Questions corporates ask about Social Media

We’re running a session on Brand 2.0 for about 120 folks here today in Mumbai. This is for a large MNC company in India, who’s willing to explore the Social Media space for their brands. We set up some one-on-one interviews with some of the managers prior to this session, and it was really very useful getting their perspectives and expectations prior to this session.

Some of their concerns/questions were:

will internet ever become as big as TV in India?

what is social media – we don’t understand it, there is no resident expertise, the ‘effort-reward’ ratio is currently unfavourable – how can you change this for us?

why should we care – why should we be a part of this medium (particularly for brands that are targetted at a largely ‘offline’ population)?

what’s driving so many ‘consumers’ into using social media – what really motivates them to network, blog, join communities etc?

how can we transition from the perspective of ’spare cash goes into online activities’ to a belief that advertisers and marketers ‘must spend’ on this medium?

what linkages and interplay can we expect or build between social media and traditional media?

we build online ‘campaigns’, we’ve even tried building communities, but they are flashes-in-the-pan — what can we do to build a sustainable social media strategy?

Really great questions – and I do hope we can throw some light on these today!!!

There seemed to be a lot of interest in social media – what was luring them to consider this space was the knowledge that Youth are growing up with this medium – and they, as a company were not engaging with them, not ‘encashing’ this phenomenon, not riding the wave. Coupled with the belief that the Internet will explode in India, as we have seen with the Mobile phone space.

Underlying all this, I sensed a feeling of helplessness and loss of control among the managers we met – they were worried about competition pre-empting them with social media strategies, they felt that they personally did not know much about how social media works and that brand managers MUST acquire this knowledge and skill, even if they maynot use it directly for their brand today. That they weren’t entirely in control of their media and PR agencies who were pushing social media plans to them, because they did not understand this medium. And that top management needed to encourage participation as well.

Bonus Link: Jeremiah Owyang has a set of questions corporates ask about Social Media, and some predictions!