Can Twitter Go Mainstream In India? TCS And Kingfisher Join The Bandwagon
It’s high time that Indians learnt the art of speaking in 140 characters, don’t you think?
The recent past has seen Obama gathering public support via Twitter, Ashton Kutcher reaching the huge tally of 1 million followers and billions of people tracking the Mumbai attacks through Twitter. All this media hype has helped in marking a new peak for the microblogging service, and looks like one more step forward for the acceleration of the service. More recently, talk show queen Oprah Winfrey delivered the essence of Twitter to every household in US when she tweeted live from her show. Most people wouldn’t have known about the service two weeks back, but now it’s on everyone’s tongue and in the nook of every gupshup corner.
For the unversed, Twitter is a free service which enables its registered members to send and read other members’ updates or short text-based messages known as ‘tweets’, of up to 140 characters in length. Members can share URL’s of web pages as well. Twitter.com, which received about 1.2 lakhs unique visitors in India as per comScore data released in February 2009, is still nascent in the country and not many brands are using it. Some of the brands which have started experimenting with Twitter are Zapak.com, Naukri.com, Business Line, The Times of India, Mint and DNA, but these are still striving to get a solid footing on it.
This week, Kingfisher Airlines has joined the party (twitter id : FlyKingfisher) to carry out conversation with its target audience. Through Twitter, the airline is looking to target consumers who would like to stay connected with the latest news and updates. The company will be sending messages related to news, latest promotions, new sector launches, airport and weather updates to its consumers.
The twitter mania has also caught TCS (Twitter id: followtcs), the Indian IT giant and last week COO N Chandrasekaran addressed a press conference in Bangalore, while ‘followers’ of the company were getting real-time feed of his comments on their computers and mobile phones. The company started twittering six months ago about new client wins, interviews and releases. A TCS official in Mumbai on videoconference tweeted while Mr. Chandrasekaran spoke in Bangalore.
A TCS spokesman said the company has been experimenting with new media for some time. CEO S Ramadorai has an account on Facebook and there is a separate TCS account on the social networking site. “A lot of TCS employees were already on Facebook. We thought it was a good way to form a community,” he said.
Twitter might not have percolated into the fingertips of the common man yet, but with such a huge young population which is turning towards the internet for information, friends and fun; it is just a matter of time before India gets its very own Ashton Kutcher moment.
What say, Mr. King Khan?
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Unsure if interest in following TCS on Twitter would go past employees and IT industry watchers / analysts. How they could cash in on the current situation is to post details of job openings, training schedules etc. That would give a larger audience a compelling reason to follow and stay hooked onto someone like TCS on Twitter.
@ Navneet
Very true, optimising Social Media policy is not just about Tweeting madly.
Hope TCS is listening to this!
nice to see this note here..i too wrote on my blog on indian companies still shy of using social media, specially twitter, linkedina nd facebook…read it at http://www.myntfresh.com/indyeah/y-r-indian-companies-shy-of-using-social-media/
Tata Docomo is also big time on Twitter and facebook – check @tatadocomo