Today I had given a presentation (guest session) at Beroe Inc a Market Research company on how to leverage Social Media for marketing and research purpose. The session started with a video on ‘Social Media’ followed by introduction to social media marketing, Indian social media scenario and over view of the best marketing and usage practices for Research companies.

The audience included Research Analysts, Account Managers, Content Developers, HR and other officials of the company. Overwhelmed with the hospitality the session had amazing round of questions that every social media marketer must be in a position to answer.

Few Questions were:

1. Should Social Media Marketing be from company’s perspective or personal perspective?

My Answer: Social Media is for networking and personalization of your social efforts on web. Unless a company is a renowned company or globally recognized firm using a company’s name for activities or engagement may not obtain credibility as in approach by a person (the face of the company / on behalf of the company). It is essential to have mixture of both for different reasons:

1. Relationship:- Personal

2. Customer Service:- Company / Personal (If company approaches that gives customers a sense of satisfaction of being approached by “the company” directly)

It is also crucial to know from B2B perspective being personally approachable on Social Media is a better choice.

2. Apart from LinkedIn what are the other tools that we could make use of in Research (especially for targeting Europe Market)?

Ans: Xing and Viadeo are professional networking tools. It is essential to be an active German speaker to obtain a value from Xing. Whereas there are country specific tools such as Koolred targeting Malaysia, Xionei for China etc. I guess my post few months back on 240 social networking sites I admire can help research analysts obtain some more relevant sites.

3. What is your opinion on the Privacy Policy of Social Media? Does it limits to companies or customers also?

Ans: Many companies design limitations for its employee’s use of Social Media in relevant to share company’s information. Some companies do not prefer being active on Social Media or some have restrictions in sharing information such as: project wins, internal issues, process, business models, words agaihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnst team members or authorities etc. Doing so can penalize the employee or they can be rusticated from the job. Engaging with a company on Social Media mostly does not really hold any privacy policy for customers unless in case of Facebook applications where customers can prefer not to share the personal information or the usage of application with friends.

There were other interesting question in the session related to Social Media such as ROI, NGO and the relevancy etc.

Thanks to Mr. Sunil Ashwin Roy (Account Manager at Beroe) for humble hospitality and gratitude to Mr. Vel Dhinagaravel (CEO of Beroe) for giving an opportunity to share.

Photos of the event here:

Poster for Internal Promotion of the talk: