Social Media is The Need of The Hour - 5 Lessons from TiE Summit

It's not everyday that you get to meet so many enterprising individuals at one place. Aptly titled as The Mahakumbh of Entrepreneurs, TiE Summit is the best place to be for any entrepreneur.

With so much brainstorming and innovative ideas floating around, you can't do much but get infected with some of them.

As a social media person, the summit was a great experience. The interactions I had with fellow entrepreneurs and the panellists were an eye-opener.

Startups badly need social media assistance

In my interactions with startups, I realized that several of them have been duped by scamsters. It pained me to listen to them talking how they got 10000 fans overnight but can't see any sales. I am not sure if they liked my idea of 'cultivating' fans because it is a long process. But we really need to find a way to help startups realize what social media actually is and how it can be used effectively.

They seemed quite ignorant.. event at this age.

Analytics Rule

Manu Sharma, Principal Data Scientist, Linkedin was a great listen. Talking on one of my favorite topics, analytics, he emphasized how it will define businesses in the future. With so much data available online and the integrating it with your offline analytics, you will end up with a 'Big Data' that will possibly be a game changer for you.

Not only is analytics going to help you with customer acquisition, it will also give you an idea about the changing market scenarios and the shift in industry that will keep you ahead of your competitors.

Become a content creator on social media

You can't use social media just as a platform to push your marketing messages. If you want to generate buzz around you, then you must create content that is highly engaging and interesting.

In the panel discussion about Media & Entertainment, Roopak Saluja (Jack in the Box Worldwide) emphasized on how Red Bull is generating so much buzz without going out there are pushing its drink.

Later on, during my interaction with Abhigyan Jha, he mentioned how good content has the potential to go far and why everyone should focus (and invest) more on quality content. The success of his JayHind TV is a great example of it.

TV As You Know Will be Redundant

Abhigyan also shared some amazing stats on how the viewership for TV has been going down and how people are consuming video content more on their phones and tablets. It's amazing that in US, Comcast started offering content for iPad because they saw more and more shunning TVs in favor of tablets.

So yes, while the video content will rule the roost, the interface of interacting with it be much more smaller and portable.

Be yourself

The panel discussion on building personal brand using digital media was undoubtedly the most interesting of all. While Poonam Pandey set the house on fire, Ramesh Srivats brought the house down with his wisecracks.

But one thing where everyone emphasized the most was 'Being Yourself'. You can't have different personality offline and online. And it doesn't matter if you are a person or a brand. Having a personality helps you a great deal if you maintain consistency everywhere.