_____________________________________________________ _________
Social Media Consulting, Architecture & Delivery
SOCIAL MEDIA – DEFINITION
Social media is any vehicle which fosters community building through content sharing and
collaboration. The processes, tools and technologies of social media facilitate creation and sharing of
user-generated content (UGC) in a way that simultaneously begets collaboration and individuality.
People: Interactions between people in social groups constitute social media, wherever they live, work
and socialize, online and offline. Social media is triggered by a few knowledgeable and trusted people.
Their views, creations (UGC) and friends attract others to follow and interact with them out of sheer
self-interest. The search for valuable information, access to experts, control over their experiences,
choice of self-expression and chance to influence others drive interactions on social media.
Events: Social interactions are created in private activities on-ground, like 1-to-1 discussions, parties,
outings, training, projects, etc and formal events like classes, seminars, weddings and shows. Shared
experiences, tastes, opinions and actions, as much as the content, attract people to form interest
groups that foster themselves through word-of-mouth evangelism.
Internet: Interest groups and their evangelism are formalized by a family of internet tools and
technologies, known as Web 2.0, which automate, facilitate and host communities and their content on
web-based platforms. Formal Web 2.0 social media falls into one of two broad categories as follows:
1. Content Sharing: Blogs, podcasts, videocasts, widgets, wikis, and various other forms of user-
generated content (UGC). Each technology encourages the sharing of information, whether
through comments in the case of blogs and podcasts, photos and discussions in the case of
wikis, or entire applications in the case of widgets.
2. Community Building: Social networks and other forms of networks, on-line communities,
message boards, focus groups, support forums. Each technology encourages users to form
relationships and collaborate with other users who may know each other, or may be connected
through other users in the network or even strangers who share common interests
Mobile: Interest groups and their evangelism are also formalized by closed-user-groups (CUG) and
tools of mobile telephony. Web-mobile applications like Twitter add richness, currency and relevance to
social media platforms. Mobile social media facilitates and accelerates volume and speed of
transactions, content sharing and communication.
WHY SOCIAL MEDIA
Across 300 diverse enterprises covered by Aberdeen Research in USA, companies with best-in-class
participation in social media reported the following performance gains over the previous 12 months:
1. 95% improvement in marketing effectiveness
2. 90% improvement in visibility into consumer-generated content
3. 80% improvement in ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment)
Participation in social media helps marketers meet consumers on their own turf, join their
conversations, become a trusted presence in their community and thus leverage their voices, i.e. word-
of-mouth, with precision, scale and speed. Social media not only helps marketers get the right message
to the right people, but also to invite them to share the message in a way that enhances the credibility,
transparency and authenticity of the brand.
Hence, marketers need to move beyond extending reach and awareness to active engagement, by
embedding their brands into the social experience of consumers. “Share of Voice” is a more potent
metric than ever to drive market share when it refers to “Voice of the Consumer” in social media.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________