Social Media has come to party in the last couple of years in a big way in India. With funding, acquisitions and tieups happening all over the social media scene in last two years as far as India is concerned. And the trend to do tieups with social media sites to build brand leverage just continues to get bigger.

Before we jump on to any analysis..

Lets firstly understand what is social media branding?

First thing is first! Social Media branding may be paid or non paid dependent upon what you are proposing i.e. if its a social cause or an NGO then social media sites may tieup to provide you a branded presence for a barter deal i.e. you rub my back and I rub yours. Whereas if you are commercial entity or a big brands then there are two options either you tie up with a small social media site and pay very little and promise them good traction from your association or pay some big bucks to get the big boys of social media in India.

How is social media branding different from Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization is all about working on building a positive presence across social media sites i.e. facebook, orkut, youtube, flickr, twitter etc and making sure that the maximum potential of these social media sites is leveraged to connect with a target audience that is interested, engaged and evangelised to participate in conversations concerning the companies products and services. As rightly put in this article by gaurav it follows the Listen - Understand - Engage Model.

While Social Media Branding is not looking at only a conversation propagation it looks at creating a branded presence by tying up with social media sites. In the former there is no apparent tie up i.e. in social media optimization one usesthe available social media tools to engage existing audiences on that third party platform while in social media branding one would be using the third party platforms to create a branded experience which becomes a destination in itself for users looking to engage with that brand. This could be done through a contest, freebies or just with a branded page on a social media site that looks to engage users.

Lets take one of the most recent examples of social media branding to understand this further..

Airtel creates ithappensonlyinindia with Rediff ishare.

Airtel has used the rediff ishare platform to engage its target audience in a contest wherein they need to upload videos that are truly “Indian” (via agencyfaqs). This is a clear case of social media branding wherein a social media platform like ishare is used to provide a platform to a brand like airtel which can leverage it to build engagement with a certain segment of the audience.

Internationally channelV has tied up with myspace for having an exclusive page for channel v. Over time i expect more and more brands to get conscious of the importance of a social media presence creation and will move more and more towards a branding based approach towards social media.

Image Credit: http://audreycarr.ca

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