What, Why and How of Social Media

In my earlier post on my corporate blog  the changing face of Airline website  I discussed on various trends influencing future airline websites, as promised  will touch upon one of the trend – Use of Social Tools to engage with customers across the travel life cycle.

I will not try to delve upon what is social media, why is it important for business – There is enough reports and research out there trying to prove that we are getting more and more digital and social – Instead, I will let this Kodak video do the talking – This is a story on digital transformation of Kodak – how they changed and whatever exists at Kodak now, never existed couple of years back – So very true for any industry embracing digital, including Travel and Airlines -

There is third question which is of particular interest and we definitely need to spend time on is – How are we doing Social Media and Are we actually doing it right? These questions remind me of the 10 key lessons on Social Media, as perfectly summarized by Gavin (@servantofchaos) during one of the ad:tech events-

1. Don’t believe the hype
2. Use subtle branding i.e. you don’t want to appear lame
3. Social media is not free … You are putting your reputation on the line
4. Learn from other people’s mistakes
5. Be quick ..New ideas are only unique for a short time … It’s the zeitgeist baby!
6. They won’t come. You have to use social media
7. Constantly reinvent … Your social media beast develops a life of its own. Sounds like a teenager!
8. Keep path to trial simple
9. Understand how your audience uses social media
10. Be brave … Social media is not for the faint hearted

It will sound repetitive, however social media is important and is transforming Travel industry in more than one ways – As is rightly highlighted in the fact – More Americans are on Facebook than have Passports and many more as highlighted in the latest infographic from Tripl – a social travel site (Please refer to image towards end of the post)

While you enjoy these interesting facts, I will get on working for the next topic – how exactly are Airlines using Social Media (Read Facebook and Twitter!!)

English – Language of Problem solving!?

No wonder most of the products around are made in China …Watch this video to see how Chinese are rehearsing English …However it is interesting thought when Jay Walker says in his TED speech -

“…English is the world’s second language.Your native language is your life. But with English you can become part of a wider conversation. A global conversation about global problems. Like climate change or poverty. Or hunger or disease.The world has other universal languages.Mathematics is the language of science. Music is the language of emotions. And now English is becoming the language of problem solving…”

welcome back sid

Sid was out of action from virtual world …He stepped into Life Part II … Link

AIG – Brand destruction by social Media.

 

Above presentation  is a good case study on the Power of social media … Gone are the days when you can do “whatever” in real world and escape.  Watch out! there’s a conversation happening in the virtual world which is so very well connected and word spreads faster than you can think of … What are people talking about your brand?

Stumbled on this presentation via Laurel’s Blogpost on Reputation Annihilation in Social Media

Love the neat Visual stories at  VizEdu :)

Are you *IN LOVE*?

It didn’t work out for him in his first relationship. She told him

Dude, I loved you! However I was not *IN LOVE* with you!

 

I think – Organizations and CIOs who are embracing social media should realize this -

They can love social media, however to make it successful they will have to really be *IN LOVE* with social media

Hmmm, whatever that means! (Isn’t it true for anything and everything you do in life?? you got to be *IN LOVE* to make it successful)

Online censorship debate Goes to India

Seems like governments and legal bodies around the world are onto blogs and social media. Earlier it was Facebook Debate in Australia and this time it is India, where a boy is facing criminal charges for starting an orkut community against a political party (Times of India reports).  He landed up in this situation for there were hostile comments from anonymous users. Court denied protection to him saying -

…You are a computer student and you know how many people access internet portals…

Other than the usual debate of freedom of speech and expression of thoughts , interesting thing to note is that while in Australia Facebook was held responsible for a similar case, In India its the individual who is facing the heat. I feel they have simply caught the easy bait and got him scared. This also reminds me of  2004 MMS case when ebay CEO was arrested for sale of Porn CD on ebay. Google officials beware!! By the way I am wondering if there are any comments from Google. At the time of posting this blog I could not find anything either on orkut blog or Google Blog. It would be nice to hear something from them.

Who is really responsible? The Journalist or the newspaper? The user or the Orkut? The founder of the community or the anonymous commenter?

That Debate will go on … Its difficult to decide who should be held responsible for this, if it would have been a blog and his personal thoughts then it would have been easy to point fingers on him, however these cases of  un moderated online groups present a complicated case.

I haven’t seen the community nor the comments however I personally dont believe in this argument of defaming somebody through online blogs and comments, is there a real example of  defaming a genuine person or prodcut through blogs? Would really like to know such an example. This web world is unique in its sense of self regulatory system. Try blogging or posting bad about something which is really genuine and I am sure it will be followed by greater number of positive comments proving the  genuineness. So instead of reacting and initiating a criminal case against the boy, political party could have entered into positive debate and shown some courage to prove those comments to be wrong (If at all…!)

This article on Techtree covers Indian Bloggers’  comments on the issue.

TED in India and TED translation

Stephen Collins recently came back from the TED conference, and during our discussion around TED he mentioned two things which are worth sharing. So I did some googling to know more about following interesting news pieces  -

1. TED Global will be coming to india this year in November (Link)

2. TED Translation program – In March TED with support from NOKIA will be rolling out TED Translation program which,  So every TED talk will come with English Subtitles to it, which can be converted to other languages (including Hindi and Tamil) using the tool on website. Further they will open up the framework so that anyone in the world can translate the Talk into any language. Viola!! TED talks will be avaialble for everyone to get inspired …language will no longer be a barrier.

I was more interested in the second one for few weeks back  a friend of mine came up with this idea of making informative videos available in local indian languages. At that point of time we thought of  dubbing  TED talks in local languages.  Forget Dubbing! This open framework will make life very easy! little bit of search landed me up at another neat website called Dotsub – Any video any language! it says upload any video and help translate into any lanugages. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds neat. Check the following TED announcement video of TED translation program on Dotsub website (note the trnascript and the subtitles)

Good work TED!