In India, Digital is fast becoming more and more social with largest and most active sites being Facebook (with 12+ million Indian users), Twitter (with the bollywood bandwagon and more on it) and Linkedin (which claims over 5 million registered users).
As digital grows one is forced to think about what the key USP’s that will drive adoption of this media in the future. And by future I mean the next 3-4 years. Most correct answers are simple and I believe the answer to digital media’s future is also embedded in two simple words.. Influence & Interactivity. Let me attempt to explain these two.
The world around us works because of trade and commerce and commerce takes place because buyers buy and sellers sell. We all know that the economy we live in most categories the buyer dictates the terms. This means that the sellers influence on buyers and how he gets them to buy his or her product over the others is key for his survival and growth. Sellers can be products, services or brands but they still need to wield the magic wand on influence on consumers. Offlate in social media the term influencer outreach is fast becoming common which underlines how important this term is to sellers. Social media and digital media by virtue of having realtime updates that are share instantaneously which can have a huge network effect wields huge influence power. No surprises then that actors are themselves logging on to twitter to converse with fans and movie goers to build their own influence net through the medium.
The second aspect of digital medium is interactivity. So while offline mediums are influential too as they reach a large base via print or TV they aren’t interactive enough at the same time. This means that incase you want to focus on few but highly important users through interactions then that isn’t really possible in the best way through other mediums. This is where digital scores highly on other media outlets. Also as niche brands, products come to the fore and as vertical influencers get built through bloggers and social media interactions this would become more and more a reason why sellers, marketers or brand flock to digital media to get a fix rather than look towards offline media.
