Panel Discussion: Future of Digital Businesses and Innovations in Social Media

New age enterprises have started taking social media as a strong link between the message, what they want to convey and the audience, to whom the message is to be conveyed. Social media has opened up new avenues of communicating and linking with the target audience; there are so many things which are being experimented upon on social media platforms, things which would never have been on the face of conventional media vehicles. Brands have begun to realise that they can be made or broken by way of social media.

A trend which has emerged is in the field of advertising. Big-time corporate firms have shifted a lot of their advertising and other promotional expenditure to online, digital and social platforms; this is not only frugal in its approach but also very high on penetration. What the social media has also done is that it has made content very entertaining and engaging, having positive ramifications. From the business perspective, this had led to an increasing involvement of social media in key strategic business functions and more prima facie, customer engagement functions.

For individuals and potential consumers, all support and engagement activities come at the cost of privacy. According to Ms. Sweta Sharma, COO and co-founder, Simplify360, "there has been a marked rise in instances of targeted adverts and big data, but the customer is not aware of that." We, as individual entities and consumers, have begun "inventing and re-inventing ourselves" on a digital platform. In light of these rapidly occuring changes, the key is in synchronising the evolution of individuals and consumers with the evolution of social media and the information available. In words of Mr. Thennavan Subbiah, Head, Digital Marketing, Adobe, "the challenge [here] is to utilise the information available and identify what matters to the customers."

The most important point that the panel members reiterated was the importance of content. The key to success of any business in the social media scenario lies majorly in the quality and focus of content; as Mr. Anant Goenka, Director and Head-New Media, Indian Express Limited, put it aptly, "Content is the King, Queen and Jack of social media."

In nuce, the fact is that social media is here to stay. With all its dynamism, social media has a lot to offer. Therefore, it can and should be leveraged by businesses in their future endeavours.

This post was written by Jayesh Surisetti, PGP 2013-15. He can be reached at pgp13082.jayesh@iimraipur.ac.in