Brand Recall

“Whaaaaa??? You are not on Twitter?”

“Nope! I have heard it all the time. Twitter is not just online anymore. I get to read tweets from celebrities on every newspaper”, my boss said looking at me without raising his head.

“Yeah! Almost all newspapers have a twitter beat now”, I said with total abandon. Half the newspapers waste environment by printing SRK’s tweets without realizing that almost all of their readers have already read them online.

“So what is it? How does it work? I am feeling archaic about this Social Networking thingy!” said my boss, now lifting his face.

It was a difficult and awkward moment in one. Probably he was genuinely interested. Or he just wanted to humor me and understand how I work. But none the less, I took the bait.

The discussion started with me trying to explain to him why it was important for our brand to go online and ensure that we ‘listen’ to our customers. I even shared with him a print-out (fml – If you don’t understand what it means, click here of the article by Rameet Arora on Afaqs!

“So, Twitter & Facebook are social networking sites. They are not alone. There are more like Orkut, myspace etc. You can create your profile and get connected with your friends through these sites.”

“How does it help me? I am anyway connected with them otherwise!”

“But boss, your status update or comment will reach all of them at the same time – provided they are also online. You can comment about almost anything under the sun. And that’s where the importance of brands being online comes in.”

“How?”

“See, I will just give you an example. Hippo – a snack food brand from Parle Foods decided to get information about stores where the snack is not available so that they can fill the shelves immediately. They used Twitter as the medium to get the info and went online to commit that they will fill the shelves of all stores where people claim that Hippo wasn’t available. They started receiving responses from people across the country – from more than 25 cities. Hippo got this information free of cost. They outsourced the demand gauging exercise to the customer itself. They crowdsourced it.”

“What? All this online?”

I was just getting excited. Totally warmed up!

“Yeah boss! There are enough cases on how we can use online platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to further the cause of the brand.”

“How?”

“Twitter for instance is a medium where you air your thoughts within 140 characters, but Facebook, Orkut or Myspace doesn’t have such a restriction and also works differently. You can create fan pages on Facebook to provide and receive information. It has now become a two way communication model. Gone are the days when you just made a creative, carpet bombed it and waited for the best results. We are fast moving towards a period where you will make a product, put it up in the market and get the result of customer acceptance by the next day, if not the same evening. Hippo is just one such case.”

“Wow! Show me a plan on social media. And I like this piece about ‘listening’ to the customer. What did you say is your twitter username?”

“err… Sir…”

There goes my only source for venting! My boss-bashing on Twitter stops with immediate effect!

Note: This is an attempt to use a different format to put my thoughts across. After all, this is a writing attempt and it is only fair that I try different styles. Comments would be very welcome! Note: psst… I generally don’t boss-bash on Twitter. I have other vents

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