SOCIAL MEDIA

Now a day's social media has evolved and legacy brands are doing much more to stay ahead
in the game. but the trends that would have never been born or flourished had the world not
decided to go social.
five areas where social brands hit like a miracle:-
Connected Cameras
Generally the first thought is about sharing its picture on Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat.
Because the experience is nothing without witnesses. On Facebook-owned Instagram the over
95 million photos and videos uploaded every day, get over 4.2 billion likes daily. The age of
selfies, though the selfie has been in existence since the 19th century, could not have
happened without social media. Phone cameras are getting smarter and sharper. Its far easier
to make videos: there are even action cameras like GoPro, SJCam etc that specialise in
capturing hard to capture moments and easier still to broadcast in real-time with Facebook
Live, Instagram videos and Twitters Periscope.
EMOJIFICATION
Tweet a pizza emoji to get a pizza from Dominos wins a Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes.
With Facebook incorporating a range of emojis as a way of responding to news and status
updates, we dont need to spell out who won that debate. Emojis are a handy short form of
communicating complex thoughts that would otherwise require a lot of verbiage. They are a
quick dodge for situations where words fail us. For brands, this has been a convenient and
easy bandwagon to hop aboard.
MUSIC
Music-streaming that changed the notes of the industry. Once upon a time there were LPs,
then came cassettes, then CDs, then MP3 players and then there were none Ask todays
generation about any of these and chances are theyre likely to stare back blankly. Customer
changed at a breakneck speed, the industry forgot to keep pace. People wanted the music but
they stopped paying for it. Apples over-exuberance on iTunes started looking weaker,
because music streaming started gaining traction.
CROWDFUNDING
Its hard to imagine just how the people, bands and projects that got crowd funded would
have managed to get the money in a world before social media. We are guessing it would
require a lot of begging, persuasion, more than a few doors slammed in faces and a rapid
decline in ones social equity. All thats changed with social networks and their aggregation
of fans and interest groups. Projects can possibly be funded by a previously unimaginable
number of people, securing previously unimaginable amounts of money. The poster child for
crowd funding, Kick-starter, began operations in 2009 and within a year made it to Time
magazines list of 50 best inventions of 2010. On offer: a chance to connect with fans, get
their money in return for unique personalised rewards.
GAMES
When Niantics servers couldnt handle Pokemon Gos unprecedented popularity around the
world. Were all gamers, often mindlessly, post to collect likes, friends, followers, and
whatnot. We arent competing against others, we are competing against ourselves. Constantly
tracking and breaking records. Social media, aided by the explosive proliferation of
smartphones, has a major role to play in the gamification of everything - from life, its
milestones and dating to education, scientific research on diseases like AIDS and cancer,
saving the planet (points for conserving energy) and charities. Naturally, marketers have been
applying principles of gamification to their endeavours to grab attention and consumer
patronage. John Boitnott describes gamification as the practice of synthesizing the best ideas
from gaming, loyalty programs and behavioural economics, with the aim of driving user
engagement over indifference.
 EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA
social media has evolved over the years slowly and gradually. 15 years ago in 2001 One of
the worlds most popular websites, Wikipedia was launched. With average 800 new articles
per day, receives approximately 58% of the sites cumulative traffic as of January 2016. In
2002, a portmanteau of friend and Napster, the Kuala Lumpur based social gaming site
suspended services in 2015.
Down the line in 2003, HI5 launched getting highest number of users from India, mostly
male college graduates, according to Alexa. And came MYSPACE, Having shifted its focus
to music, traffic hit 50.6 million unique viewers in November 2014, up 575% from the same
month in 2013.
In 2004, came THE FACEBOOK , Al Pacinos face was on the original Facebook homepage.
Along with ORKUT & FLICKER, where ORKUT having Brazil and India as its biggest
markets once. Owner Google killed the platform in 2014 after it failed to keep up with rivals
like Facebook.
In 2005, came revolutionary YOUTUBE, 1 billion users, thats almost one-third of all people
on the Internet. With local versions in more than 88 countries; YouTube is navigated in a total
of 76 different languages. And then THE FACEBOOK turned up into FACEBOOK later 2005
with 1.65 billion monthly active users / 1.51 billion mobile monthly active users {as of
March 31, 2016.
In 2006, came TWITTER, with 310 m monthly active users. A total of 139 world leaders
have accounts. The top two leaders on Twitter are the US President Barack Obama 76
million followers & PM Narendra Modi 21.2 million followers.
In 2007, came TUMBLER , Yahoo-owned micro-blog and social media site Tumbler
launched its live video feature in June this year to compete with Facebook Live and Twitters
Periscope, among others.
In 2009, came WHATSAPP, Founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, acquired by Facebook
in 2014. The messaging app has been downloaded over 1 billion times on Android by people
in 109 countries. In 40% of adulterous divorce cases in Italy, WhatsApp texts are submitted
as evidence of infidelity.
In 2010, came INSTAGRAM, Acquired by Facebook in 2012, the photo-sharing site that has
made us all fancy ourselves Henri Cartier-Bresson hit the 500 million user mark in June this
year.
In 2011, came SNAPCHAT, Snapchat is increasingly introducing features that let you save
messages for posterity. With 10 billion daily video views in May 2016. Thats more than
Facebooks 8 billion and 150 million daily active users more than Twitters 140 million.
 BULDING A SOCIALLY RELEVANT BRAND
Back in 2008, during the early days of social media Twitter was just 2 years old and
Facebook had opened its membership to all only in 2006, it was not even thought of that a
brand can be socially build. It was tough to think about building an audience, only what
brands wanted was a ready audience for their views. It was hard to invest time in finding an
audience for brand beyond physical presence. These days, social is an extension of what
brands already do using media in general yet another channel to talk about themselves. And,
use one or more social media channels to pull an Oreo. Awkwardly enough, the real social
relevance happens far beyond the brands or its agencys office. And thats nothing new either
people have always spoken about brands, their products, advertising, communication, stand
on select topics, price, availability etc amongst themselves, for many years. Now, they also
speak online and the word travels much faster. And since brands have always wanted to be
talk-worthy, besides being just buy-worthy (because the former helps in recall, which in turns
aids in the latter) social media was seen as a natural extension in talk-worthy efforts. But
what most brands forget is that social media is perhaps the first ever massively scaled up
communication channel that is truly democratic where people to talk back to brands, while
the whole world watches. This changes everything, quite literally. Because, now brands have
to communicate by being fully aware of how people may react, and not just whether they will
buy. To know how people may react, brands need to be amongst people, listening to them,
learning from them, talking to them. And that makes brands not just part of the media
spectrum, but also a media vehicle, by themselves. Some brands have learnt this already. Like
Red Bull, for instance. While most brands are merely scratching the surface, and exploiting
only the broadcast nature of social media, without realising that while they are broadcasting,
people are talking amongst themselves about the broadcast. Chief Social Officer ensures that
a brand is socially relevant. Anything that goes on any social channel owned by the brand, on
behalf of the brand paid or organic, reactive or proactive goes through the Chief Social
Officers team. If the company is a 5-star hotel chain and PR team is expected to know food-
related journalists, the Chief Social Officers team is expected to know food bloggers, recipe
bloggers social handles and opinions of people in the industry bodies that track hotels besides
customers who talk more often about hotels online. Chief Social Officer is that person who
needs to confidently walk up to the middle of the road and talk to complete strangers who
have an opinion about her brand. She should be loud enough that others hear and add their
point of view. While she is doing that, a HR person from her organisation walks to the road
and starts telling strangers about how their workplace policies. And a marketing person walks
into the same road and asks anyone who cares to buy their services. Chief Social Officer and
her team needs to ensure that they say things in a manner that is appropriate for the brands
personality. Seems like a tough ask, building social brand. But then, being socially relevant is
a tough job because we are all brands, and us people sitting with megaphones in our hands.