Trading ideas virtually

You’ve started a company and want to use social media to market it. But apart from having a limited budget, you’re completely clueless about advertising online. In times like these, wouldn’t it be awesome to have someone help you reach your target audience on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc? Local youngsters have turned entrepreneurs and are using their skills to help people market their organisations using social media.

One of them is Arvind Venkatesh, a 25-year-old who started Reticular with his buddies Vikram, Varun and Andy. “When my friend started a company, he didn’t have the budget to use traditional means of advertising. So, we decided to check Facebook out. It turned out to be profitable and we could target the right demographics too. Before we knew it, brand value was created through social media — we’d created a brand out of nothing!” The pals now focus on advertising for existing brands which include a popular denim brand and a well-known supermarket.

With everyone venturing into the social media market, advertising online needs to be done in the right way, believes management graduate Justin Jude. Justin, who started Beehive, a company in affiliation with Bee Built. “Everyone is using different techniques. Social media needs to be kept simple. It’s about communicating online with customers and finding out what they want, directly.”

Apart from popular networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, they use Digg, StumbleUpon, WordPress and Foursquare. “Every site needs to be used to its full potential. Even a statement with 140 characters on Twitter is enough to tell people what you need to tell them,” says Justin.

Reticular makes use of sites like YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. “Today, every person wants to be a part of it even if they don’t know what they want. A lot of people are offering social media services and it’s a kind of a new wave that people want to ride on. It’s going to slowly eat into traditional media,” says Arvind. Justin too feels that social media will wipe out TV commercials and banners in another year.

Despite studying hotel management, Akshaye Madhok was so fascinated by advertising that he co-founded Geek Creative Agency along with his friend. “We’ve created Facebook pages for brands and also created apps for FB. The openness of the medium is good.” With tools like Facebook, Skype and Twitter, people can get connected in a better way, feels Manoj Verghese, co-founder, Bee Built. “There are also badges on sites like Foursquare. All this adds another layer to connectivity. People connect a lot on their smart phones too,” he says, adding, “Social media is very transparent, which helps build the reputation of a company.”