We all have grown up watching advertisement. It’s a daily part of our life; we talk about it with our friends and unknowingly become a part of big marketing campaign. As a child, I was fascinated by how impeccable these TV advertisements were. Starting from Dabar’s Tooth powder advertisement to Vodafone’s ZooZoo Advertisement, it’s amazing how these campaigns affect human sentiment and influence us. Marketing has more depth to it than just factual messages or promotion of services or products; it has a deeper connection with technology, innovation and society.

There are many innovations and technologies affecting marketing but I am going to concentrate on one particular innovation – Social Media Networking. The need for people to communicate, express and share is growing. Every day millions of words, pictures and videos are being created and shared on internet. The growing population of netizen and increase in the engagement time in internet is the key factor to it. Remember how we use to use internet to check only mails and sign out. Today, there are hundreds of reasons for you to be online for 24 hours. You meet friends, read news, and engage in online forum, play games, watch movies and many more. Moreover, you don’t have to be in front of your computer; today’s mobile phone has immense capability built into it for High definition images, music and videos.

Online social network has transformed the fabric of our social structure. The key component of society is communication and it’s this communication which every innovation tries to address. On the other hand, Marketing is all about effective communication with the consumer. Here are few points which I find key to be addressed for leveraging social media in marketing:

1. Understand and figure out your business needs,
2. Draw a line upon the people and networks that your business is going to affect,
3. Carry out surveys to understand the behavior and sentiment of your population,
4. Experiment, Experiment and Experiment your strategies, this will allow you to perfect yourself,
5. Learn to be subtle but at the same time emphasize on your words,
6. Address your technological requirement and innovations if necessary

But does the present technology allow us to carry out such complex operations, you may ask? I would say the framework is there like twitter, facebook, youtube and mobile networks, but lot of innovation and awareness among users is still missing. Being from technology background, I understand the complexity of these innovations will take long time to reach the market. But this should not be the obstacle for any young entrepreneurs to invest their time on social media innovation.

Personally, it’s been a year of struggle in the market as an entrepreneur and I have found the potential in social media getting clear every day. As an information company, InRev have ventured in creating awareness and also innovating tools and services like buZZom to leverage social media. The interaction of human and application is increasing and it’s this area which innovation has to bring some break through.

Full Disclosure: I am the Chief Marketing Officer of InRev Systems, which is a Web Information Company that owns the products NXY.IN and Buzzom.com.