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 ):

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.

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!

I recently came across Tac Anderson’s post “What the heck is a lifestream?” and found it very interesting that a simple question like this can spark a very interesting discussion.

With the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon, people who do not have a lifestream are considered social outcasts. The question that comes to my mind is – How important is a lifestream to you?

Please take the poll below to share your view on this topic:

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