Web 2.0 In The Corporate World

Web 2.0 has spread widely among the internet community over the past five years and the social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace boast about more than 100 million users per month. Imagine how easy it is to have a mere 1% of that traffic referred to your site and the sales reaching the peak. These networking tools are more for consumer engagements and interactions. These should not be perceived as sales tools. Corporate companies have already noted the intense strength of these technologies that they are now becoming keen to adopt.

Why corporate are not ready to adopt this latest technology as they have adopted ERP and CRM?

• Corporate companies are too conservative and the fear of transparency which Web 2.0 offers makes them take the back seat
• Organizational structure and the lack of knowledge of managers to understand the new trend. Executives feel suspicious and uncomfortable and perceive such changes as taking unwanted risk
• Unless a quantitative measure is shown these corporate companies will not like to deploy
• They will not like to discuss about their clients or vice-versa openly and honestly as they feel they have bad competitors
• Implementation of Web 2.0 does not require much time, but to implement it and to participate in it requires the interaction of the larger workforce

These Web 2.0 tools are easy to implement but inherently disruptive and can challenge an organization and its culture. These interactive tools can be used strategically across the organization internally or externally to tap the unused potential. Corporate leaders should understand that this technology helps their business, employees and of course their customers as this provides a channel for broader collaboration, broader communication, instant and fair solutions to their problems and issues, to get feedback and opinions and helps community building. This in turn will help corporate leaders in generating new ideas and strategies and to take important decisions quickly and wisely.

L K Advani a la Obama?

I do not have much interest in writing on politics or giving my opinion on the elections outcome. But, when I came across a banner of Shri LK Advani / BJP on one of the websites when I was browsing, I was intended to click on it and see what is in it. Next, it made me anxious to know his presence in online and social media.

Looking at the past there was no role of marketing or online strategies for the campaigns. And now, the advantages of leveraging social media and internet technology to connect directly with people has not gone unnoticed and the bug has bitten our political parties. The political leaders are trying to ride on the internet technology wave especially to connect with the 100 million first-time voters who would start voting from this general election. But, the way Obama leveraged the social media and networking for online campaign, I guess Advani is trying to follow the same foot-steps (I mean only in online and social networking strategies). I was suprised that the first adopter to this social media is not the young leader Rahul Gandhi or Sachin Pilot, but the 81 years old — Shri. LK Advani.

I have read in a news article that Advani’s team has started with a Web 2.0 and blog, and now his team is leveraging YouTube, Facebook, Orkut and Google Adwords to reach out to the young voter.

However, what remains to be seen is whether he can pull it off the way Obama managed. I just want to have your check on the stats which I got for one of the news article. (Source: RWW)

Facebook: Obama has more than 5.4 million supporters and 570,000 plus wall posts.
YouTube: Obama’s YouTube address garnered nearly a million views.
Twitter: Obama sent out more than 260 Tweets to 144,000 "followers”, updating supporters on his whereabouts.
Other Online tools: The “My Barack Obama” community beautifully used online tools to organize offline activities and generate donations.

In shortl, Obama’s managed to raise $600 million from 3 million people, mainly through small contributions made online.

If we look at the stats of Advani’s team (Source: My own findings. The above numbers can be inaccurate):

Google Adwords: Search on Google for the keywords – Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, BJP, TDP, blog, elections, Narendra Modi, Manmohan Singh, Mayawati…may be more. You will see Advani’s ads linking it to his website or his blog. Suprisingly, they are not bidding on ‘Laloo Prasad Yadav’ as the keyword.
Website: His website is buzzing with activity. It has blog, discussion forum having more than 5000 posts, speeches and more. As soon as I went to the page there is welcome note from Advani (You need to have QuickTime plug-in to listen to it. The website does not has mp3 or mp4 audio). It has achieved an impressive Alexa ranking of 13,914 as on yesterday. A Google page rank of 4/10 for the home page. But no page rank yet for inner pages. The visitors traffic to the website is about 400,000 visitors in the last 30 days. Impressive numbers for a website to start with.
Blog: Has well written posts, but infrequent. The last post is dated February 1, 2009. And I see as on date, 122 comments posted here. I did not want to click and read the comments though.
Facebook:Has only 140+ supporters and not much activity happening.
Orkut: He has 531+ as supporters.
YouTube: His channel has 191+ videos and 82+ subscribers as of now.
Twitter: I read on one of the blog that Advani himself does not update the status but his support group does it. The profile used to say so. Ironically, this account was suspended on February 15, 2009 so I can’t provide the number of followers.

Nevertheless, a good beginning and I just imagine that many more Indian politicians engaging online with their voters in the near future. Also, I would love to chat with Laloo Prasad Yadav some time.

My question here is can Advani (or any political leader or party) gain similar support from Indian people who browse the web? Obama won the elections because he is Obama. By walking on the marketing tactics of Obama will not make Advani or anyone else the PM. Of course few net savvy guys may change their mind and vote for Advani, but the question will be how many? Next, Obama used the social networking for Americans. Advani is doing it for Indian audience.

Update on Mar 4, 2009: Oh God! After posting this on LK Advani, my whole blog is carrying his ads and banners. So, do click them and see what BJP has in store for us...

Corporate Blogs – Why the BIG BUZZ?

There are millions of blogs around and hundreds get launched daily. Currently Technorati tracks over 71 million blogs. More and more corporate are turning to blogosphere to connect with their prospects and customers. It is a good platform for them to listen to their prospects and customers and respond to them. In turn the customers also feel that they are being listened by a person and not auto-responders or IVRs. Blog is an effective access to the frustrations and desires of a company’s target audience.

Corporate and business folks are going towards blogs as:

• Blog is an effective media for brand awareness
• Blog is the fastest growing form of consumer generated media
• Blog can change the way a business interacts with customers
• Blog can engage your target audience and it is easy here to convert them as customers
• Blog as an effective media to put before what you have learnt and bring it to action
• Blog is the most economical way to promote the business – if you do it effectively and strategically
• You can also market your business through other blogs or asking other bloggers to write about your business and build company’s reputation and address criticism

The few hitches which can the corporate folks can have with a blog are:

• Finding a good blogger – should also be a part of the decision maker
• Should balance the sales push and information on the blog to build a loyal readership
• Negative comments/blogging (on other blogs) can occur and companies need to be ready to tackle such customers/bloggers

There is a very good tool which can be used to track other bloggers which write about your brand, comments being submitted on other blogs or social media websites. This tool is called Trackur. The internet has given a powerful voice to consumers, bloggers, forums and other internet users. You can arm yourself with Trackur's intelligent online reputation monitoring and you'll never get caught by a surprise attack on your good name. The good news is they also have a free trial.