Power of Social Media by Ashraf Chaudhry

The Power of Social Media seminar by Ashraf Chaudhry was held at Carlton Hotel Karachi on 13^th June in collaboration with the Management Association of Pakistan (MAP).

Here’s the gist of what was taught at the seminar:

• Future online wars between companies would be fought to get on the first page of Google as many as 90% of the people don’t go beyond the first page of Google.
• If your brand, either personal or company, are not on the first page of Google, then you do not exist.
• Social media can help you to get on the first page of Google within days free of cost, something that would take months and money using SEO techniques.
• Social media refers to all internet and cellphone based tools and applications used to share information, create relationships and engage people.
• Most of the social media entrepreneurs of today are in the young bracket.
• The CEO of Tradekey, an online B2B marketplace rival to AliBaba.com is 32 years now, and was just 25 when he started the company.
• There are about 233 social networking sites in the world.
• You can find them at vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/list-social-networks/
• Instead of giving all your different profile addresses to someone, just make a profile on xeeme.com where you can put all your profiles in one place and give that single address to your contacts.
• If you want to reach mass audience cost effectively, make use of Pring.
• Pring is a cellphone based service that sends text messages in the form of sms to all the people that are following a particular person, just like Twitter. The only difference is it does not need Web to operate, and can operate on just about any cellphone and not just smartphones.
• In order to ensure your brand reaches the first page of Google, create your profile on as many of these sites as possible using the same keywords.
• For instance if you are in the insurance business, then instead of using your brand name in the keyword, use something like ‘insurance companies in pakistan’ as the keyword.
• The power of social media is more like the tsunami of social media which has created a paradigm shift in the way information is shared.
• The basic difference is that now you’ve got user-generated content and instant feedback that spreads like wildfire.
• The most poignant example of this is that of the Sons of Maxwell vs the United Airlines case.
• United Airlines broke their guitar due to baggage mishandling and then refused to refund the $3,000 for the guitar. After much efforts, the brothers finally wrote a letter to the CEO giving him the warning to either pay up or be ready to face the music. The CEO shrugged them off.
• They wrote a song about their mistreatment at the hands of United and released it on Youtube.
• The song had 7,672,731 views on Youtube by 10^th Feb 2010 which rose to 11,403,152 by 14^th Jan 2012.
• United’s share price dropped by 10% costing shareholders $180 million just four days after the release of the song.

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  Power of social media by Ashraf Chaudhry

• United’s then called them up and told them they were finally refunding them. They refused. United’s then told them they were willing to negotiate and settle the matter, to which the Maxwell Brothers replied why would they settle for peanuts when they were earning huge  by the song, a song which had become their identity.

• Social Media usage has now become the No.1 activity on the web in the world, surpassing pornography by a long shot.
• The following are the top 10 global sites according to Alexa:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Yahoo
5.  Baidu
6. Amazon
7. Wikipedia
8. Live
9. Qq

10. Taobao 11. Twitter

• All these sites are either social media, search engines or ecommerce. Not a single site like CNN or even a celebrity fan site is there.
• The same is the case with the Top 10 Pakistani sites:

1. Facebook
2. Google.com.pk
3. Google.com
4. Amazon
5. Yahoo
6. Blogspot
7. Windows Live
8. Dailymotion
9. Wikipedia
10. Youtube

• There’s no Jang or Dawn or even Geo news in spite of the fact that Pakistanis love to consume news.
• 1 out of every 8 couples marry in USA over social media.
• Every fourth divorce case is discussed over social media.
• The statistics for social media marriages in Pakistan are not available since people here are not that comfortable confessing to meeting their spouse online.
• Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users.
  • TV took 13 years
  • Internet took 4 years
  • Facebook took 9 months to reach 100 million
  • Pakistan’s Social Media site Pring reached over 5.3 million users in 22 months

 

• 80% companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find new employees.

 

• 45% companies screen out candidates by spying on profiles on social media.

 

• 80% Twitter usage is on mobile device.

 

• The biggest source of Breaking News is Twitter. Even the news channels follow Twitter to find out news stories.

 

• 100,000, 000 videos are watched daily on YouTube.

• 300,000,000 blogs are working

 

• 54% bloggers post content & tweet daily

 

• 34% of bloggers post opinion about brands/products

 

• Twitter is one of the most unforgiving mediums for any brand which it cannot control. Just do a search for PTCL or Warid on Twitter and you’ll find out the expletives their users are resorting to for lambasting their service. And these brands cannot do anything about it apart from improving their quality and customer service.
• There are four steps of how to use social media:

1. Becoming part of social media
2. Building online community
3. Engaging online community
4. Motivating online community to take action.

• And all this has to happen under a written social media policy of the company. Without this policy, a company has no direction for how to leverage social media for itself.
• Using social media for your own self has its own set of rules. You cannot post all your whims and fancies online because it gets to be seen by everyone, even those you don’t want seeing it, like prospective employers.
• It has become a trend that prospective employers first find out about a candidate as much as possible through his online profiles.
• Ashraf Chaudhry was once selecting candidates for a company’s director marketing.  He shortlisted one person who sounded well on the phone but when he checked out his profile, the profanities on it did not suit a person of that caliber. He therefore removed that person from his list of candidates and didn’t even call him for an interview.

 

• More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day
• More than 75% of users are outside of the United States
• More than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices
• Right now there are 8,687,000 Facebook users in Pakistan, up from 1,546,000 in Feb 2010, a 300% increase in just three years.
• The daily growth in users is 6000.

At the end Ashraf Chaudhry invited Hammad Siddiqui to come and speak on social media and its implications on his life. Here’s what he had to share:

Hammad Siddiqui

• PSO came up with an ad for its motor oil that implied that going the wrong way on the road was a cool thing to do. I visited their website, found out all the email addresses listed there and sent them an email questioning the ethics of this ad.

 

• PSO defended the ad saying the experts had gone over the script and there was nothing unethical about it.

 

• I then replied them back that I’m going to ask my followers on social media what they thought about it and that would decide the fate of the ad.

 

• PSO must have gone through my profile and looked at the strength of my followers because they immediately pulled the ad off the air. That’s the power of social media.

 

• Jehanzaib Saeed, an IBA grad and a budding entrepreneur has come up with his own brand of shirts which he promotes solely through social media. And his shirts are quite expensive.

 

• I bought one once and when I pulled the shirt out of its packaging on the morning of an important event, I found out they had not bothered to iron the shirt before packing. This pissed me off so much that I immediately took a photo of it with my mobile and posted it online.

 

• I discovered a lot of people had faced the same level of indifference from them.

 

• I emailed them to which they replied I can either call them up or if I wanted them to call me, I should leave my number with them and they’ll get back to me. I left my number but have yet to receive any call.
• I once asked Marvi Memon to come as a guest speaker for an event we were hosting. She refused. I then came across her at some other event. I introduced myself to her and told her I followed her on twitter. She was glad enough to hear that she finally came to the event.

CONCLUSION: There’s no doubt Ashraf Chaudhry is an expert on social media. The way he has leveraged his personal brand online and continues to convert that online presence into sales just goes on to prove it. The little bit of time he spent with his audience showed he knew what he was talking about. But Ashraf Chaudhry just needs to up his game. Conduct full-day seminars as half-day seminars don’t do justice to the vast knowledge he can impart to the participants of his courses. This social media seminar was just too short to get the maximum benefit of the social media expertise of Ashraf Chaudhry.

You can contact him at the following: Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Follow at Pring: Text ashraf at 9900 Email: ashraf@ashrafchaudhry.com Cell: 0321 9274 723