Last year has seen businesses taking a significant move from traditional marketing to integrating Social Media into the marketing mix, almost all around the world and in every arena. And some predict that the year 2011 will be the year of the “Social Media Bubble”. Throughout last year we have also noticed how a number of Srilankan business too, making a move towards social media marketing. But are we just following the herd or are we actually making any marketing sense? Do you think that the local businesses embracing social media is due to the noise social media marketing has made globally or have they actually seen the huge potential in it?
As I mentioned before, this year (2011) has been foretasted as the year that Social Media will come forward and lead the way to marketing, PR and generally – how we run our businesses. So are we ready for this here in Sri Lanka?
I’ve observed that a couple of organizations were already looking for “Social Media Marketers” towards the latter part of last year. It’s not far that large companies would get serious about social media. What I mean getting serious about it is that they would actually hire a specialist in Social Media into their Marketing team, to say the least. Right now you would have noticed how many company Facebook pages exist already. What you may have also noticed that most of them are in Small and Medium . However, more and more big players are testing the Social Media waters and I’m not just talking about just a Facebook page. Social Media marketing is a whole different ballgame than just having a Facebook page and posting a status or a link.
Okay tell me how many of you have Facebook (among others) blocked at office? And why do you think its blocked? If you ARE allowed to go on Facebook at work, how long do you stay logged in and what would you be doing on it, typically? In my opinion, by the end of this year, most organizations would (or rather, should) unblock social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and might even encourage it, at least in the marketing department. You don’t believe it? All around the world, Social Media and SMM is being recognized as a necessary factor in business. And Srilankans, not too far behind the latest trends would not be far behind. So, let’s wait and see.
In point of marketing view , it will quite profitable for letting employees to get log on to FB,Hi5,LinkdIn etc.But in point of management significantly it will reduce the productivity of the employer.So what seem most profitable is to keep these kind of stuff blocked unless if they think it should have.
Unlike Japanese employees most of our Sril Lankan employees do not think about the increasing their own productivity unless it increases their monthly salary.At least if they start to think that “okay this is my company and I should do my best to keep it steady & growing , so then benefit will come back to me either direct or indirect or no matter if not ” It will be quite fair to consider about keep accessing to SN during office hours.
But what normally keep happening is management orders admin to keep block certain sites and what employs do is keep looking a way to sneak through firewall of the company.
what do u think ??
The SL corporates are starting to take SM as a serious medium of marketing. From a entirely business marketing stand point, SM allows companies to market to a focussed audience easily and effectively. This is the biggest plus of SEM as I see it. The effectiveness of the campaign vs cost.
The problem is that many corporates do not realise the work involved with SEM. They feel that like a paper advert or a TV commercial it will take care of itself, which unfortunately is not the case. You need to empower the users through this, the beauty of the web is that it allows you to interact. Without interaction, we may as well run the ads to monkeys.
Corporate and vendors still place SEM only as a “platform to connect with customers”. Actually, I think the best model is Pizza hut (International). They have an app on FB that allows users to place orders directly from FB, thats crazy thinking. The strenght of SM is the time people invest on it, and without trying to divert them from that it makes more sense to keep them their and feed them your marketing lines as well.
I think SL will probably be about another 6 to 12 months before we move forward to that extent. But I think we are all taking a step in the write direction!