Social Media Week In Mumbai

Social Media Week was held in Mumbai on 22nd-26th September. I was invited by Blogadda to attend the events on day two. With almost 1000 events taking place in 11 cities and 9 countries and with around 3000 speakers confirmed, Social Media 2014 was the world’s most culturally diverse and geographically distributed conference of its kind.

I was able to attend only three sessions on the day two of the social Media week and the most interesting of them all were the sessions on Food blogging and Pinterest.

Pinterest is the photo-sharing medium widely used to create engagement with the reader by the impressions you make. Pinterest does not link boards to other social platforms unless it is mentioned with targeted key words, phrases. To improve the traffic to the business, a great variety of boards can be created using tags/titles. Linking the business account with the impression makes a huge difference.

Pinterest is most popular social networking website because it is used more by women.

A small film was shown during this session in which women were shown pursuing their interest in painting and handicraft. The hobby projects are very inspiring to women and it helps connect people with the retailers through attractive images. Women get inspired to share their activity on social media, interact and improve their performance.

Everybody wants to know the stories behind the trends, Pinterest allows you to show your interest in images, you could benefit better if the proper research is done to understand the market and use it to your best advantage. Use hash tags that make sense. It could work best by promoting photo contest and maintaining interaction. You could solve problems for people by offering consultation.

It is better to use your own images to present your own idea instead of picking others images. You can pin the images you like to broaden your theme of interest.

Personally speaking, Social media has played a very important role in helping me sell my book. I created a board on Pinterest with the hash tag and it has reached a wider audience.

The other day, I met a face Book friend at Durgamata pandal, and she congratulated me on my recent published cookbook on Sindhi Cuisine.

My #SindhiCuisine was published two months ago. Neither did I have a formal book launch with popular food chefs as chief guest, nor any live cooking demonstration in front of audience. I just used social media to promote my book and it was an instant success.

U-tube is the personal visual channel and this plays an important role in spreading your idea. One must learn to use it productively.

Not just images, the content is also important to convey your idea. The session on food blogging was focused on how to be a good blogger. “Food blogging gives a thrill of instant connect with readers when you get feedback” said Rushina Munshaw, who conducted the session on food blogging.

Bloggers are becoming powerful because they are the media who promote brand with honesty and sincerity. The key to writing a blog is to create interaction. Blogging can also lead to some issues in negative manner. Handling of sensitive issues is important because people forget and move on to trending issues. Lots of things will change in future, people will pay for performance and if you are not able to be sincere and honest, you could lose your audience.

Rushina Munshaw’s session was more focused on how to be a successful blogger. Food blogging should be original and true to the heart, she said. People come to your blog to read your story and your thoughts. Your blog should reflect your originality and personality. It does not serve the purpose if you plagiarize other people’s content. Blogging is the conversation you have with your readers; you can add anecdotes, summary and surprising statements to keep the readers interested.

Another session on ’14 Social Trends’ discussed the rich informative journalism. It falls under 3T: Tools, Talent and Context. Content is the king and context is definitively the queen. TV and print media is still going strong in spite of twitter, Face Book and other social media but there will be revenue generation on line too. It is important to stay connected with social hanger that is based on real time insight driven by cognitive computing which is basically talking to web. All social media are interconnected through social data and sensors from roads, cars and other transport that give real time graphic data. 

Social trends are all about delivering right content at right time.

 We are the media. We have a voice. We can learn to use it to our best advantage.