India Social Media marketing - Using Orkut
Despite the fact that the Indian online population is small, they have latched onto social media pretty early. Social networking sites and blogs are the most popular forms of social media, with a large following from the Indian online audience.
- As of June last year, Orkut had 7.2 million unique visitors from India. Facebook had 0.78 million unique visitors, with a month over month surge of a whopping 230% (via AgencyFaqs)
- Assuming that India has 24 million Internet users, this means that about 30% of the Indian Internet users have used Orkut.
- Blogs have turned out to be shockingly popular - 85% of the online Indian users read blog
- Thats almost 20 million Indian Internet users
So, when it comes to digital marketing in India, are Indian marketers warming up to the social media phenomenon ?
In this multi-part series, I’m planning to pick each of the five channels (Orkut, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, brand websites) and discuss various marketing initiatives by Indian companies in each channel.
Advertising - Marketing on Orkut:
Several Indian companies were advertising on Orkut via AdWords, which Google had integrated into Orkut a short while ago. However, rising problems, mainly cultural, forced Google to remove ads from Orkut.
It is unclear at this point as to when ads will be enabled on Orkut again. I guess Google is still trying to figure out a way to effectively monetize Orkut.
Meanwhile, companies can probably pursue guerilla marketing tactics via scraps, but chances of running into legal problems via this method are plenty. Companies can probably provide branded widgets for stuff like greetings, photos, music etc - Orkut does allow users to embed HTML code in scrapbooks and festivals like Diwali, New Year etc. are times when you do see a lot of greetings scraps all over the place.
Several companies like MTV have sought out the option to run official communities on Orkut. Here’s the official MTV India community on Orkut.
At this time, Orkut doesnt offer varied advertising options similar to Facebook’s sponsored groups, social ads, pages etc. (I wonder why). The OpenSocial developer platform is yet to produce any interesting Orkut apps, partly because the OpenSocial platform API was half baked. (The only two publicly released Orkut applications are PhotoAttack and Hangout). As a result, companies cant yet build entertaining, engaging apps like they can for Facebook.
Till Google opens up advertising on Orkut again, the options for marketers to tap into that huge Indian demographic are pretty limited.
Can you think of any innovative ways of marketing on Orkut under the current circumstances ?
March 13th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Well written article. It will be great if you can publish your articles in SiliconIndia also as I am a member of Siliconindia, I am sure that most of the members will like reading it. http://www.siliconindia.com/register.php?id=T49I1Fh5