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Indian Social Media Agencies in Early 2008

Last year, I had created the first list of social media agencies in India, which included –

- Digital Advertising Agencies like Webchutney, Quasar Media/ Quasar Talk and Phonethics offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public Relations Practitioners like Rajesh Lalwani’s Blogworks offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent Bloggers like Kiruba Shankar, Dina Mehta’s Mosoci, and Rajiv Dingra’s WATConsult offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

Indian Social Media Agencies in Mid 2009

A year later, I can see at least six type of companies offering social media services in India –

1. Independent Social Media Agencies offer social media monitoring, social media outreach, and community manager services. Blogworks and WATConsult are the most visible example, but other examples include Windchimes, Social Wavelength, Bloggers’ Mind, Sulmoz, Zapylacz, Mercury Communication, Ripple Links and Electrosocial.

In my previous posts for the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections, I have analyzed how Indian politicians and political parties are using internet and mobile tools for election campaigning and civil society groups in India are using digital tools to run voter registration and transparency campaigns.

As interesting as these initiatives are, the three most effective election campaigns in the 2009 Indian general elections are run by corporate brands: Jaago Re by Tata Tea, My Idea from Idea Cellular and Lead India/ Bleed India by The Times of India (Live Mint/ Thaindian/ Exchange4Media/ Hindustan Times).

In my earlier avatar as the custodian of a large brand in India, I was convinced that online campaigns in India could stand on their own, without support from ad spends in mainstream media. The tactics employed by these three successful campaigns have made me realize that online brand campaigns in India will continue to be driven by heavy spending in mainstream media.

Armando Alves has compiled a great list of the top 150 Twitter users who blog about marketing and advertising — The Twitter Power 150 — based on Ad Age Power150 Ranking, Twitterank and Dapper.

I come in at #114 and WATBlog is at #147. In the AdAge Power 150 list, I’m at #117 and WATBlog is at #141. However, as Armado points out, the ranks of many other users vary significantly between the two lists, with SEO/ SEM blogs doing well on AdAge Power 150 list and social media blogs doing well on Twitter Power 150 list.

Here’s the complete list –

Priyanka Joshi in Business Standard –

Around 20 million internet users actively use the social media sites in India. According to market research firm IDC, the use of social networking sites will continue to grow, but advertising may not necessarily expand along with it. The result is that Indian start-ups like Ibibo and BigAdda are innovating to get brands onto their networks. 2009 might turn out to be the year when marketers will realise the potential of cross-promoting their media buys on the social networking websites.

“Local marketers are becoming familiar with the best ways to promote their businesses and by crossing online and offline campaigns, they are getting more bang for their buck,” said Shivanandan Pare, COO, BigAdda, that commenced operations 15 months back. The brands that are promoting themselves on BigAdda include Nokia, Lenovo, Sony Ericsson and Intel among others.

Ibibo, which calls itself a ‘talent based social networking site’, is willing to bet that 2009 would be the year when targeting consumer on social sites will have a far bigger payout than any other media. Ashish Kashyap, CEO, Ibibo, has built traction for his site among the 14-28 year olds by running talent-based contests since its inception.

Almost a year back, I had compiled a list of Indian blogs in the AdAge Power 150 rankings of top media and marketing blogs.

Gauravonomics was at #224 then, and the other Indian blogs in the list were India PR Blog at #266, Rajesh @ Blogworks at #340, Desi Creative at #451 and The Online Agency Blog at #481.

I decided to update that list today and here’s how the Indian blogs are ranked on the AdAge Power 150. I’m also including a automatically updating banner after each blog to make it easy for me to track this list in future –

- Gauravonomics at #123 

- WatBlog at #140

- PageTraffic Blog at #399

- Rajesh @ Blogworks at #425

- Marketing Practice at #456

- Marketology-Emerging Trends at #556

- Bhatnaturally at #590

- MisEntropy at #629

- Brants at #668

- IndiaPRBlog at #684

- Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings at #721

- SEO Tips PodCast Blog at #746

- eCommerce Retail Blog at #763

- People As I See at #764

- Interactive Marketing Blog at #834

- Customer World at #836

Sam Fleming’s CIC has released a useful four part report on Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) Developments in China —

Part 1: The Chinese IWOM Landscape –

Part 2: Alternate Ways to Measure Internet Community Dynamics –

Part 3: The Diversity of Chinese Net Language –

Part 4: Reshaping the Relationship Between Brands and Consumers –

Planner and marketer Anjali Ramachandram is sharing some interesting ideas about marketing and social media, both on her own blog and on PSFK’s Marktd.

Anjali has been doing a series of interesting interviews with marketing thinkers and practitioners like Faris Yakob, Noah Brier and yours truly in the Brain Tap Interview series.

Here’s the transcript of an interview Anjali did with me way back in May —

1. Which is your all-time favorite ad and what do you think makes it work?

I’m not particularly turned on by ads per se. I think the value is not in thinking of an interesting idea that works for 30 seconds. I think that the real value is in thinking of a truly compelling idea that works over the brand’s lifecycle, that becomes an ongoing conversation between the brand and its audience, and becomes the lens through which the brand’s audience interprets culture and life itself. Amul in India and Absolut internationally are two brands that have done it well.

2. What do you think the Next Big Thing in media is going to be?

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report has some interesting data on the who, why and how of blogging. The analysis is based on a survey of 1290 bloggers from 66 countries, apart from their own index.

However, it was the data on brands in the blogosphere that I found most interesting.

The big revelation for me was that more than nine in ten bloggers blog about the brands that they love (or hate). I don’t remember seeing a similar statistic before (and I’ll be grateful if you share a link to a similar study with me) but this means that blogging about brands is more ubiquitous than most brand managers realize. Bloggers also write about a wide range of topics related to brands — from brand or product reviews to news or gossip about brands and their experience with store or customer support employees. It would have been interesting to get a sense of how many of these posts are positive, negative or neutral and how blogging about brands varies across geographies.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog: How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Before I became the marketer who went off consumption, I was the marketer who understood social media.

Over the last two years, I have been fortunate to be included in conversations around social media thought and practice in India in multiple roles — as a traditional marketer who understood social media, as a blogger who wrote about social media, as an early adopter of new social media platforms, and as a connector of social media thinkers and practitioners. I think that I was able to play the last three roles primarily because of my first role. Much of my legitimacy as a thinker/ blogger and most of the connections I was able to make were rooted in my role as the custodian of a big brand that was engaging with the social media space in a meaningful way.

Over the last few months, my focus has moved away from social media marketing to other use cases of social media in developing countries, especially the use of social media for social change. As I explained in the introductory episode of my fellowship podcast, my research really lies at the intersection of three worlds that (surprisingly) don’t really understand each other — the web 2.0 world, the technology policy world, and the ICT4D world — and also borrows heavily from cultural studies.

I’m speaking at the Interesting New York conference on September 13 about my off-consumption experiment.

I had earlier decided to speak without any visual aids, but finally succumbed to the temptation of using slides. Clearly, the marketer who went off consumption still hasn’t gone off Powerpoint.

Here are the slides I’ll be using for my talk at Interesting New York –

If you are in New York on 13th, do come (tickets are $35 only). Some of the other speakers at Interesting New York are really interesting.