Social Media Week: A larger canvas to our thoughts and expressions!!

Today we are living in a world of “Social Media”.

In Today’s world we cannot imagine our existence without our presence in a virtual world where we create, communicate and share/exchange our thoughts, Information or ideas through computer-mediated tools called as social media.

Social Media are nothing but a group of internet based applications build on the ideological and technological foundation that enable us to communicate with different people beyond any geographical boundaries.

To be honest the Evolution of Social Media in recent years actually has revolutionaries the “traditional Human Communication processes” that dominated over a long period of time. It has given voice to the voiceless, speech to the speechless, sound to the hearing-impaired narrowed the distance between the powerful and powerless by giving them a same platform to communicate.

From 16^th November 2015 to 20^th November 2015, a five day Digital Extravaganza by “Social Media Week - a leading news platform and worldwide conference that curates and shares ideas, innovations and insights how social media and technology are changing business, society and culture around the world – took place in the heart of Mumbai

 Over the week, Mumbaikars as well as social media enthusiasts from other parts of India got a chance to hear speakers from different genres including Media, Entertainment, Advertising, Travel and Food at Social Media Week Mumbai #SMWMumbai.

I was fortunate to attend the same conference in Day5 on 20^th November 2015. Here is my take on it…

Session #1
The session began with 

IS SOCIAL ADVERTISING REALLY TAKING OVER TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING?

 and The Speaker was

Joy Paul – Chairman and Chief Creative Officer, BBDO

There is no “Versus”, there is only Us. It’s not social Vs Traditional. It’s traditional to the power of social…that’s how he started with.

His speech was around the point that “social media is not an alternative to traditional media as far as advertising is concerned. In fact both are complementary to each other. His way of promoting a product is through acts and just advertisements. Because as per him, Acts are commitments where as ads are just conversations. Promotion of any product is more influential when acts are created by creating platforms for them rather creating slogans”.

He talked about a case study about advertising on Gilette and how it helped the brand to grow among audience and another case study on Whisper’s #TouchThePickle campaign for the end of the Period taboo that was quite effective and successful. A very interesting session it was. Smart campaigning strategy. 

Session #2

Can social media exist as an island, what happens when integrated?

The panelists were:

Deepak Sharma – Executive Vice President &Head. Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd.  

Pranayesh Singh - Heads Social Intelligence, Accenture

Ram Subramanian - Internet Artist, Writer & Director, Handloom Picture Company

Uma Talreja - Director Strategy, Raymond Ltd

Nitish Tipnis - Director-Marketing & Sales (Nissan) , Hover Automotive India Ltd

It was quite an insightful session. There was some amazing information like Kotak Mahindra was the first bank globally to connect Twitter with banking i.e. twitter banking,

The insights of this session was, We are a country which is going to become the 2nd largest country in the world to use internet - 400 million users, so if any brand try to encase the profitability to have committed consumers, then they can’t ignore “Social media”. Also they have to focus on at human level contact, transparency in services without any hidden agenda, authentic and credential claims and look for more and more innovative ways of communication as it is a large two way communication platform.

The Most Interesting and exciting Session was on

IS SOCIAL MEDIA SHAPING JOURNALISM FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE?

The discussion was held by a power packed panel consisting of: 

Sidharth Bhatia - Journalist, Writer & Founder/Editor, TheWire.in

Arnab Goswami - Editor-in-Chief, Times Now

Dhanya Rajendran - Managing Edito, thenewsminute.com

BV Rao – Editor,Firstpost

Sruthijith KK - Editor in chief, HuffingtonPost India (Moderator)

As expected the crowd seemed most excited as Arnab Goswami was on the dice. In fact on a lighter note I must say, no one can Moderate Arnab. He is as usual very firm on his opinion.

Well coming to the point, it seemed as if all four other than Arnab spoke in support of the motion that Journalism is changing through Social media and digital media is certainly invading in the reign of traditional media. Arnab was firm on his opinion as TV journalism has broken the paradigm of journalism. Social Media has nothing to change in it. Since 2010, particularly times now has taken an aggressive way of throwing news in way to make people consume it.

However I feel a bit differently. Of course traditional journalism that includes TV and Print media are quite a powerful medium and dominated journalism since years and Social Media is at present at a very early stage. But even if there has been some spectacular achievement in breaking stories in recent years, traditional journalism is still remain a “one way communication”. Also they still don’t have a reach the remote places of India (villages) irrespective of their resourcefulness. How many cases they’ve broken that happened in interior areas?

These days TV or print journalism is no more just giving news, they are in fact giving their views and that to agenda based. They are in fact imposing their opinion on public on certain instances. As rightly pointed by Dhanya Rajendran - Managing Editor, www.thenewsminute.com, there has been some selectiveness also. I mean ignoring similar instances in other part of country when an incident is trending.

Actually there is a large gap between traditional journalism and the people which can be invaded by Social/digital media by giving voice to more and more people. For the traditional media Opinion of common people doesn’t matter but I think “Opinion of people matters most in a healthy democracy”. Social Media had democratized journalism and even if Digital media is less resourceful I think they can really make a Change in journalism the way it is done today.

The other sessions were too insightful and informative giving a broader vision of “pros and cons” of social media.

It was a great day with much insightful learning. Social Media Week was where the intellectuals gathered together to discuss Social Media as a larger canvas to our thoughts and expressions. A great day of my life.

It was co-sponsored by TATA MOTORS and I had my#madeofgreat moment with none other than Lionel Messi – The Global Brand ambassador Of TATA Motors.

(There was also a Creative Writing workshop "SPINNING CONTENT – WRITING FOR THE WEB" Conducted by Blogadda in the first part of the day. To Read My post CLICK HERE)