One of the reasons that I’m now working on a new book titled “Is your social in sync or sinking?” is because of how social media is used and perceived by marketing organizations. Many people often think that social media and digital give you better measurable returns in comparison to traditional medium. This is one of the reason you see you several newspapers today are moving away from print.
In fact, as part of our Marketing Sync workshops, we saw that several marketing organizations saw digital and social as a replacement for traditional media. This was many a times a result of people not understanding how social media works way different from traditional mediums.
Related Read: Why Startups And Entrepreneurs Need Marketingsync?
During one of our sessions for an energy company, a gentleman got up to ask a brilliant question.
‘We all know that storytelling has existed for ages, and is nothing new. We were doing it quite well across most traditional channels and now suddenly the company wants to hire social media specialists and agencies. If we could be effective on traditional channels, we could handle social as well. Why do we need specialists or agencies?’
In a simplistic world, what he asked made perfect sense. However, as we navigate across mediums, we can see that each medium needs a different set of skills because each of the social platforms behaves differently from one another.
Hopefully, the gentleman would have realized that it wasn’t about hiring a specialist or an agency but about acquiring a different set of skills.
Here’s an excerpt from our discussion with Ramesh Srivats.
Scene: The conference room at TenTenTen Digital Products, Bengaluru. Both of us have had our privilege to sit down with Ramesh Srivats, the Twitter rock star, who is also the Chief Executive Officer at TenTenTen Digital Products, to talk about how he viewed storytelling on social platforms.
Background: Ramesh Srivats, as we know, is a celebrity on social media, especially on twitter, and is known for his witty tweets on pretty much everything under the sun. TenTenTen Digital Products is the company behind Fandromeda, IPL Fantasy Leagues and other revolutionary digital products. The synchronicity between Ramesh as a personal brand and his company is that they both are completely social media driven for their marketing.
When asked on how social media has changed storytelling, he said, ‘For a long time, the only way we knew about products or brands was based on what their advertisement copies told us. For example, a car manufacturer spoke about the features of their car in their commercials or advertisement copies, and that was the information we got to consume as prospects. In other words, brands spoke and we listened.
Today, social media platforms have changed the equation completely. For instance, a movie releases and within the next 2 hours, we have several people sharing their review of the movie on Facebook, blogs, etc. In other words, with social media, customers speak and brands listen.’
Related Read: Jayant Sood, Snapdeal’s Chief Customer Experience Officer On How To Maintain Positive Customer Experience !
As he puts it nicely, the major take away is that social platforms are for conversing and collaborating and not to push a message across like other mediums.
Are we in sync with how social media works?
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Image Source: startribune.com
