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Most companies see social media as a part of communications, sales and marketing. Some, with a little help from us, realize that social technologies have implications for diverse business functions beyond these functions: from market research and product innovation to customer support and process redesign and even to partner relations and organizationsal development.
However, social technologies are a part of the core product for few companies, apart from the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, standalone social networking firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and social tool vendors like Jive, Lithium and Salesforce.
I believe that social technologies are becoming a part of the core product for news, media and entertainment companies, because an increasing amount of the content available online is now consumer generated content. As the boundary between content companies and technology companies blur even more, all news, media and entertainment companies will need to become technology companies.
In the US, the ubiquity of the internet has forced news, media and entertainment companies to become early adopters of social technologies and experiment with all the five underlying drivers of consumer generated content (CNN iReport), conversations (NPR Community), collaboration (Al Jazeera War on Gaja), community (NYT Times People) and collective intelligence (CNN News Pulse).
In India too, news, media and entertainment companies are increasingly becoming social media savvy.
NDTV is ahead of the pack with NDTV Social and the video player Tubaah. CNN-IBN has blogs, podcasts, conversations and a citizen journalism program. Star TV is slowly catching up with the Star Player.
The Times Group is persisting with its social network iTimes and experimenting with niche social network iDiva and aggregator Hotklix. Hindustan Times has started Talk to HT, an ideation platform. Hindustan Times, Live Mint, DNA, Economic Times, Business Standard, India Today and Outlook also have journalist blogs, while Indian Express has user blogs.
Everyone has links to Twitter profiles and Facebook pages proudly displayed on their homepages. All the entertainment focused TV channels and movie production houses have done consumer generated content contests.
Elsewhere, Bollywood group blog Passion for Cinema is doing well and Bollywood focused talent search community Desitara is shaping up well. Several Indian celebrities have their own blogs now and so many celebrities are on Twitter now that there is now a Twitter app called Bollytweet for tracking them.
So, yes, Indian news, media and entertainment companies are indeed experimenting with social technologies. The jury is still out on how strategic and successful these experiment have been, and they are two different things.
In a series of posts in December, I’ll explore how Indian and international news, media and entertainment companies and individual celebrities are using social technologies. I’ll then separate out the wheat from the chaff and identify best practices. Expect case studies of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and communities, graphs that give context on what is really happening and scenarios for how Indian companies and celebrities can really become social media savvy. Stay tuned.
good post, gaurav.
Mainstream Bollywood production houses have been flirting with social media for some time. Quite a few have YouTube channels, like Rajshri Pictures and Yash Raj Films.
Great post
The print media in India has been shying away from user-interaction. Biggest example is most of the print media on twitter don't follow anyone which creates a one-way communication (not a great idea when you talk about social-media). They suck on FB fan pages with minimal amount of events promotion and no ugc.
Would love to hear your point of view on best practices on twitter & FB.
@gautamghosh RE: Yash Raj Films I love the fan engagement on the Rocket Singh Facebook page http://facebook.com/rocketsingh
@pratikks: I believe that journalists will use Twitter for engagement while newspapers will use it for distribution.
Good post Gaurav – looking forward to your follow-on posts on this topic. Here is a bit of what we've seen in the 2.0 jungle.
We think this space is still in its early days and people are figuring out how to use 2.0 technologies. One factor to consider is pure logistics. Media companies have long had call-in numbers, sms numbers, email id's and used these to request user input. The problem to sort through the inputs and then to interact with each is not a small task. Some media companies will pick some inputs and use it during their programming (ex: scroll bar on TV). But how many can you truly interact with. Tweets that media houses may get from users fall into the same category (and hence the default for now seems to be to use the medium as a broadcast channel).
The most interactive apps that media houses use are polls where every responder has an input. What is needed is simple applications that (1) allow users to interact easily (2) allow media houses to acknowledge this interactivity in an automated but still personalized manner. We've had some success with SMS 2.0 apps – SMS gives a lot broader reach than a pure online channel. We have deployed such a community for a radio station and are in talks with other radio/TV outfits. We've also tied SMS interaction into Twitter thereby creating an integrated community. To us it seems that media houses are looking for the right solution even while they (along with the rest of us) figure out this social media beast. Interested folks can contact us at jerryatcellzappdotcom.
@cellzapp True. Real engagement doesn't scale for companies, you can only engage with people (journalists for media companies).
Excellent point about journalists having to be the engagement focus. An example of this – what we've seen is RJs in radio stations play this role. An interesting dynamic we've observed is that RJs are staking out a social media presence for themselves. But the radio station wants listeners loyal to them and not only to the RJ. In the extreme case an RJs followers would follow the RJ to the next station if such a situation occurred. The media co hence wants personalities with followers but these followers should also have a loyalty to the company itself. Tricky. In our SMS 2.0 communities we build the company as the core brand for the community and allow their personalities to fall under this umbrella. So users belong to the companies community but can subscribe/follow personalities within the company.
@gautamghosh RE: Yash Raj Films I love the fan engagement on the Rocket Singh Facebook page http://facebook.com/rocketsingh
@pratikks: I believe that journalists will use Twitter for engagement while newspapers will use it for distribution.
Good post Gaurav – looking forward to your follow-on posts on this topic. Here is a bit of what we've seen in the 2.0 jungle.
We think this space is still in its early days and people are figuring out how to use 2.0 technologies. One factor to consider is pure logistics. Media companies have long had call-in numbers, sms numbers, email id's and used these to request user input. The problem to sort through the inputs and then to interact with each is not a small task. Some media companies will pick some inputs and use it during their programming (ex: scroll bar on TV). But how many can you truly interact with. Tweets that media houses may get from users fall into the same category (and hence the default for now seems to be to use the medium as a broadcast channel).
The most interactive apps that media houses use are polls where every responder has an input. What is needed is simple applications that (1) allow users to interact easily (2) allow media houses to acknowledge this interactivity in an automated but still personalized manner. We've had some success with SMS 2.0 apps – SMS gives a lot broader reach than a pure online channel. We have deployed such a community for a radio station and are in talks with other radio/TV outfits. We've also tied SMS interaction into Twitter thereby creating an integrated community. To us it seems that media houses are looking for the right solution even while they (along with the rest of us) figure out this social media beast. Interested folks can contact us at jerryatcellzappdotcom.
@cellzapp True. Real engagement doesn't scale for companies, you can only engage with people (journalists, actors).
Excellent point about journalists having to be the engagement focus. An example of this – what we've seen is RJs in radio stations play this role. An interesting dynamic we've observed is that RJs are staking out a social media presence for themselves. But the radio station wants listeners loyal to them and not only to the RJ. In the extreme case an RJs followers would follow the RJ to the next station if such a situation occurred. The media co hence wants personalities with followers but these followers should also have a loyalty to the company itself. Tricky. In our SMS 2.0 communities we build the company as the core brand for the community and allow their personalities to fall under this umbrella. So users belong to the companies community but can subscribe/follow personalities within the company.