Social Networking for Success at PanIIT 2009

Posted by Pradeep Chopra

at October 9, 2009

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Christopher S. Rollyson (Consultant and Marketing Executive), the moderator of this very interesting and relevant session welcomed the audience. He started his talk by saying that Social Networks are causing disruption in the way the business is done today. The key reason behind this disruption is the fundamental nature of Social Networks - “relationship” is critical to any decision making. Today, customers expect companies to start communicating through Social Networks. And, “Word of Mouth” is highly pervasive and digital today.

Social Networking not just offers an opportunity for Sales & Marketing but also for various other business functions such as Recruitment, Customer Feedback etc.

We now have Clara Shih, the author of The Facebook Era. She led the Salesforce.com’s formal partnership with Facebook. The title of Clara’s presentation is “Networking in the Facebook Era”. The importance of Facebook can be estimated by the no of active users on Facebook today – over 300 million users spending more than 6 billion minutes every day. Today, Facebook has really gone mainstream – the greatest growth on Facebook is among the people in the age of 35 – 49 and more than Women than Men.

Mark O Goodman, director of Social Networking and Augmented Reality at Alcatel –Lucent is our next speaker. He highlighted some of the projects his company is doing:

1. Video Mobile Social Networking Tool (with Penn State University)

2. Augmented Reality (with Georgia Tech) - take graphics and overlay them on real world

He also shared how actively Social Networking is being used internally at Alcatel-Lucent for day to day activities.

Kevin P. Rice (Director, Social Networking Solutions at Allstate) is our network. He talked about “Good Hands Community” [http://www.goodhandscommunity.org/aghhome], which offers “together you can share ideas about keeping families safe, saving money and preparing for what’s next”. He also shared how Allstate is actively engaged on Social Networks

The final message he said was “don’t just depend upon online world”; “P” of People is still very important and can’t be substituted by any other medium.

Joseph Paulsen, SVP Marketing Analytics at Experian Marketing Services is our next and the last speaker. He shared how his company helps clients understand their customers from sales data and sophisticated analytics (including social media data). He emphasised on the importance of the “online reputation” for any business, which is serious about leveraging Social Media for its growth.

The session was concluded by a highly interactive Q & A session. Interestingly, this (and other panel discussions) was the first sessions which could accommodate Q & A.