@dvocable

BM has come out with its Asia-Pacific Corporate Social Media Study for 2011.

Key findings from the study include:

• 81% of top Asian companies have a branded corporate social media presence, over double the figure for 2010 and in line with the 84% of Fortune global 100 firms
• 31% of companies use at least three social media channels, up from 3% in 2010
• 19% of companies still have no official corporate social media presence
• 30% of companies use social networks for corporate marketing and communications, up from 20% in 2010
• 28% of companies use micro-blogs for corporate marketing and communications, up from 18% in 2010
• 62% of social media channels surveyed were inactive, and the same percentage of companies do not promote their social media channels on their homepages

Regarding India, my colleague, Salil Jayakar from Mumbai writes in the report : Indian companies’ preferred channel is social networks, with almost 60% of companies using Facebook, as well as Google’s Orkut, as opposed to some 30% using Twitter. Only 10% of companies surveyed are using online video in any way for corporate marketing or communications.

Here is the study:

Well it’s amazing that there are so many auto blogs in India. Being part of a team that handles the digital outreaches of an auto brand requires that I read these blog regularly. And of course added to that is my passion for highway driving.

Just managed to take out some time finally and create a mashup the feeds of around 26 auto blogs in India on my Google Reader. You can take a look here (http://bit.ly/IndiaAuto).

Often we have to go for live blogging/tweeting at events and functions and manage the client Twitter accounts and we need to show our clients a sample of what we plan to do in a simple sheet that we usually called the Tweet Sheet. I have seen various styles of this one and I thought I should create one that might just answer most client questions.

Check it out. Thoughts welcome.

Tweet Sheet Template

I often met people who say they are very active online and in the social media space. They silently listen and read. They  know a lot of things, about who is doing what, and what new thing has happened, etc. etc. but  they do not  blog or have active profiles where they share stuff back to the social media community.

So when I ran into one such person recently, the conversation took on an interesting  turn when I gave an example of the torrent communities.  In these communities/ sites where you can share and access various multimedia, you will see that there are seeders and leechers.  Seeders are those who are sharing files from their systems and thus actively contributing to the community while leechers are those who are just downloading. If there are more leechers than seeders, the community wouldn’t be fun anymore.

Likewise in the social media space, can we dare ask ourselves? Are we seeders or leechers?

One of my clients is a global auto company and for one of its small cars that it was aiming to push in the small towns of India, we were recently discussing how we can engage the audience in these regions in an exciting manner using a digital platform. Social media engagement is good for the young crowd in urban areas but when it comes to small towns where laptops and internet broadband connectivity are still issues, there were limitations. We agree that one of the workable ways could be mobile phone, which we all know that almost everyone from a rickshaw wallah to a corporate CEO owns one.

But is mobile exciting enough? That was our next conversation. For sure we have the short codes SMS and some interesting IVR stuff. We can also probably create WAP sites and some banner ads. Not engaging enough still.

So imagine my delight when I bumped into some nice people from RockeTalk, one of the leading mobile phone social networking service, at the recent India Social Summit at Delhi.

Here are some salient features that you might not know about mobile social networking:

1. There are a lot of users. Rocketalk has around 5mn. That’s almost on par or more than some well known global and Indian social networking sites. Check out this Jan 2010 blog post from Rocketalk.

2. These sites are targeted towards the young population in Tier II and small towns who don’t have a laptop/PC but who have mobile phones with data connection. 60-80%% of users are from small towns.

3. We normally are on Facebook to connect with old friends. Generally many users on mobile social networking sites use the service to find new friends. In fact, you can specify age, gender, location, etc. and search for new people as soon as you create your profile on the site. Users from small towns often say their friends are right next door in their neighborhoods – why spend money on the data connection to connect with them when you can just visit their houses any day.

4. Users do a lot of fun stuff like play a virtual antakshari game or send virtual gifts to total strangers even if buying those gifts costs anywhere starting from Rs. 10-20 each. They also upload pictures and videos.

Also Rocketalk just opened up an API recently so we might see some nice applications in this space. Rocketalk is not the only player. We also have Mig33, which I suppose is promising and interesting equally. Here’s an interview of Mohit from Mig33. Will connect more and try to do more posts around this in the future.

What I’m interested to see now is how these sites gear themselves up for brands and corporates. When Facebook opened up itself to brands and created Facebook pages, it did make a very smart move. Now we see every brand on Facebook doing their own thing and ultimately all that is making Facebook a very fun place to be at for everyone.

In this photo: @futurescape (Syamant), @gsgill187 (Gagandeep Gill), @mokshjuneja (Moksh Juneja), @palinn (myself), @rgambhir (Rajeev Gambhir), @surekhapillai (Surekha Pillai)

I have been part of an exciting Burson Marsteller research on how top Asian companies from the  Wall Street Journal’s Asia 200 Index are using social media. The findings are interesting.

Less than half of Asian companies listed has a corporate social media presence. Of those corporate brands that do have a presence, more than 55% of social media profiles are inactive. Only 18% of surveyed companies integrate their social media profiles into their corporate websites. See the press release here.

Here is a summary of how Indian corporates are using social media:

At 6.9% , internet penetration in India remains relatively low, ever greater numbers of people are using social media to network and voice their opinions.

Facebook and Orkut are the most popular social networks. India is a major engine of growth for LinkedIn. Meantime, Twitter’s embrace by politicians, celebrities, film stars and sportsmen has given the microblog massive publicity.

On the whole, Indian companies have moved fast in response to the opportunities afforded by social media. Many top Indian corporates surveyed are either experimenting or already have active accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Hardly surprisingly, India’s top technology companies are proactively using social media of all types, for both corporate and consumer outreach.

Yet companies in other sectors are also jumping on the social media bandwagon, including FMCG companies, whose product brands are generally active in the social media space, and financial services companies such as ICICI and HDFC banks. The latter are mostly focused on providing customer service support and product promotions.

It is not all Facebook and Twitter. Corporate blogs are seen as a good way for Indian companies to communicate with their many stakeholders, both domestically as well as in other English language markets. Corporate blogs are also seen as a useful means of getting your message direct to the audience, rather than having to communicate through intermediaries such as journalists.

Partly given their international focus, Indian technology giants such as Infosys and Wipro are actively blogging. Infosys has a wide range of blogs, mostly focused on its products, categories and partnerships, but also highlighting and analysing trends around innovation and leadership. Wipro’s blog discusses technology trends and the firm’s sustainability initiatives, amongst other topics.

Using video to tell the corporate story is also gaining ground in India. Here, companies are using YouTube (and increasingly Facebook) to host interviews and speeches by senior management and promote events, in addition to supporting broader marketing campaigns.

Indian companies still put great emphasis on their websites. But only a small minority has sought to integrate their websites and activities on third party social media platforms. While Indian companies appear relatively comfortable with corporate blogs, most companies are still experimenting with Facebook and are not yet ready to join together their various online channels at the hip.

See the full report here.

Of  late, I have been doing some online research on the sites that exist today in India on personal finance. It’s kinda nice to see the plethora of sites that are mushrooming up. They certainly on the first glance seem to offer you comparisons of financial products available in the market – insurance products, mutual funds, credit cards, etc.. However, you soon realize that most of them want your name, address, phone number, email and many more things before you can simply use any of the compare feature they provide. If you provide your contact details, you soon get a call asking if you want to buy any insurance policy, etc. In a nutshell, these are the online insurance agents, sort of.

However, some do provide good comparisons and a few offer their services without you having to enter your personal details.

Site   -  Unique Visitors per month (according to Google Ad Planner data)
ApnaPaisa.com – 130000
BimaDeals.com – 32000
ChildInsurance.in – NA
Click2Insure.in – NA
CompareInsurance.co.in – NA
GetMeInsure.com – NA
IndiaBima.com – NA
InsuranceMall.in -   NA
InsurancePandit.com – 11000
iTrust.in – 63000
InvestmentYogi.com – 9400
PaisaWaisa.com – 64000
Personalfn.com – 36000
PolicyBazaar.com -  350000
RateKhoj.com – 27000

I like ApnaPaisa among the lot as I can do a quick comparison whenever I want. But you want to drill deeper, then it also  starts asking your personal details. One thing they lack – recommending which is the est product of the lot – can be found at PolicyBazaar.com. However, here you have to submit all your personal details before doing any search or comparison. Personalfn is good to read up on financial topics but they are limited beyond a point. InvestmentYogi is a new site and they are trying hard and it would be good to see how they fare int he coming months.

Of late foursquare has been a hit among my office colleagues and they all have been trying to become the mayor of the office.  Apart from that, you also find these guys becoming the mayors of many interesting locations around the city.  There is almost a competition nowadays to become the mayor. So now the norm is almost like –   you come back to the office from a meeting,  check in and you get nearer to dethroning the current mayor.

The update status ‘XYZ just checked-in @ABC’ is becoming a bit of an eyesore, especially when it comes out on Twitter and Facebook repeatedly. Why not be creative? So recently I checked in inside a flight IC 213……..

How about checking in on foursquare itself. I just checked in @foursquare.com

I added a place called ‘The most wonderful place in the world’ recently. I am the proud mayor of that place now.

My colleagues suggested why places only, why not people? So we thought we should check  in @Tina @Surangana. How many girls in office have you as the mayor now? Cheeky.

One of my colleagues has become a super mayor for becoming the mayor of 10 places. I’m at 4 – one is an imaginary place, one of MG Road sucks, and two of my clients’ offices.  I don’t travel so much nowadays, except for obvious places where I could go with my 9 months old . Like one of my friends on Twitter said, ‘Fathers of toddlers can become mayors of doctor’s clinics; Hard Rock Cafe, difficult.’ :-)

By the way, let’s connect if you are on foursquare. My profile is here. Let’s see how many more interesting places we can discover and thus get many more fancy badges.

I wanted book air tickets for two adults and one infant from New Delhi to Imphal on Feb 6, 2010 and return tics on Feb 13, 2010. Since I had some time on my hand, and after a failure to book online  yesterday, I thought I will check out some of the travel agents online.

I tried Makemy trip.com, Yatra.com, Cleartrip.com, and Flykingfisher.com. These are the top travel sites according to Vizisense. The total fares shown by these sites on the airlines with the lowest fares available with them were interesting and all different.

Makemytrip -Rs. 14,405

Yatra – Rs. 13,682

Cleartrip -Rs. 15,921

FlyKingfisher – Rs. 14,274

Curious, I tried another search, Yatra gave the cheapest fares again. Seems like I found my banshee.