3) Network, network, network

Every market, in every country has a few people who have a great reputation – when they speak everyone listens. These are typically industry experts or domain experts. In addition, there are a lot of independent bloggers who are very influential in their sphere and are extremely well networked.

Find out people like these in your market and start talking with them. Get one of them interested in trying out your product. If they have feedback for you, listen to it carefully and go back to them after you’ve implemented their feedback. What is important here is to establish a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the other person, so that when you have something worthy of being showcased, you have someone who can spread the word for you.

Remember, there is a thin line between networking and spamming – don’t cross that line otherwise you will have them on the other side. Also note that this is a time consuming process that generally takes a few months – make it a part of your daily routine.

4) Build your channels

So far, we have talked about speaking with customers and industry experts. In addition, social media is a great way to find prospective partners. Almost every business has some identity on twitter and facebook, be it large or small and by using social media, you can get in touch with them without physically being present there.

So find your potential partners there and have conversations with them. If a mutually beneficial partnership is possible, you can even sign all legal agreements by passing around scanned documents over email. This way, you can actually start doing business in another country through a partner without spending a lot of money.

5) Build positive reputation, but don’t ignore the negative

We have already talked about listening in to what customers are saying about competition. Now that you are doing business in another country, wouldn’t you want to listen in to what customers are saying about you? Setup your social media alerts and pay attention to every conversation where you or your business is mentioned.

Its unlikely that all the conversations will be positive, so it is important to pay more attention to the negative conversations and alleviate their causes. Remember, internet has a long memory, so handle the situation gracefully, solve the problem being discussed, have a conversation with your customer about it and you will most likely have a happy ending there.

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Originally published on the NILF Blog.

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave.  He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?