The Circle of Influence – Social Media

The Circle of Influence – Social Media

On 5th August 2011, mild afternoon with cool environment “Blogversary 2011” celebrated with grand manner by Knowledge Management Team of Cognizant.

Tagline for Conference was very impressive “I blog! therefore I am”.

I registered to attend this function and promptly sat in the auditorium by 2:00 pm. Rajshree Natarajan,Vice President welcomed the audience.

Manikandan Phisarody, Senior Manager, Knowledge Management provided the statistics of Blog journey in Cognizant from 2006 to 2011.  If anyone want to write a History of Cognizant, Ch1blogs will play a major role, and the pattern of thinking of our associates can be easily tracked.

Dorai Thodla, CEO of Imporph Inc, popular in Social Media ,Student Community and Entrepreneurs world. He is also Board of Director of Knowledge Community, Chennai (kcommunity.ning.com) . He is prolific speaker and the coverage provided by him on social media was excellent.

The topic of his address was “Leveraging Social Media” . Very intersting topic and excellent to hear his speech with seriousness, personal experience and humor. The attendees were so serious like me in hearing the talk.

The following are the important points shared by Dorai Thodla :-

Social Media :- Why, Who, What, How

What is Social Media :-

Share and Engage is the primary thought behind Social Media.

Tools of Social Media :

– Blogs

– Social Networks ( Linkedin,Facebook,Twitter, Google+)

– Social Bookmarks (delicious)

– Social News ( Reddit, Hacker News)

-Question and Answer ( Quora, Stackoverflow)

-WIKIs ( Public, Industry)

-Sharing Networks ( Youtube, Slideshare, Scribd)

 With the above tools, I have personally experienced the influence of Blogs, Social Networks and WIKIS are really sharing and engaging in larger manner.  

Why Social Media :-

Engaging by both Inbound and Out bound.

INBOUND ( Consume) :- In today’s information overload, we are consuming lot of information through media.

Why we consume ?

         – Competitor Intelligence

         – Market Intelligence

         – Industry Intelligence

         – Reasearch

        – Tracking Trends

        – Discovering possible disruptions

        – Detecting Weak signals

OUTBOUND (Produce) :- As everyone of us know, everyday tons of content are produced in different forms.

Why we need to produce ?

      – Credibility

      – Transparency

      -Mass Reach

      – Evangelism

     – Influence

     -Authority ( showcasing expertise )

 How can we use Social Media ?

          – Evangelise

          – Listen

          – Educate

          – Entertain ( Tell Stories )

          – Engage ( Build Connections )

          – Establish ( Showcasing expertise)

          – Gain Influence

 More Information on Social Media :-

Linkedin Group – Future of Social Media

Association of Social Media

Sniki Wiki? Social Networking WIKI ( Share, Compare or Leverage Social Media)

Sniki Wiki  is a categorized encyclopedia of Web 2.0. It includes social networks, social marketing campaigns, a comprehensive list of companies that utilize social media, bloggers, and freelancers

 Tip :- Relevance drives Influence . Find the influencers who matter most to you.

Analysis of Tweets : “Engaging News Hungry Audiences Tweet by Tweet: An audience analysis of prominent mainstream media news accounts on Twitter” –

http://blog.socialflow.com/post/7120243870/audience_study

Trends can derive from Social Media:-

– Social Data Aggregation

– Social Graph

– Big Data and Predictive Analysis

Book recommended by Dorai ( not on Social Media) : Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, Founder of Zappos

At the end, I feel very happy to attend this session ,  enriched knowledge and enabled many thoughts on Social Media.

Thanks to Cognizant KM Team for this wonderful event.