Indian Companies and Social Media

By Vaibhav Agarwal

[envap.com]

Maruti SuzukiMaruti Suzuki has been a pioneer in the

digital marketing space, but somewhere around 2007, it started to get actively involved with social media. Recently, the company actively seeded forums, and social networking sites with news about the upcoming launch of the Ritz. The Tata Nano team has been even more social media savvy—interacting with large member groups—both official and non-official—on both Orkut and Facebook.

“Right now the actual number of users on media might be low, but their influence is far-reaching. Besides, who can predict how many and who will use it tomorrow,” says Shashank Srivastava, GM, Marketing, Maruti Suzuki.

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NokiaFinnish mobile company Nokia has made social

media a cornerstone of its marketing strategy in several markets for its Eseries and Nseries premium devices, according to Vineet Taneja, Director, Marketing, Nokia India. To promote its new E75 device with its own e-mail service, the company set up a community website where members could contribute and talk about e-mail and help each other. Nokia also created accounts on Orkut, Twitter and Facebook to promote its device. In addition, the company set up a “shoutbox” where people could write comments and send queries to it, which would then be answered by experts.

“Many people do a web search before they buy a product, and this is why we feel having a social media outreach where we can intervene and answer queries helps,” says Vineet Taneja, Director, Marketing, Nokia India.

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Apollo hospitalsApollo Hospitals has gone one enterprising

step further, by using the Internet to advertise its services in an engaging and novel manner. The company has caught the eye of medical “tourists” worldwide by uploading videos about its procedures, on video sharing site YouTube—the company posted its first clip in October, 2008 where a foreign patient spoke about his experiences at the hospital. Since its maiden video voyage, the number of such Apollo clips has mushroomed to nearly 30, and the hospital has also set up a Facebook group, joined Twitter, added a del.icio.us account and several blogs. Timesofmoney—an online payment solution provider—is also using a combination of blogposts, Facebook and LinkedIn to attract new customers.

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A leading UNIDENTIFIED company

A leading Indian company, which preferred to remain unidentified, discovered this the hard way when it was hit by a slander campaign in January this year, followed by unusual trading activity in its stock. Even as this company voluntarily sought a probe by the market regulator and offered to be open for a peer review, it got to work by seeking to counter every allegation and doubt raised on the various social media forums on which it was being discussed. Its strategy was to foment a debate around its experiences rather than be held hostage to a one-way conversation.

“We were monitoring nearly 80 to 100 blogs and we changed the indexing on Google so that it would allow people to also look at a counter response and that way open up the dialogue for a two-way information, rather than just a one-sided view to perpetuate among people,” says Mahesh Murthy, Chief Executive, Pinstorm, a digital marketing firm.

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