Introduction and Welcome Speech by Director

Far from being the esoteric marketing term understood only by experts a few years ago, Social Media has evolved into a mainstream marketing medium worldwide.

Today’s approach to marketing, the approach infused with social media, leans much more heavily on the 4 Cs of marketing. Tons of relevant, education-based, and perhaps user generated content that is filtered, aggregated, and delivered in a context that makes it useful for people who are starving to make connections with people, products, and brands they can build a community around.

Samriddhi ’10 looks at the growing impact of social networking on the success/failure of products & services and how social media has changed the business outlook. It explores the positive and negative sides of this growing trend. It also focuses on how the traditional businesses are adapting to this new wave of constant consumer interaction, and how the Social Media Service companies are helping them.

The conference began with the honorable Director, Mr. D’ Lima’s welcome speech. He looked back at the evolution of Samriddhi and congratulated the students for choosing a novel and contemporary topic like “Social Media” as the subject for this symposium.

He went on to say that while his personal experience with Social Media was by far limited, he was aware of the great potential the field had in the days to come. He mentioned how he had heard on a news channel a prediction about the enormity of the management of privacy which is only a small part of the Social Media business in the next five years.

Introducing the Chief Guest, Mr. Ivan Arthur (former national creative director of JWT India), Mr. D’ Lima described him as a living legend in the area of advertising and praised his pioneering work in the field. He spoke about the academic collaboration of GIM with AICAR Business School, of which Mr. Arthur is a trustee. He also announced that Mr. Arthur is likely to conduct a workshop and a small course on this area of expertise at GIM. With this, he handed the stage to Mr. Arthur.