Delhi lad Clinton Jeff starts his day with Gmail, followed by postings on Twitter and Facebook, a couple of breaks for lunch and coffee, with a hard day's work ending on Flickr, YouTube and his personal blog. Keeping up with a few close friends, several hundred followers and several more readers can be quite exhausting, but doing it as part of his company's business strategy is a totally different scenario.

But hey, he's not complaining. After all, working extensively on these social media websites is earning Clinton, head of Strategy, Blogger's Mind, a social media agency, his monthly pay packet!

What is social media?
The consensus is that social media refers to any online portal, community, technology or software application that is deployed or created to disseminate, manage, organise, share and reuse content both textual and graphic.

Social media is relevant to any company whose audiences participate in or are influenced by online discussions," says Jeremy Woolf, the Global Social Media Practice Lead for Text 100, a PR consultancy based in New York, with offices across the globe, including India.

Bloggers' Mind created the hugely popular "Search for N" campaign for the Nokia N97 cellular phone and the "Tag Your Music" Facebook activity for Nokia India's Music Page. Bloggers' Mind is a 'Word of Mouth' and 'Conversation Analytics' company basically, it helps companies to read, understand and analyse conversations taking place online on their products.

Targeting a new audience
Mid-sized book publisher Tulika Books caters to a new section of their audience the Facebook generation. Malarvizhi Jayant, Online Editor of Web & Social Media for Tulika, says, "We announce new books, continue discussions about older publications, discuss issues of literacy and reading, share news, collect reviews of Tulika's books. The goal is to tell more people about Tulika, the kind of books we publish, and have a communication channel open to fans."

Read More...