Social Media Club Mumbai

Social Media and Crime from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.

cross posted from amitklein.com

There’s no doubt that Google Search is a great product, but aside from some cosmetic changes in how results are displayed there hasn’t been any major innovation in search in the last few years (aright, Goggles is pretty awesome):

There are a number of questions which Google fails to answer:

• “where’s the best bagel in new york?”
• “what’s a cheap, clean, centrally located hotel in bangkok”
• “which DSLR camera should I buy?”

In the cases above, you’re most likely to get SEO-optimized aggregator/review site whose primary motivation is affiliate sales.  And forget about finding anything usable to:

• “what’s everyone up to this weekend?”
• “should I get a tattoo?”
• “is business school right for me”

Increasingly, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for these types of questions:

Aardvark is another really nice product that tries to answer these experiential/recommendation type of questions.  It’s easy to use (via a chat bot) and gets quick and solid responses.  The same question got me three responses within 10 min (here’s two): (more…)

This past Saturday we had our fourth meeting of the Social Media Club – Mumbai.  We split the meeting into two parts: in the first half we discussed our content strategy (what sort of content do we want to produce and what tools do we want to use to promote it), in the latter half we looked at brands effectively leveraging Facebook (specifically Fan Pages, Applications and Connect).

SMCM Content Strategy:

What types of content do we want to produce:

• Case Studies and examples
• White papers
• Meeting Notes
• Photos from meetings / events
• Links to articles people are reading
• Jobs
• Static content (goals for the group / about us / etc…)
• Top 5 blog posts per week/month from other sites (in case you missed it…)
• Awards for other individuals / companies effectively leveraging SM

One thing we discussed is that there are very few resources on the Indian SM scene.  We could add tremendous value by publishing information about this geography.

What tools can we use:

• Blog – Previously we were using a Wordpress MU install with Buddypress.  This seemed to be filled with spam and the community features seemed unnecessary for now.  We’ve decided to scale back to a standard WP blog.
• Twitter – Not sure yet how we will leverage this… let’s leave this alone for now.
• Email – Slowly phase out of using email to Twitter/Blog
• Facebook Fan Page – Need to create a new fan page, assuming this will aggregate blog / twitter

Kicking off a whitepaper:

In order to get some street-cred we’d like to kick off a whitepaper: “Corporate Social Media Use in India” (we can come up with a snazzier name later).  We’d like everyone to submit links to great Indian social media examples on our fancy new wiki.  Next week we will pare down the list to the top 3/4 examples, come up with some conclusions (Indian SM is still nascent), put together an outline and ask for volunteers to contribute / edit.

Brands Using Facebook Effectively

Why should brands leverage FB:

• Tap into the 300mil users
• Get product feedback
• Show your human side
• Increase engagement / brand loyalty
• Entertain
• Customer Service
• Deals / promotions

Why use Facebook Fan pages:

• Get a fan once, push content out forever
• Engagement on fan pages (likes/comments) show up in news feed (viral!)
• Examples:
  • Coke – Empowering Evangelism
  • Victoria Secret – Blending Content and Advertising
  • Vitamin Water – Major advertisements lead directly to a FB fan page – is a corporate website necessary anymore?
  • 1-800-Flowers – Actually sells stuff (ecommerce storefront)

Facebook Applications / Appvertisements

• According to this report: appvertisements yields 6x more impressions then a traditional display advertisement campaigns.  Appevertisements also cost 78% less for 398% more users.
• Examples:
  • Nike Baller’s Network – Adds real value, let’s people find courts, great branding, create’s mindshare
  • Pizza Hut – Actually order pizzas
  • ZooZoos – Engagement, let people pick the concept for the next commercial
  • BurgerKing – Best App Ever!

Facebook Connect

• Allows you to create a Facebook Application outside of Facebook
• Single sign on
• Use users FB photo
• Publish content to your activity stream (viral)
• Invite people from Facebook to participate in activity
• Send email from Facebook on your behalf
• Examples:
  • Digg – posts you Digg are sent to your wall
  • Fight Club
  • Prototype

Next meeting (12/19) we will be doing a similar run through for Twitter.  See you then!