It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t used social sites like Facebook / LinkedIn these days, be it to connect with school friends or colleagues. However, when it comes to using social media for your small business/corporates/brands, most people only know about online advertising, i.e Facebook Ads/Google Adsense. Talk about using Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn to drive business and create brand awareness and people will look at you like you are a scam artist. If you are one of those, read further,this is for you (too)! :)
I firmly believe that the only way to know about Social Media is to be on Social Media and for me, this is where the #DVCamp workshops stood out. Yes, from my perspective, there were elements of “gyaan” to the sessions, presentations on why Social Media is a necessity now and such. However, for the most part, it was an interactive session where all participants got hands on experience with Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn and got to see the benefits real time. Kapil Nakra (@kapilnakra) and Bhaskar Thakur spent a good amount of time in getting people to actually use the tools. This was the key takeaway for me during my #DVCamp experience and this intersected well with my belief that to know is to use!
All the presentations/ case studies and how-to sessions were very interactive. In fact, there was even discussion around a participant’s company Facebook page, the problems it had and how it could be enriched. LinkedIn Profiles were created, how to identify hooks for your LinkedIn profile, how to go about increasing visibility and credibility on LinkedIn was discussed. Both, the technicalities of creating a Facebook Page/Ad for your brand and the challenge of creating a community for your brand were discussed. All these hands-on workshops added a very unique perspective to go with useful case studies that were presented as well.
They also have an extremely interesting format where the attendees split into groups and compete amongst themselves using Facebook as a petri-dish! Teams start off with a social media strategy session which involves a worksheet! Strange as it may seem, it was a great way to get people to focus on what are their key requirements from Social Media and to detail their engagement strategy for each medium. This was followed by creating groups on Facebook and actually going through the tasks identitified in the worksheet to drive users and engagement on the groups. I think this is a great way for people to really see what kind of questions, contests, content actually gets you more Fans/Likes/Comments/Users. Ultimately, depending on the business space you are trying to get “social” in, this entire excercise helped to identify what drivers one could track to gauge social media campaign effectiveness and what the focus points were.
The workshop I attended had an interesting mix of people with varying degrees of social media exposure, we had the complete newbies (love this tweet! http://twitter.com/amritplaha13/status/17456275411439616 ) to people with casual engagement levels with social media. However, the DV team worked with the entire group and got everyone to take to
it quickly, within the 2 days that I attended, which spoke volumes about the effectiveness of the program!
I polled some of the attendees in the group to gauge why people attended the workshop, this is what the participants had to say;
Founder of “Akar”, a packaging and containers company: “want to learn how social media can help me in the Packaging business… Want to reach out to the B2B industry through Social Media”
Anish Bajaj, Founder of “Marvel Infomedia”, publishing: “trying to understand social media as communiciation is moving rapidly through print to digital”
Amrit Plaha, Marketing, Crosswords Bookstores: “To form a social media strategy”
There were others from traditional marketing backgrounds, Airtel,Lintas, Zee (yes, the TV channel), even a pharmaceutical
company “Mission Vivacare”, that wants to use social media to explore B2C.
And their comments post the workshop;
Amrit Palaha : A must do for those unaware of how social media can be used to leverage brands!
Anish Bajaj: Great Bootcamp, a must for anyone who wants to run a relevant business in the future.
This is a very well structured workshop and the hands-on experience that the participants received with the guidance of the instructors/speakers, is definitely an excellent starting point if you are a business and just starting to get your feet wet with social media or are struggling with how to leverage SM for your business or brand!
Thanks to the DV team (Kapil, Pradeep and Bhaskar) for hosting me for the two days during the workshop!
More information about upcoming DV Camp’s can be found here. You can track SM chatter about DVCamp using #DVCamp.
