Ratish Nair : Co-Founder - Ad Magnet

Mr. Nair initiated his speech by describing social media as a “new wine in a new bottle”. He highlighted the growing importance of social media by stating that 71 million Indians are online and that they are spending an enormous amount of time on the internet. 70% of these people make use of social media. Needless to say, social media has the potential to become an important mass media in India.

Numerous businesses have discovered this potential and are using social media for achieving various objectives like brand recognition and brand monitoring. Whereas only 10% people trust advertisements, a sizable 30% trust the opinions of their peers. Considering this, social media gives brands a massive opportunity to reach out to customers. Grievance handling and enhancing customer service are other areas that companies like CCD and Jet Airways have made use of with the help of social media.

To illustrate the success of the medium, Mr. Nair gave the example of Jet Airways which has used social media in a big way and has achieved sizeable results in very little time. While not so long ago, almost 90% of the feedback Jet Airways received on the internet was negative. After their online campaign, there negative responses were reduced to about 50%. Thus Jet Airways has adopted a long term social media strategy.

Other companies such as Dabur, Intel, Fedex and Toyota have a short term and tactical social media strategies that have proved to be quite successful. Bingo used the “Mad Angles” Campaign on Facebook by creating an application that allowed users to display their status messages upside down and this application received a huge response.

The revolutionary online campaign of Old Spice’s body was-“The man your man could smell like” elicited a colossal response and grew to be one of the most successful campaigns in the history of social media. Another example is that of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign on the internet which not only earned him a tremendous amount of campaign money as well the popularity that made him President.

With the help of these fascinating illustrations and captivating videos, Mr. Nair enlightened the audience on the sheer power of social media as a tool for popularizing brands and addressing customers’ concerns.