Walk The Talk '09, The Lalith, Bangalore

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Last Saturday I was invited to a panel discussion on Social Media for entrepreneurs where I shared the dais with Professor Suresh Bhagavatula - IIM Bangalore, Sanjay Mehta - Founder & CEO of Social Wavelength, a Social Media Outsourcing company and Vijay Rayapati - Strategist at GizaPage.com.

The event called "Walk-The-Talk '09" was organized by the Bangalore Business Network and had awesome talks from various entrepreneurs.

The panel discussion started off with Sanjay (whom I met on Twitter) sharing some interesting statistics about social media & networks some of which are given below:

• Social Network has surpassed porn as the #1 activity on the net!
• Some timelines w.r.t. getting 5 million users are compared:
  
  
  • Radio: 38 years
  • Television: 13
  • Internet: 4 years
  • Ipod: 3 years
  • Facebook: Added 100 million users in less than 9 months
  • iPhone Apps: Hit 1 billion in 9 months

and for more such stats watch this AWESOME youtube video about the Social Media Revolution.


I started by emphasising on the parallels between the real world networking that entrepreneurs do, like in the current event we were all present & the online networks to increase it in size & speed. I talked about social media & networks mostly from a social CRM perspective, most of which I have already shared on this blog.

I used the threadless.com example to explain how a pure online company makes & sells awesome t-shirts by getting the community to submit & rate the t-shirt designs, pre-order the t-shirts so that threadless.com makes only as many t-shirts as required & how the customers are their biggest advocates since they take pictures of themselves posing in threadless.com t-shirts and thus eliminating the marketing costs too! Talk about customer co-creation & keeping the costs to the minimum!

I also shared a bit about how social media & networks affect the core functions of CRM - Marketing, Sales & Customer Service. And how it even goes beyond that into co-creating offerings & experiences with the customers (on being prodded by Prof. Suresh about Ram Charan's book about the same).

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Someone in the audience said that they did not understand how can a site where people talk about what they ate for breakfast can help in building a business & I, rather than taking the examples of Comcast or Jetblue, etc., told of my own experience in networkin in Twitter, where I have nearly 2000 people following me & follow a bit more than half as much. I get to learn so much from them, and that alone is worth the effort! Others agreed to it & took it as a great insight.

Sanjay explained about the 4 Ps of social media & I explained about our three phase approach of Listen-Engage-Influence that is supported by Measure & Analyze at all the stages.

At the end of the panel discussion, that overran the time limit by a bit, Mr. Tarun Hukku presented us mementos (no, momento is actually a misspelling, but its quite common and thus some sources refer it as a proper spelling). BTW, in the picture it seems as if I am presenting it to Tarun. ;)